Sony Pictures
When everyone is broke from Black Friday shopping and still getting over pounds of turkey they stuffed their face with, movies like The Possession of Hannah Grace get released. The weekend after the Thanksgiving holiday is a horrible time to release a movie, but that doesn’t stop Sony from releasing a generic possession film that cost them barely anything to make and wants to dump on movie-goers. While some may be recovering from the holidays and trying to lose those extra pounds, I was at the theaters hoping that this new film might offer something new to the genre … but it didn’t.
Hannah Grace, played by Kirby Johnson, is a young girl with a loving father, but unfortunately was possessed by a demon. She was believed to be dead and ridden of the demon after what was thought as a successful exorcism after her father suffocated her to dispose of the demon. Three months after her supposed death, she ends up at a morgue where a new staff member, Megan, works the night shift. Megan has a typical backstory for a film like this. She is dealing with trauma and anxiety over the fact that she let her police officer partner get killed after she froze up during an altercation with a criminal. During her first shift at the morgue, she starts to experience faulty equipment, lights turning off and on by their own, and a young girl possessed by a demon hungry for humans.
The Possession of Hannah Grace lacks originality as many of the scenes feel borrowed from other films in this genre. I thought the opening sequence which featured an exorcism was ripped from The Exorcist, even if I thought it was a promising opening. The film offers plenty of clichés that you would expect from a possession film. Hannah Grace spends most of the movie trying to get her body healed by killing various member of a Boston hospital. As her body is being healed, her bones are cracking, and she is bending in uncomfortable positions, which we have seen plenty of times.
The film features various staff members of the hospital that add nothing to the plot, but their dialog seems otherwise. One character offers her opinion on dead people which truly baffled me on why she would even need to say it. Another character offers the comedic side to the movie that felt out of place and awkward. Plenty of people come through the hospital at night to drop off dead bodies and a few of them interact with Megan, but none of them feel significant to the story.
The extended periods of suspenseful silence are a recipe for anxiety, which many audience members will feel as well as our main star, Megan. The long periods of silence sometimes are met with jarring sounds of horror. Loud noises such as broken glass and hand dryers quickly shake the audience with a jump scare that feels unappreciated. The director did manage to freak me out a few times throughout the film with shadowy figures lurking in the background. What manages to always scare me in horror films is when characters skulk in the background and you catch them in the corner of your eye. Every single time it happens in any horror movie, I cry inside. Hannah Grace was creepy enough to scare me a few times when she was crawling on the ceiling or slowly walking to him victims.
The Possession of Hannah Grace was a clichéd horror film that mixed many elements of previous possession movies and it never felt original. Diederik Van Rooijen established some small scares with shadowy figures in the background and utilizes sound elements well, but that couldn’t hold the film together. One thing I did take away from this film — never take a night shift at a morgue.
The Possession of Hannah Grace has a run time of 1 hour 26 minutes and is rated R for gruesome images and terror throughout.
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