Horror Round Up: Demonic Posession, Cults and Haunted Houses.

Join us on a movie night with four scary movies about demons, posession and cults. Grab your popcorn and something to hide behind…

Regression

First up, is a film technically classed as crime or thriller, but is based on a true story about satan worshippers in 80’s America, and has some really creepy, horror-movie moments. When dedicated cop Kenner (Ethan Hawke) investigates the rape of pious Angela (Emma Watson), he is joined by a psychoanalyst who helps find answers through regression therapy, but the answers are far more disturbing than anything anyone expected. Angela accuses her father of the rape, and starts talking about her family’s involvment in satanic rituals. I think this film should have gotten more attention than it did, but I think most poeple would find that because it sits on an odd line of being about a horror subject, but being a true crime story it doesn’t really satisfy the full tropes of either genre. But who cares about that? It’s a hell of a story, with plenty of scary bits.

Demonic

From James Wan, that master of horror, comes a movie about a police officer investigating the slaughter of five teenagers at a house in Louisiana following a seance. The house was the site of a previous mass murder years earlier under similar circumstances, and the son of the sole survivor was convinced by his friends to return with them to film a documentary and hunt ghosts. He is being held for questioning and between his story and the slowly recovered film footage, the team peices the story together. It’s got a few great horror movie tropes covered: haunted house, teenagers being killed off, gruesome deaths, demonic posessions, even found footage. But what makes it great and original is how it mixes all these elements together to make a sound plot and some great scares. Really good.

The Veil

Jessica Alba stars in this horror movie as a film maker who convinces the only survivor of a cult mass suicide to return to the scene of the deaths of her entire family and community, which occured when she was about 5. But as soon as they set foot on the property, strange things start to happen, people go missing, and they must peice together the story of the cult and what happened that day from tapes of experiments conducted there before it’s too late. The film is moody and atmospheric, with the cult leader some kind of occult Jim Morrison type, and the dilapitated houses that they investigate creating a real sense of mood and place. I really enjoyed it.

The Posession Of Michael King

Finally, this low budget, documentary style film (don’t worry, it’s not found footage and it’s nicely shot) about a man who decides to disprove that God and the Devil exist in the wake of his grief over his wife’s death. Whilst he engages in various rituals and occult silliness, he’s a delight, but once strange things start to happen, and something is certainly not right, he starts to wonder what he has awoken. Whilst there are no big names in this film, and it’s probably not one that you’ll find on your radar, out of all of the films on this list, this one was the most uncomfortable to watch, and really gets under the skin. Chilling, and I think the scariest on the list, partly because it feels so convincing.