Who’s in the mood for a Jewish exorcism?! Courtesy of Lionsgate.It was the summer of 2012 when I first saw the trailer for The Possession. Oh man, did I geek out. You probably know by now that I LOVE horror movies. Good or bad, I just love them. Creepy with no fake blood or not creepy with fake blood, I love them. The trailer for The Possession, which you can watch below, hooked me because A) it said it was based on true story and B) it was produced by Sam Raimi, the horror maestro who gifted us horror buffs with the Evil Dead franchise. It was a late summer night when I presented the trailer to my buddies on my one friend’s TV. When that final shot in the trailer came up, the moment when the little girl shines a flashlight in her mouth and two fingers crawl up from under her throat… AHH! What an epic shot.
Just a few months later and I was back at Temple University for my senior year. I attended an advance screening of The Possession at Cinemark University City, presented by the Philadelphia Film Society. The movie played. There were some chuckles, a couple gasps. In the end, audience reaction was mixed. I even remember walking out and hearing two older guys speak.
“What’d you think?”
“Ehh.”
“Ehh” indeed. The Possession pretty much came and went. It received mediocre reviews from critics, despite Roger Ebert, who surprisingly awarded it 3 ½ out of 4 stars. It made over $80 million worldwide, but once it left theaters, people pretty much forgot about it. I wouldn’t necessarily call The Possession a cult movie or argue that it’s made a resurgence in popularity, but it does stand out as being one of the few commercially released Jewish horror movies in recent times. It’s not a classic, but you know what? I really like it. It has creepy imagery, good performances, and Jewish reggae/rap singer Matisyahu performing an exorcism. Come on. How could you not enjoy The Possession?! This is the epitome of solid-but-not great-but-still-fun-horror-B-movie.
As I stated, The Possession opens with the chilling words you never want to see in a horror movie: BASED. ON A TRUE. STORY. Well, and I’ll get into this more later, no. This isn’t based on a true story. It’s based on an actual, alleged “cursed” box that any paranormal geek like me has heard of. It’s called the dybbuk box, and it does exist. Owners of the box have experienced frightening, unexplainable events which have forced them to sell it.
Anyway, The Possession takes the legend of the box and obviously exaggerates it. We follow the Breneks, a family of four in upstate New York. Clyde (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Stephanie (Kyra Sedgwick) are getting a divorce, much to the disappoint of their young daughters, moody Hannah (Madison Davenport) and her younger sister, the smiley Em (Natasha Calis). Clyde is a college basketball coach and not necessarily a deadbeat dad we so often see in movies. He’s loving and caring. We don’t know what happened between Stephanie and him because this isn’t a family drama. That backstory doesn’t really matter.
Clyde is particularly close with Em, whose decision to become vegetarian has turned her into a bit of an activist at school. Hannah is, well, a teenager with her head in her phone most of the time. One week, he takes the two of them to his new, completed house out in the suburbs. The other houses are empty, of course, because this is a horror movie. They drive by a yard sale where Em finds this cool-looking box with Hebrew inscriptions on it. It doesn’t open, but she’s drawn to it. And even as a viewer, it’s a pretty neat box. I mean, I don’t usually buy stuff at yard sales, but if I came across Judaica like this for a decent price, I’d buy it.
That night, while in bed, Em manages to open the box. Inside it, she pulls out a dead moth, a ring….and a human tooth. After that, things get weirder and weirder. Em becomes really obsessed with the box, urging her dad to not touch it and beating up a classmate in school for taking it. Dozens and dozens of moths get into the house one night. The box opens by itself while Em sleeps. During breakfast, Em keeps shoving pancakes into her mouth before stabbing her dad in the hand with her fork.
I think, by now, you get the gist of where The Possession is going. Em is becoming possessed by a demon! Clyde is the only one who senses something is off, while his ex-wife just thinks their daughter is reacting badly to the divorce. (Stabbing him with a fork though? I think that’s a bit of an overreaction.)
So when does the “Jewishness” of The Possession become apparent? Well, I’ve mentioned the Hebrew inscriptions already on the box. And you got it! Clyde does some investigating and finds out that the inscriptions translate to dybbuk, “demon” in Jewish folklore. This alarming discovery takes him to none other than Borough Park. He brings the box in-hand, and the rabbis already know about this legend. They warn him that it should never be opened and there’s nothing they can do. It’s “God’s will”, one rabbi tells him. The only way to save Em is to get the dybbuk out of her and lock it back inside the box.
This is where Matisyahu comes in. He plays Tzadok, a young rabbi who volunteers to exorcise Em. He’s a nice guy who is a little more modern than the rest of his tribe. When we first see him, he’s listening to music alone on the sidewalk while the rest of the town is inside. This is probably an obvious nod to Matisyahu himself, being the famous musician that he is. He helps, and the film – spoiler alert, although it’s pretty obvious – ends in a penultimate, over-the-top exorcism. There’s screaming, contorted bodies, demonic CGI effects, etc. You know, the usual.
Pretty much all the critics agreed that The Possession was just a cheap rip-off of The Exorcist.
I can’t argue that. The Possession is very similar, but PG-13 and Jewish. (Fun fact: The Exorcist is also based on a real exorcism that took place in late 1940s America.) Nevertheless, it’s still a lot of fun. Director Ole Bornedal has a keen visual eye, and there are some shots in his film that are simple yet very effective. As Em, Natasha Callis pulls through and certainly knows how to be in a horror movie. She can scream. She can cry. She can menacingly stare at people for an unsettling amount of time without blinking. She’s no Linda Blair, but her performance is strong and convincing. Matisyahu’s character isn’t the most three-dimensional, but he dominates the screen as Tzadok. He’s only in a few scenes, but already you’re hoping this poor rabbi won’t get killed by the dybbuk.
Now, back to reality. What is the dybbuk box? This all came to light in a 2004 Los Angeles Times article titled “A jinx in a box?” It started when Kevin Mannis, an antiques collector from Oregon, purchased the box, described as a wine cabinet box, at a neighborhood estate sale in fall 2001. The host of the sale told him that the box had belonged to her 103-year-old grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, who always warned her kids to never open it… Mannis put the box in his basement, and it wasn’t long before a lot of weird, supernatural things happened. When he gave the box to his mother as a gift, she immediately had a stroke. Fed up, he put the box on eBay where it was soon purchased by a Missouri college student, Iosif Nietzke. Soon after, “bad luck” – unexplained bad luck – started happening, and Iosif had to put it back on the market. It was then purchased by Jason Haxton, a university museum curator. Weird stuff happened to him. So basically, the moral of the story is DO NOT PURCHASE THE DYBBUK BOX!
Unfortunately, in 2021, Mannis was interviewed by Input Mag where he confessed the following.
“I am a creative writer,” he says. “The Dybbuk Box is a story that I created. And the Dybbuk Box story has done exactly what I intended it to do when I posted it 20 years ago.”
What?! OK. So it’s a hoax, but what about Nietzke, Haxton, and these other temporary owners of the box? Were their allegations of paranormal activity made up too? Even more bizarre – and this is crazy – unexplained activity actually happened during the filming of The Possession. The director claims that a neon light exploded under him one day, and five days after filming wrapped, all props from the movie were burned in a mysterious fire. The fire department, crew, no one could give an explanation for what happened…
Is it real? Did Mannis make up this story, but the box itself is actually cursed and you shouldn’t go near it? No matter what you believe, this is one strange case, and The Possession is having the time of its life bringing it to light.
The Possession is now streaming on HBO Max.