The Possession of Michael King

The Possession of Michael King is a 2014 American found footage horror film written and directed by David Jung, in his directorial debut, from a story by himself and Tedi Sarafian. The film had its world premiere on August 14, 2014 in Singapore and had a limited theatrical release in the United States on August 22 of the same year. It was released on to video on demand on August 26, 2014.[1] It stars Shane Johnson as a widowed, atheist filmmaker who finds himself the target of demonic forces.[2]

The Possession of Michael King
Directed byDavid Jung
Produced byPaul Brooks
Jaime Burke
Guy Danella
Jef Levine
Scott Niemeyer
Tedi Sarafian
Screenplay byDavid Jung
Story byTedi Sarafian
David Jung
StarringShane Johnson
Ella Anderson
Cara Pifko
CinematographyPhil Parmet
Edited byJake York
Production
company
Gold Circle Films
Quickfire Films
Distributed byAnchor Bay Films
Release date
  • August 14, 2014 (2014-08-14) (Singapore)
  • August 22, 2014 (2014-08-22) (United States)
Running time
83 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Box office$12.3 million

Plot

Documentary maker Michael King does not believe in God, the devil, or any other supernatural existence. His wife Samantha believes the opposite. For many years she has visited medium Beverly for spiritual assistance. Samantha was killed in an accident in the United States, while Michael had wanted to travel with her in Europe at the time. Beverly, however, "foresaw" a major breakthrough in Samantha's attempt to become an actress and advised her to stay in America. Michael confronts Beverly with this. He asks her to admit that she plays false drama and has no contacts with anything at all. Beverly consoles him, but then asks him to leave.

Michael struggles to pick up his life again after the death of Samantha. His sister Beth moves in with him to help him care for his daughter, Ellie. Michael decides to make a documentary to prove that there is no paranormal world or afterlife. He argues that such concepts can only be sustained out of human fear of nothingness, by a market that earns big money from it. From that starting point, Michael offers himself as a test subject for the heaviest, darkest supernatural rituals in which some other people believe. He places an advertisement on the internet where people can respond with suggestions for experiments to prove the opposite of his position. Cameraman Jordan will film everything he goes through, 24 hours a day. Michael assumes that he can show that there is nothing. If he is wrong, at least he becomes the first person ever with concrete evidence for the supernatural. There are hundreds of responses to his internet posting.

The first of Michael's new internet contacts to visit him is a spiritual named Gibbons, who says that his father systematically sexually abused him in his youth. According to Gibbons, his father died of a heart attack shortly after he prayed to Satan for help. Coincidence, according to Michael. Then he orders stuff on the internet with which he could attempt to call demons. Nothing happens. That is why he visits self-proclaimed demonologist Augustine and his wife Marsha. They give him LSD, bind him to a cross in their cellar and speak spells about him. Michael gets a solid trip, but demons do not appear. In retrospect, he sees on the camera images showing that Augustine and his wife used the opportunity to have sex with each other in his presence. Michael doesn't give up and contacts a funeral director who claims to be a necromancer. He dehydrates Michael, this time with the substance DMT from the body of a toad, that causes psychedelic experiences. Then he takes Michael to a cemetery in the middle of the night. Here he wants to transfer the spirit of a newly deceased person to the body of Michael. Before they are able to get started, the police arrive. Running, they avoid the police.

Michael next attends a large group meeting with a medium. She says she is getting a message from a recently deceased woman. The medium says to him "Michael, you need to ...". Halfway through her sentence she falls to the ground. Michael goes home. His head aches and he suffers from a constant sound in his head: a result of the drugs, he suspects. After an internist tells him that he does not suffer from ringing in the ears, he goes to a psychologist, who tries to get rid of the sound with hypnotherapy. The session is interrupted because the light in the room fails. During this time, Michael moves feverishly through space and begins to shout unintelligibly. Jordan analyzes the camera recording and determines that human vocal chords are not capable of producing Michael's shouts. Michael suspects that there is a defect in the camera. Jordan doesn't believe this and decides to no longer work on the documentary. Michael therefore takes the camera himself from that moment on. Without knowing it, he walks around at night, for example to feel his sister while she sleeps. He is dead during the day.

The sound in Michael's head begins to appear more and more often, and is like a talking voice. He becomes convinced that something dangerous has happened to him. Michael therefore asks the voice to leave him alone. A "no" thunders through his head, and his own image appears on the television screen in the room, mocking him. Michael looks for the funeral owner to ask for help, but he sends him away with the message that it is his own fault. Augustine and Marsha explain that what they did was just for fun and put him out the door. Michael feels less and less in control of himself. At night he goes without knowing it with a kitchen knife to Ellie's bedroom. The next day, Beth finds the dog, Fishbone, dead, in Ellie's bed.

Michael sends Beth and Ellie away to stay with friends. Because the church refuses to do an exorcism, he tries to do this at home on his own. His Bible goes up in flames in his hands. The entity that has taken possession of Michael's body throws him around the room and makes him carve a pentagram in his torso. When he sews his injuries the next day, he notices that it hardly hurts to insert a needle through his skin or completely into his thumb. The voice in his head demands that Michael kill Ellie. He refuses and goes after random women and vagrants instead. Michael now seems unable to control himself. That's why he goes home and chains himself with handcuffs to his bed. He wakes the next morning to find that the living room is completely messed up. The walls are full of signs written in blood in Latin.

Michael handcuffs himself to his bed again with the key beyond his reach, while the demons are torturing him for not being able to take his body away to do any damages to anyone else living. In the morning Michael wakes up, finding his cuffed up hand, un-cuffed and bloodied. He walks around in his room finding arrows in blood pointing him out and downstairs to the lounge room and TV where on the screen is written "Watch this ->". He pushes the player button and on the screen appears the recording of the events that happened during the night. He sees that Jordan came by to see how he is doing. He sees the havoc and finds Michael in bed. He releases Michael on condition that he starts to seek help. Michael than rings Jordan's mobile which now is ringing from one of the rooms upstairs, but no one answers. Michael goes back upstairs and finds Jordan dead, hanging from the ceiling with a kitchen knife stuck in the middle of his left hand. Michael picks up a shard of glass and tries to end it, but the entity in him stops his arm. He then swallows the contents of few bottles of pills, but vomits them up. Finally, he tries to electrocute himself by taking a bath with a hair dryer, but the power plug explodes and cuts of the electricity flowing through it. Few hours later Michael is watching TV again which on the screen shows his wife, Sam, speaking into a recorder, from a hospital bed, her face is all stitched up on the areas that were damaged by the car accident, and she is talking about her meeting with Angels and God and trying to convince Michael to not be worried for her well being because she is safe and happy now and she still loves him and Ellie, always. Also she is telling him to never be worried to die a normal death and that she was worried for no reasons about it, but the truth about God and Heaven is real and she has seen it now, and she will be there waiting for the day when they will be reunited again. Michael than talks to himself and his inner demon about the noises and sounds inside his head which he described as "white noise" being the sounds of Angels tying to interfere and cover up the demon's voice which he can now hear very clearly.

Michael is sitting in a rocking chair at the front door. The voice in his head talks to him: "We're together now Michael." In the morning Beth enters with Ellie. Michael lifts his sister up with one hand and breaks her neck. Then he goes up the stairs, behind Ellie. As he walks into the room where Ellie is hiding, he finds her, and struggles with the entity for power over his body. The demon is getting more and more powerful. Michael begs Sam for help. The coin which he was carrying around all the time which Sam was holding onto when she died, starts to spin fast while standing on its edge, than stops for few seconds and drops flat. Looking into the mirror, Michael gets momentary control over himself, and uses the opportunity to throw himself out the window. He falls to the street and dies while he hears Sam's voice saying "Everything will be alright now".

Epilogue (flashback)

On a sunny day, Michael and Samantha are with Ellie and Fishbone in the park. Because the time on the parking meter has expired, he gives his wife a coin to put in the meter. She drops it on the ground near the meter, and she bends to pick it up. Because of this, she does not see the approaching car, which hits her and fatally injures her.

Cast

Production

For the film, Jung drew inspiration from the character of Jack Torrance from the 1980 film The Shining. He noticed that The Shining and similar movies that dealt with demonic possession did not tell the story from the viewpoint of the possessed person, and thought that it would be interesting to shift the film's view point to the possessed person.[3] Jung chose to make the film found footage as it would allow the character of Michael to document the events as they occurred, in a "scientific approach and personal approach and documentarian approach".[3] While researching for the film Jung "tracked down a lot of really arcane, occult manuscripts", some of which required translation, and also researched rituals that were passed down through oral traditions.[3] In an interview with Nerdist, Jung stressed that he did not want to use rituals that were like "a lot of the other stuff that had been explored in the recent mythology", as he wanted to avoid "Ouija boards and candle lighting" as the film's sole staple of demonic rituals.[3]

Johnson commented on his role, stating that he spent several months to prepare for the film where he viewed similar films to see "what works and what doesn't work" as he felt that "there's a lot of what doesn't work out there".[4] He also researched demonology and necromancy along with viewing films such as The Last Exorcism, which he said made him feel like he "came into the project with some ammunition".[4]

Reception

Critical reception for The Possession of Michael King has been predominantly negative and as of October 2014, the movie holds a rating of 29% "rotten" on Rotten Tomatoes (based on 16 reviews) and 34 on Metacritic (based on 10 reviews).[5][6] Many film critics criticized the movie for being too overly familiar in how it delivered scares, its found footage aspect, and in its story line.[7][8][9][10] A reviewer for RogerEbert.com panned the film overall, writing "What’s so depressing about fare like this is how creatively uninspired it feels to see the same tricks pulled over and over again. Horror, true fear only comes from the unknown, the unexpected, the unexplained. There’s never a moment in “The Possession of Michael King” that isn’t telegraphed either by the film itself or from memories of a superior one. It is a work that mistakes loud for scary and turns to camera tricks just to keep you awake."[11] In contrast, Twitch Film commented on the movie's familiarity and stated that "While Jung does not necessarily do anything new under the Sun with his jump scares, they are still effective in their execution."[12] Matt Donato of We Got This Covered also gave The Possession of Michael King a positive review, stating that he had not expected to enjoy the film as much as he had and singled out Johnson's performance as a highlight.[13]

Film reviews from horror websites have been mostly positive. Ain't It Cool News Horror praised Johnson's performance while Shock Till You Drop stated that Jung "gets the most out of the story and his talent".[14][15] Reviewers for Dread Central were polarized—as one praised the film for its twists while the other criticized it for having too many "cheap scares and found footage tropes".[16][17]

References
  1. Collis, Clark. "Video: Dad becomes demon in 'The Possession of Michael King' trailer". Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved 2 September 2014.
  2. "Intense 'The Possession of Michael King' Exorcism Clip". Bloody Disgusting. Retrieved 2 September 2014.
  3. Wolfe, Clarke. "INSIDE THE POSSESSION OF MICHAEL KING WITH DIRECTOR DAVID JUNG". Nerdist. Retrieved 2 September 2014.
  4. Hallam, Scott. "Shane Johnson Talks The Possession of Michael King". Dread Central. Retrieved 2 September 2014.
  5. "The Possession of Michael King (2014)". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 2 September 2014.
  6. "The Possession of Michael King". Metacritic. Retrieved 2 September 2014.
  7. Hassenger, Jesse. "The Possession Of Michael King is possessed by the spirit of better horror movies". AV Club. Retrieved 2 September 2014.
  8. Chang, Justin. "Film Review: 'The Possession of Michael King'". Variety. Retrieved 2 September 2014.
  9. Scheck, Frank. "'The Possession of Michael King': Film Review". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 2 September 2014.
  10. Tsai, Martin. "Review 'The Possession of Michael King' fails at found-footage fad". LA Times. Retrieved 2 September 2014.
  11. Tallerico, Brian. "The Possession of Michael King (review)". RogerEbert.com. Retrieved 2 September 2014.
  12. Mack, Andrew. "Review: THE POSSESSION OF MICHAEL KING, It's Not Real Until You Try It On Yourself". Twitch Film. Retrieved 2 September 2014.
  13. Donato, Matt. "The Possession Of Michael King Review". WGTC. Retrieved 2 September 2014.
  14. "AICN HORROR looks at EXTRATERRESTRIAL! SAVAGELAND! REVELATION TRAIL! THE POSSESSION OF MICHAEL KING! THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE! SLOPPY THE PSYCHOTIC! MY FAIR ZOMBIE! THE FORBIDDEN GIRL! MOEBIUS! TWILIGHT ZONE 1985! SUFFER THE CHILDREN Book Review! & cast your vote for PRESIDENT WOLFMAN!". AICN. Retrieved 2 September 2014.
  15. Jimenez, Christopher. "Review: The Devil Gets Called Out In The Possession of Michael King". STYD. Retrieved 2 September 2014.
  16. Hallam, Scott. "Possession of Michael King, The (review)". Dread Central. Retrieved 2 September 2014.
  17. McHargue, Brad. "Possession of Michael King, The (review)". Dread Central. Retrieved 2 September 2014.
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