Movies
5 Unconventional Demonic Possession Horror Movies to Stream This Week
At its most basic, possession horror exploits the primal fear of losing control over your own person, usually due to a demonic entity. Victims in a possession movie are rendered mere passengers in their bodies as a sinister force takes over and destroys them from the inside. That potent combination of body horror and a complete lack of free will makes for inherently terrifying and fertile ground for exploration. While possession horror is often tied to biblical battles of good versus evil, that’s not always the case.
This week’s streaming picks are dedicated to demonic possession horror titles that leave conventional depictions of faith and exorcisms behind for new terrain and metaphors.
Here’s where you can stream them this week.
For more Stay Home, Watch Horror picks, click here.
Demon Wind – AMC+, Shudder, Tubi
Possession horror tends to take the possession seriously, opting for full-throttle scares and intense emotional or faith-related stakes. Demon Wind offers the silly antidote to super serious possession horror. The setup is simple enough; Cory assembles a group of friends to help him investigate the mysterious deaths of his grandparents sixty years ago. The execution, however, defies logic in the conventional sense as Demon Wind takes a kitchen-sink approach to possession horror and frequently embraces the absurd. Martial arts, demonic mayhem, time travel, and an uncredited Lou Diamond Phillips cameo as a demon make it impossible to be bored.
Jennifer’s Body – Max
Hell is a teenage girl. If ever there was a well-rounded coming-of-age horror movie that tried to encapsulate the teen girl experience, it’s Jennifer’s Body. When Jennifer becomes possessed by a man-eating demon in a sacrifice gone wrong, her best friend Needy must learn to step out of Jennifer’s shadow if she hopes to stop her. Toxic friendships, self-discovery, the heartbreak of first loves and first traumas, and more are explored in this bitingly hilarious horror-comedy.
The Shrine – AMC+, Tubi
After the disappearance of a backpacker, a journalist traces it back to a small village in Poland and enlists two friends to come along on her quest for answers. They’re met with hostile locals, which forces the journalist to try to circumvent them. It results in the trio becoming the next target of ritualistic human sacrifice among the villagers. There’s much more than meets the eye to this standard setup, though. The Shrine merges folk horror with another tried and true subgenre: possession horror. A brisk pace and some subverted tropes combined with a few potent scares make for a fun watch.
The Taking of Deborah Logan – AMC+, Prime Video, SCREAMBOX, Tubi, Vudu
For her Ph.D. thesis on Alzheimer’s disease, Mia Medina (Michelle Ang) thinks she’s found the perfect subject in Deborah Logan (Jill Larson) for a documentary. In desperate need of the money, Deborah’s daughter Sarah (Anne Ramsey) allows Mia and her team to set up cameras in their home to record and study Deborah over the next several months. As the days progress, it quickly becomes apparent that there might be something more sinister at play than Deborah’s illness. Co-written by Gavin Heffernan and director Adam Robitel, this found-footage gem knows how to craft effective scares. It’s incredibly creepy, oozing with atmosphere for days. This pick is for those in the mood for major chills.
When Evil Lurks – AMC+, Shudder
Courtesy of Shudder. A Shudder Release.
Writer/Director Demián Rugna broke onto the horror scene with 2017’s aptly titled Terrified (Aterrados), a paranormal tour de force of shocking imagery and genuine scares. Rugna continues that streak with his latest, When Evil Lurks, which includes the central theme of infectious evil. This time, however, the Argentinian filmmaker shifts gears to take on possession horror, and he’s unafraid to spill buckets of blood and offer up jaw-dropping violence. Go in blind on this possession horror, and brace yourself for a gnarly ride ahead.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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