Possession (1981)

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2026

Prompt 8 is Sam Neill. He was in a lot of genre stuff through his career. And I’ve seen almost all of them! But this is one that always sounded like not my kind of thing. So here goes.

8.

Possession (1981)

Trailer which shows the big reveal but with a lack of context

Neill plays Mark, who has been away from his Berlin-based family a bit too long for work, an assignment of some kind of espionage - this isn’t important until it becomes so again at the end. His wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) has been seeing someone else while he was away. Mark spirals, considers cutting all ties with Anna and their son Bob, then sees she’s neglecting Bob and tries to sort things out, meets the supposed lover, Heinrich (Heinz Bennent) and learns that she moved on from him. He has a detective follow her, and finds she has another apartment. And inside is...

... a half-developed head and body with tentacles instead of limbs.

Which does indeed appear to be her lover.

Watching it, I wondered if Clive Barker saw it ahead of making Hellraiser. (It wasn’t given a home release here until 2000 but that didn’t always stop people seeing things

Which, by comparison, is a pretty down-to-earth and straightforward take.

The characters are weird and highly strung (and their dialogue is in non-native English) for various reasons including the secret monster but most of them have no such excuses. Mark treats Heinrich like a joke after their first encounter - not unfairly - and sends him off to likely death and kills him when this doesn’t work. The most normal adult in it is Adjani’s second character, Bob’s teacher Helen, an ideal surrogate mother who is probably Anna’s psyche given a separate form and life.

Then after all that, Mark’s work comes back leading to an assassination attempt, the final reveal being followed by a hail of bullets, and a very early 1980s ending - this was a time when we weren’t really expecting World War III to start any minute but wouldn’t have been particularly surprised by it.

So the world ends because of marital difficulties and the monster is only tangentially involved.

It was an interesting watch - the small cast and mannered dialogue with big emotional acting often made it feel like a play, with the roving camera in long takes being the most cinematic feature. The creature is one of the most naturalistically shot parts, perhaps due to the effects team working separately but I like the juxtaposition, getting to see this wet unfinished thing so clearly.

The medium: Prime

Gameability: The setting, cosmic horror happening unnoticed behind closed doors, and the backdrop of people living their lives right on the frontline of the Cold War.