The possession analysis

The possession, a horror/thriller movie, released in 2012. The film entails an antique box, which encloses a malicious spirit. The collectible is sold at a yard sale to which a young girl buys which leaves her cursed by the apparition. Her divorced parent’s team together to find a way to end the curse.

The poster includes a photo of a girl with her head tilted backwards, screaming, whilst a coarse hand is coming out of her mouth grabbing her forehead; representing how a young girl is being controlled and isolated by an evil-being. This is all supported by the film title ‘THE POSSESSION’, the context implicates the narrative of the film for ‘possession’ is defined as ownership and a state of control and with ‘THE’ placed before it, it visualizes that the young girl, is in fact being controlled by someone who has authority and power of her. The distressed typeface with shattering and scratching within it, envisions the distress/struggle of the young girl as well as the twisted and horrid persona of the ghost. The white typeface connotes that of innocence and purity, referring to the young girl, however with the distressed styling it then implies how that has been dispersed by a demonic creature.

The tagline is placed below the film title, reading ‘DARKNESS LIVES INSDE’, this enigma makes the audience curios about what it is that could possibly live inside you. In addition to this, this is ironic because the image itself showcases a hand coming out of the girl so its stands true that indeed something is inside her, DARKNESS also links to the detestable ghost.

Stereotypically they have used a girl as the main protagonist for woman are suggested to be vulnerable and defenseless – men are considered strong and brave - so this movie is conventional. On the contrary, most horror films include blonde haired models who are roughly in their late teens or early 20s but this film includes a young child with brunette hair so considering these factors, it challenges typical conventions.

The image aforementioned is a medium close up of the girl, drawing us into her distress, making us as an audience feel more involved and sorrowful for the young girl. Moreover, the fact that the girl is a child, makes the audience more sympathetic towards her; seeing such a young and innocent girl being secluded by a dirty, old and coarse hand (ghost) creates such a suspense to which will drive us to watch this film.

Another factor that creates suspense is how the upper three thirds of this poster is blank, grey scaled and grained which only contains a simple text that reads ‘BASED ON A TRUE STORY’. This text is in a simplistic form, not distressed like the film title, in a conventional black coloring, because the context is enough to makes us on edge, when a horror movie is based on a true story it acquires the audience to consider how this story actually occurred once before, which makes the film all the more scary to approach because its denoting what could possibly happen again. The simplistic form is also due to the factors set around it, they’re allowing the image and film title do all the talking. Typically, due to the horrific imagery that the poster includes, the audience wants to jump straight to the denouement (end).

I believe the audience to this film is variable for a lot of people will be emotionally attached and drawn to this movie due to the fearful child – the vast majority of people are more likely to watch something about a defenseless child opposed to a young, beautiful and troubled woman because children are a catch to draw people into almost anything. Not only that, due to it being based on a true story, the opposedfictional aspects makes people wander what possibilities could occur in real life, consequently more people will watch this movie to try preventing it from taking place in their own lives.