Make it a Double Feature: ‘The Brood’ and ‘Possession’
Valentine’s Day.
A prime time for flowers, chocolates, raising single awareness, and, above all, rom-coms. Putting on a film like When Harry Met Sally.. or His Girl Friday will certainly set the mood. But because scary movies are also good movie-watching options for date night as your partner being terrified brings them physically closer to you in the living room couch while watching the movie, I decided to choose two horror films for this month’s double feature column. Two frightening horror films that may have you and your partner thinking, “Maybe the problems we have aren’t that bad?” scaring you into a relationship if they don’t scare you out of one.
The first of the two is 1979’s The Brood. This Canadian frightener by the godfather of body horror, David Cronenberg, follows Frank Carveth (Art Hindle, Porky’s), a father involved in a custody battle with his troubled wife Nola (Oscar nominee Samantha Eggar, The Collector) over their daughter, Candice (Cindy Hinds). As Nora sees Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed, Women in Love), a psychotherapist with unorthodox treatment techniques called “psycho-plasmics,” Frank begins investigating a series of murders committed by a brood of deformed infant creatures that slowly become linked to Nora herself.
Inspired by David Cronenberg’s divorce from his ex-wife, and described by Cronenberg himself as “his most personal film,” The Brood effectively conveys how custody battles make divorce even uglier only instead of money being shed, it’s flesh and blood. While custody battles do involve parents using children as pawns the way poor Candice is, they don’t always involve mutant offspring creating a string of carnage. Serving as a manifestation of Nora’s rage towards her ex-husband, the titular brood gives the film its fright factor based on how merciless they are along with the creature designs from the makeup team. Furthermore, Samantha Eggar’s portrayal of Nola serves as the picture’s unsettling anchor. Theatrical without being cartoonish, Eggar puts the viewer in near paralysis with just a glance as a woman trying to force control of the situation at hand even as she’s at odds with the men around her.
It is during the film’s scariest moment involving Nola conceiving a monstrous child before licking it clean when it becomes clear she’s someone that Dr. Raglan can’t control nor is she one that Frank can reason with. A moment more squirm-inducing than the gory murdering, the scene, which earned The Brood a spot on Bravo’s 100 Scariest Movie Moments, is an instance of the film’s equating of contraception and motherhood with monstrosity that has sparked debate over whether it’s misogynistic since its release.
As much as the brood is of Nola’s creation, Dr. Raglan’s psychiatric methods being a catalyst for Nola’s inception of such creatures are enough to spark debate over who the film’s greater villain might be. Even for this writer, by the time the movie was over after his initial viewing, the answer wasn’t fully clear.
Keeping up with the theme of mind-bending horror inspired by the director’s marriage is the 1981 cult hit Possession by writer/director Andrzej Żuławski. Conceived during Żuławski’s separation from actress Malgorzata Braunek, Possession is a dizzyingly tense thriller about a couple whose marriage takes a strange tailspin when Anna (Isabelle Adjani, The Story of Adele H.) tells her husband Mark (Sam Neill, Jurassic Park) out of the blue that she wants a divorce. What transpires is a tale about a couple trying to hold their marriage together but is evidently less afraid of mysterious tentacle monsters than they are of divorce papers and lawyer fees.
The creepy monster invites meaning over its interpretation while the dizzying cinematography by DP Bruno Nuytten that zooms in on the constantly bewildered protagonists’ faces becomes a vital component to putting the viewer at effective unease. Then, of course, there’s Isabelle Adjani as Anna. In what is one of the greatest performances in cinema history, Adjani is a force of crazed and carnal nature who often magnetizes with her camera-friendly screen presence, making it hard to look away even when things go more off the rails for the doomed Anna.
That being said, things hardly go more off the rails than in the film’s most famous scene in the empty subway involving Anna having an intense physical breakdown. A scene done in only a few takes due to the scene and the role itself leaving Adjani emotionally traumatized, Anna becomes a woman possessed as she bursts into laughter while flinging her groceries before heavily convulsing. Although there is blood shown towards the scene’s end, it’s the feeling of losing control of your physical and emotional being, along with the physicality in Adjani’s acting, that makes the sequence so effective.
A film that left emotional scars on its two main leads and was initially banned in the United Kingdom, Possession is an experience that is hard to forget. While The Brood didn’t have the same censorship issues as Żuławski’s demented masterpiece, it’s another frightener about the horror of divorce that may spark debate over its themes the way that Possession does. If you’re looking for good scary movies to watch with your significant other that invite discussion and, above all, are genuinely frightening, why not watch both of these classics and make it a double feature?
The Brood is available to stream on the Criterion Channel and MAX. Possession is currently streaming on Shudder and AMC+.
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