Review #75: The Possession of Michael King (2014)

This review was originally written in October 2019.

October Horror Movie Review #23: The Possession of Michael King

Well, here we are, with another found-footage movie. Spoilers for my review: I didn't much like this one, and I'm going to complain a lot about technical stuff. Fair warning.

So, The Possession of Michael King is a movie about a guy whose wife (whom we presume was a strong believer in the supernatural) recently died, and so he's setting out to debunk the paranormal by subjecting himself to some satanic rituals. Surprise surprise, he ends up getting possessed.

Despite being presented as found-footage, many of the scenes could not possibly have been shot without multiple takes or a camera crew (like the scene with the psychic at the very beginning). For most of the film this is hand-waved by our protagonist wearing a thing around his neck that supposedly captures his POV and a shot of his face, but then you need to assume that this (incredibly slight) device somehow captures high-quality video 24/7 without a hard drive and without ever needing to be charged.

Also, this movie uses the ol' standby of random digital artifacting ALL THE FREAKING TIME, sometimes using it as a jump scare, sometimes using it as a transition between scenes (and FYI, if your video goes all static-y between scenes something is seriously wrong with your editing software), but always used as an indication that something demonic is happening. Because... demons affect digital recordings? It's really dumb and it's the laziest and cheapest way to convey that something abnormal is happening: just record whatever and then slap on a digital effect later. What's especially absurd, though, is when it even happens to the analog footage of the day at the park with Michael's wife (which then makes you wonder why the characters were filming on 8mm film in 2014). To someone who knows nothing about film (and perhaps has never seen this trick used a thousand times in every single found-footage movie) it might look cool but if you know anything about any of this it just looks ridiculous.

The movie starts out with the premise of Michael trying to debunk the supernatural; this is an interesting premise for a movie but it gets dropped almost immediately because like ten minutes in he gets possessed and then that's the whole rest of the movie. On one hand I want to applaud the filmmakers for getting into the meat of the film quickly- but on the other hand, watching this character attempt to "debunk" anything is like watching an infomercial for a frying pan where they show the black-and-white footage of someone using the competitor's pan, but they somehow end up flinging the pan out the window where it blows up a car or something. If you're just an average skeptic, great. But you're not going to "debunk" anything if you're clearly not operating in good faith or if you're not willing to take the thing seriously. Imagine if James Randi debunked psychics by winking at the camera and cracking jokes- nobody would take his cause seriously.

Multiple times through this film I had to ask: Why is this demon recording itself doing all these spooky things? If it were intending to upset the characters by making them think Michael is going insane, that would be one thing; but it's clear that nobody is actually watching any of this footage (or, more likely, the nighttime spooky bits were recorded long after all of the more dramatic scenes) so it just looks like they're splicing in some spooky bits just for the sake of dramatic pacing. Speaking of which, it's very clear that all of the special effects (particularly the janky editing and the static and digital artifacts) were done much later, without the director or actors involved, because there are times when the characters make mention of a spooky event, except their description does not in any way resemble what we actually saw.

Now, the bit where the guy on-screen did something different than the guy in front of the camera was really cool; it was probably my favorite part of the movie. Definitely a good scare. But it's incredibly stupid if you know how perspective works. When someone looks directly at a camera, the resulting picture looks like they're looking directly at you no matter what angle you happen to be viewing it from. (It's like how people in paintings appear to be following you with their eyes.) So when the guy on the screen is looking to the left, it sure looks spooky for us the moviegoer, but if we were sitting where Michael was sitting, it wouldn't look remotely like the man on-screen was looking at us, it'd look like he was looking off to our left.

Now, I know that I'm getting incredibly pedantic about the technical details here. And I know that might not be entirely fair. But like I said a couple weeks ago when watching The Dark Tapes, to ignore all of the technical details would mean cherry-picking what type of movie I'm watching. The directors specifically chose this format to make it feel more real (like it's not just a movie), but then they also want you to ignore all of the technical errors because it IS just a movie. You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want to be able to cheap out on the details, then just make a regular movie.

I just can't get over how stupid the cinematography is. If this were the only found-footage movie I'd ever seen maybe I would be impressed but none of this is new, none of this is particularly well-done, and none of it adds to the experience in a positive way. The more you see the artifice of it all, the more amateurish and sloppy it looks. How was it that the Blair Witch Project was shot with a shoestring budget from two directors who had never shot a professional film, and shot by actors who had basically no interaction with the director until all principle photography was finished, yet it STILL feels more believable than this one?

The only explanation for the final state of this film is that it was directed, produced, filmed, AND edited by demons.

Overall rating: 2/10

A Change I Would Like To See In Movies: Stop acting like killing children is some sort of great, distinct taboo. I get it; killing a kid is bad. I don't necessarily want to see it in a movie. But you know what's also bad? Killing a friend. Killing a family member. Killing someone you don't know. An ending where a character "heroically" stops the death of a child isn't exactly a happy ending if, thirty seconds earlier, an adult who was equally as innocent just got brutally murdered. By acting like there's some invisible, uncrossable line between killing an adult and killing a child serves only to diminish the impact of killing adults.