Zach Vasquez
There are only three certainties in life: death, taxes, and horror movie remakes.
No matter how sacred or forgettable, if a horror title gains even the smallest following—which isn’t difficult, since horror lovers are the easiest lays in all of fandom—you can rest assured that somewhere along the line, it’ll brook sequels, prequels, reboots and eventually, remakes. On rare occasions this can lead to a new classic that eclipses the original—John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) and David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) being the go-to examples—but those are the exceptions that prove the rule. And while it’s hard to get upset over the umpteenth remake of Halloween, Friday the 13th, or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, there are some lines that just shouldn’t be crossed.
Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession is one of those lines.
Set against the backdrop of divided Berlin, the story charts the violent breakup of married partners Mark (Sam Neil), a spy for the west recently returned from a job on the other side of the wall, and Ana (Isabella Adjani), a ballet instructor who has been carrying on an affair with an otherworldly mutant that she herself gave birth to in an underground U-Bahn station. The film is far too assaultive and surreal to have ever broken through in America, and for a long time, it was nearly impossible to see in its original form—a chopped up American version appeared in a couple of theaters and on VHS (where it landed a spot on the notorious British Video Nasties list), but it wasn’t until 2008 that the original cut became available on DVD.
Possession would remain obscure for the next decade; it didn’t appear on any streaming services, and its Blu-Ray from Mondo proved prohibitively expensive for most casual viewers. It screened on occasion at repertory theaters, but it was by no means a staple. However, in 2021, the film received a full 4K restoration, a limited theatrical re-release and new Blue-Ray, before finally appearing on streaming services.
During this time, Possession’s reputation grew from forgotten oddity to cult curio to cult classic to full-fledged classic. This, of course, was a good thing: with the raising of the film’s profile, more films from Zulawski—who passed away in 2016—became available. However, this raised profile begat some unwelcome results. As anyone who regularly attends repertory screenings can attest, audience laughter and snickering is a real problem, and few films make bigger targets for this aggravating behavior as Possession, due mostly to the ferocity that Zulawski elicits from his performers (the word that comes up time and again when describing his style is “hysteria”). To be sure, Possession is often very intentionally funny, but it is far too disturbing and complex to be turned into a laughing stock. Its prevalence as a meme on Film Twitter—particularly its most notorious scene, in which Adjani has a prolonged and violent seizure/orgasm in aforementioned U-Bahn station—is further cause for aggravation for those of us who’ve championed the film prior to its recent rediscovery.
So too has its increasingly visible influence on newer films and pieces of media. It was neat when Massive Attack and Young Fathers homaged the subway scene (along with fellow horror classic Phantasm, which has somehow dodged the remake bullet so far) in their music video for Voodoo in My Blood (directed by the late Ringan Ledwidge and starring Rosamund Pike). That same year saw the international release of The Untamed, a work of erotic arthouse horror from Mexico, directed by Amat Escalante. The story of a tentacled alien that lands in a small Mexican village and unleashes both destruction and orgasmic release upon an unhappy married couple, Possession’s influence is so overt that it’s fair to say the film’s are in conversation with one another. But The Untamed is very much its own movie, a powerful and disturbing domestic drama that draws from various influences– Zualwski, yes, but also H.P. Lovecraft, Mexican neo-realism, and Japanese erotica (classical shunga and modern Hentai)—so that it never feels like a simple reference.
The same can’t be said for Gaspar Noe’s tributemusical horror extravaganza of two years later, Climax. A video tape copy of Possession appears in the first scene of the film, but its star Sofia Boutella’s extended freakout scene along a hallway (shot in one take, of course) where Noe and company are really going for the connection. Depending on where you land on Noe’s work, Climax is either an exhausting bit of faux-provocation or a kick-ass work of maximalist exploitation (I tend to fall somewhere in the middle). But there’s something about the obviousness of its Possession homage that feels cheap. Yes, that scene in Possession is incredible; so incredible, in fact, that trying to recreate it earnestly can’t help but come off as lame and desperate. It’s like seeing a guy out in public wearing the scorpion jacket from Drive.
Still, an homage is just an homage. It’s not like Noe was fool enough to try and actually remake Possession.
Enter Parker Finn and Robert Pattinson. The Smile and Smile 2 director and famous hunk are currently preparing for an actual remake of Zulawski’s film (Pattinson is producing and expected to star in what we have to assume is the Sam Neil role). Even though Smile 2 earned near unanimous praise upon its release last year, the announcement was met with negativity, and Finn seems to know he’s playing with fire, telling Entertainment Weekly of his version—which he describes as “viciously sharp, crazy, insane”—that “I feel like I’m making this film obviously for a big audience, but I want to make this film also for the fans of the original. I hope people give it a chance!”
It’s hard to think of a worse assurance: the idea of a new Possession meant to appeal to a wide audience while also steeped in fan service feels so wrongheaded as to be downright blasphemous. (Also, and perhaps this is petty of me, but no person named Parker should ever touch a Zulawski movie.)
Funnily enough, Finn and Pattinson have already been beaten to the punch, as just this month a remake from 2024 appeared on Netflix. Possession: Kerasukan is an Indonesian reimagining of Zulawski’s film directed by Ertanto Robby Soediskam. It broadly follows the set-up of the original: A soldier returns from a mission overseas and finds his wife acting erratically. He suspects she’s carrying on an affair, but the truth is she’s in the thrall of supernatural forces.
But here is where the films divert. In Kerasukan, said force is not a tentacled monster, but a mummified demon wrapped in a bedsheet. And whereas the title of the original Possession is metaphorical, here it’s literal, with the last third of the movie becoming a rote exorcism movie, replete with all the bed hovering and spinal manipulations you expect from that most boring of horror subgenres.
Possession: Kerasukan is a terrible film—bland, boring, shallow, and ugly. There is not an ounce of the original’s mesmerizing mise-en-scene, nor any of the head-spinning philosophical and political complexity of its script, although this new one’s fourth-wall breaking final scene does embarrassingly attempt the latter. By the time the credits roll and we get to a title card dedication (”Based on the original story and the film Possession, written and directed by Andrzej Zulawski”) it feels like an insult. The filmmakers can’t even get that right, since Zulawski shares screenwriting credit on Possession with Frederic Tuten.
Awful as it is, it’s hard to take offense at Kerasukan, given where it comes from. The Indonesian film industry is notorious for remaking popular films from other countries with no regard for rights (I suppose Possession really is 9/10ths of the law). Sometimes, this can lead to gonzo classics—run, don’t walk, and track down a copy of Lady Terminator (1989)—but that’s not the case here. Similarly, there is some potential for an interesting spin on the material in other countries, given how much of Possession revolves around the political situation of its setting; although again, Kerasukan does not do anything with that.
That’s one of the reasons it’s hard to fathom an American Possession. Even in this extremely charged political moment, with the country more divided than it’s been in decades, there’s just nothing analogous to the tensions of Cold War-era Berlin. It’s possible that Finn and Pattinson will keep their film in the original’s setting, although that would be pointless, particularly since Luca Guadagino used it for his 2018 version of Suspira (speaking of bad remakes of classic horror films…), which was seemed as inspired by Zulawski’s work as Dario Argento’s.
But more than politics, it’s the personal aspects of Possession that make it arguably the least remake-able horror film in existence. Every Zualwski film was personal, but none more so than this. Made in the wake of his real-life divorce to actress Małgorzata Braunek—as in the film, they had a young son and she left him for a new age charlatan—and his exile from his native Poland following the destruction of his magnum opus, On the Silver Globe, by that nation’s communist regime, Possession is a work of pure, uncut anguish from a man going through hell. Still, Zulawski elides any self-pity or easy answers, and the film can’t be boiled down into any single socio-political allegory. It is not about ‘trauma’ or ‘patriarchy’ or ‘fascism’ or any of the other pat themes that modern horror movies, with their one-track minds, trade in. It is the rare work of art that contains within itself an entire cosmology, even as it has no interest in explaining what it all means.
When looking at the negative aspects of Possession’s legacy over the last few years, it’s easy to come off like a sore winner and a try-hard hipster (I liked it before it was cool!). But one of the reasons that Possession is so deeply loved, the reason I hold it as my favorite film of all time, is because of how deeply personal and singular a work of art—art, not content—it is. No matter what their intentions–whether they be seemingly sincere, like Finn, or openly exploitative, like the people behind Kerasukan—there is simply no replicating that, let alone possessing it.
