MAY #12: The Taking of Deborah Logan

            When I harrumphed at The Visit a few days ago for its exploitationy treatment of old people while somehow still feeling too tame, I was thinking ahead to possession and the occult day’s The Taking of Deborah Logan, which is also a found footage film about the scariness of old people, but deals with dementia directly. The plot is simple. Deborah Logan has Alzheimer’s, but she’s also possessed. Mayhem ensues. And while it manages to bother me in a completely different way from The Visit, The Taking of Deborah Logan somehow feels a lot less icky in its treatment of aging, while also being way more trashy-in-a-good-way. Nice balance to strike!

            Unlike in The Visit, the moral of this movie isn’t that old age and its complications makes crazy people cuh-razier. Instead, Alzheimer’s is an explanation for Debbie’s increasingly bizarre behavior until it doesn’t make sense anymore and it turns out there’s actually something else afoot. The movie starts with a real-world fear and flips it into something supernatural. Daughter Sarah fears her mom’s disease will make her a different person, and that’s exactly what happens, just for wildly different reasons. Thanks to the structure of the possession movie, we get to see Debbie before she degenerates into a freaked-out possessed person. She’s prim, stubborn, a little controlling – exactly what you’d expect from an old woman who isn’t ready to give up on life – which makes her loss of self all the more wrenching. Best of all, her possession isn’t a random act of evil, no Ouija boards and Captain Howies here. Instead, a long-ago act of desperation has come back to haunt Debbie. Even though she spends much of the movie as a passive victim controlled by a bad guy, it’s her agency, we learn, that sets the plot in motion. I liked that a lot.

Debbie and Sarah, before the scary

            For all that, this movie has no arthouse ambitions. No, this movie is here to be gross and make you jump, which is what I mean when I say that this movie ~goes there~ in a way that The Visit walks right up to the line of and then walks right back to Hallmark channel safety again. Boy how, is this movie scary. Creepy shit starts happening early on and ramps up at a steady pace before tipping all the way into spooky, scary nonsense. I saw things that made me say, “I wish I didn’t see that” and “I’ll be thinking about that when I fall asleep tonight,” and this might be the first movie in this lineup that made me say “holy shit, did I just see-?” but then again it’s also rather poorly lit. If the completely bonkers territory it goes for in its second half feels incongruous with the sedate, matter-of-fact, almost realist style it establishes in its opening scenes, well, therein lies the paradox of the found footage film. And make no mistake, this is a found footage film, with all of the shaky camera and staticky visuals and “there’s absolutely no way it makes sense to be filming right now” that comes with the territory. I know some people don’t like that and, if that’s you, walk away. I myself am on the fence but sometimes you want a movie that will make you afraid to get a glass of water in the middle of the night, and this will do the trick.

            While this isn’t, by any means, a character study, I did like the tight focus on Deborah and especially Sarah, the futchy adult daughter who put her life on hold to take care of mom even though they haven’t always had the best relationship. Most of the movie, especially the first half, takes place in Debbie’s gorgeous country home in Virginia, which makes it the second movie this month to be set near where I grew up. (Even closer than Autopsy because they keep going to Roanoke for the hospital, and Roanoke is where I take the train to when I visit my parents, because that’s as far as the Amtrak goes). Anyway, in these housebound scenes, the movie accomplishes some deft characterization as Sarah drinks beer with the documentary crew and is increasingly frustrated with her mom’s erratic behavior. The documentary crew are a sweet bunch – PhD student Mia is cheery and not above a journalistic white lie, camera guy Gavin touches stuff like a goddamn two-year-old, other cameraman Luis keeps having to go first into creepy rooms. Amiable as they are, it’s never their movie. Unlike in your usual found footage movie, our camera folks are not the protagonists here – they’re more like bystanders who get in too deep.

            Meanwhile, I had mixed feeling on the supernatural angle. On the one hand, I was very happy to learn that Debbie is possessed not by a demon but by a pissed-off dead dude, which makes the possession angle feel less random and more as part of the larger story of Debbie’s life. I was less then chuffed to learn however that said scary dead dude is doing some kind of Native American human sacrifice ritual, as I think it’s usually bad form to do a genocide on a group of people and then make up stories about said people doing human sacrifice to shoehorn into your horror movies. Our protagonists learn about all this from a documentary Sarah shows them, but it feels like more like a long, rambling Reddit thread if you get my drift. All this is a shame, because otherwise the mystery element of this movie really worked for me. All the other trashiness – the shaky-cam, the gross-out, the jump-scares, the snakes – was making me a happy viewer, but there’s good trash and there’s bad trash.

Can’t a possession movie nail its mythos without either being racist or valorizing the Catholic church? I guess we probably won’t find out next week with The Exorcist III, but I’m sure it’ll give a chance to pontificate on what makes distinguishes good trash from bad.

Yikes!

Vibecheck: From cinema-verité to this camera is s h a k y in 90 minutes or less!

Scare Factor: She unhinged her jaw like a snake, y’all! I almost made girlfriend go downstairs last night to fetch my laptop so I could write this, but I am very brave. I used my phone flashlight. And turned on all the lights.

Pairs Well With: Something about this reminded me of nothing so much as The Black Tapes, a spooky podcast series about fictional paranormal events, because parts of this movie feel like reading a creepy Wikipedia page late at night. Oh, and for more creepy old people and possession and grossness action, check out Marianne, the weird French series on Netflix. It’s scary as fuck. Just, uh, turn off the awful English dub first.

But how gay is it?: I think Sarah the futchy adult daughter is our second or third canonically gay character after Golden and arguably Silver from The Lure. Huzzah, a gay!

Girlfriend’s Corner: NO. (Editor’s note: one of Possessed Debbie’s hobbies is abducting children, a pastime of which my Girlfriend does not approve).