The Twenty-Eighth Night of Halloween: Possum

ON THE TWENTY-EIGHTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Possum (2018), written and directed by Matthew Holness. A puppeteer named Phillip has created a grotesque puppet with huge spider legs and a human face. The puppet gets Phillip fired when it horrifies the schoolchildren he is supposed to entertain. This forces him to return to his boyhood home and dwell there with his gnarled and sadistic uncle. Phillip tosses the puppet off a pier, burns it, buries it, but try as he might to get rid of the thing, it keeps reappearing in his room, good as new. Now it seems to be getting out of its case at night and murdering local boys.

Possum is surprising for a number of reasons. First, Matthew Holness is best known as the comedian behind the funniest horror comedy I have ever seen, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004), so the release of such a serious and artful work by him, concerning the bleakest nightmares of cyclic abuse, was unexpected to say the least. (But come to think of it-- the move does parallel Jordan Peele’s transition from sketch comedy to writing and directing the best horror movie about racism ever made, Get Out (2017).) 

Second, it’s very rare that a text within a text can stand on its own merit, even when it's supposed to be a wildly successful song or show within a given fictional world. The dark nursery rhyme that Phillip is supposed to have written and illustrated (actually created by Holness) is fantastic though, worthy of independent consideration as gothic poetry. It begins, “Mother, father, what’s afoot? Only Possum, black as soot. Mother, father, where to tread? Far from Possum, and his head.” 

Third, I didn’t anticipate that this creepy character study would remind me of Ireland’s greatest author, Samuel Beckett (whom I was obsessed with in college-- incidentally, if Kafka can be considered a horror author, Beckett certainly should be). Several hostile breakfast chats between Phillip and his uncle recall the harsh gnomic rhythms of Beckett’s Endgame. 

Finally, I was surprised by how well all of the temporally disjointed and nightmare image-laden scenes came together in the ending’s truly nasty reveal. Possum probably spends too much time watching Phillip mess around with his puppet in the post-industrial wastes of Norfolk—it’s sometimes unfortunate that feature-length isn’t an hour instead of ninety minutes—but overall I found it to be a surprisingly excellent Halloween treat.