The Big Picture
- The Possessed is a 1970s TV movie that falls within the category of “Exorcist ripoffs,” featuring Harrison Ford in a supporting role.
- While lacking in gore and sexuality, TV Exorcist knockoffs like The Possessed made up for it with professionalism and a competent and grounded storyline.
- The film revolves around a Catholic women’s college on the brink of becoming coed, where mysterious fires and a supernatural force bring about a quest to discover the possessed individual.
We’ve made it to another spooky season. The coming October will bring plenty of new horror movies, but that’s never enough. We’ll also disturb all the old bones of horror movies gone by. Today we’re digging up The Possessed, which belongs to the category of “1970s Exorcist ripoffs.” It was made for television and originally aired on NBC in 1977, only a few weeks before one of its supporting cast blew up to become one of the biggest movie stars of all time. That’s right, The Possessed features Harrison Ford as sleazy high school chemistry teacher Mr. Winjam, before the world got to know him as Han Solo.
‘The Possessed’ is a Made-for-TV ‘Exorcist’ Clone
The 1970s belonged to William Friedkin‘s The Exorcist, an exercise in terrifying people that exceeded anything that came before it, and from which there was no turning back. This is especially true if you consider Brian De Palma’s Carrie — adapted from Stephen King’s novel about a child who, in her own way, also becomes possessed — to be a branch off the Exorcist tree. The cinema was full of imitations, with the baldly named Exorcismo, a particular favorite. Even more were created for television, most notably Satan’s School for Girls and The Spell. What the TV exorcist knockoffs lost from the grindhouse in gore and lurid sexuality, they sometimes made up for in professionalism. The Possessed is a particularly competent and grounded film, maybe a little stodgy. It’s anchored by its up-and-coming cast, which includes not just one future Oscar nominee in Ford, but three.
The film is set at a Catholic women’s college that’s about to hold its final graduation ceremony before it becomes coed. This transformation weighs heavily on the school’s headmistress Ms. Gelson (Joan Hackett), who feels like she failed. She’s cheered up by her sister, Ellen (Claudette Nevins), a widow who teaches at the school. Most of the students are intimidated by Ms. Gelson, including the secretive “Weezie” (Ann Dusenberry), who is Ellen’s daughter. Meanwhile, as graduation draws near, the students and faculty are menaced by a mysterious series of increasingly harmful fires, each with no apparent cause.
Ellen, who was the only witness to one of the fires, becomes convinced that they have a supernatural cause. When the investigating police officer (Eugene Roche) dismisses her, she asks her psychiatrist for help, and he recommends “a man who might be what you’re looking for” named Kevin Leahy (James Farentino). The Possessed never outright uses the ex-word, but Leahy is a onetime Catholic minister. We see him during a prologue, performing the sacrament, and drinking heavily on the side. After he is in a seemingly fatal car accident, he has a vision of the afterlife, where he is told that he has lost his faith, and must return to earth to seek salvation: “You must seek out evil, and you must fight that evil by what ever means possible.” Leahy is at least exorcist-adjacent.
Who Does Harrison Ford Play in ‘The Possessed’?
Leahy appears on campus one day and tells Ellen that he knows she’s been looking for him. (She assumes her psychiatrist has found him and sent him to her, as said he would, but later discovers that Leahy just “knew” to show up.) Leahy says there may be an evil occupying the school. If there is, it will have occupied one person. So the rest of the movie becomes a mystery, trying to discover who that person is.
It’s around this time that Harrison Ford’s character takes center stage. We meet Mr. Winjam in chemistry class, where you can certainly see advance traces of the classroom version of Dr. Indiana Jones, although his big thematic classroom scene is also evocative of Walter White’s “chemistry is the study of change” lecture. Later, we discover that he was once in a relationship with the headmistress Ms. Gelson. Furthermore, it’s revealed that he has been having an affair with Weezy, who’s Ms. Gelson’s niece and also his student. Finally, Winjam bursts into flames, the film’s first and only casualty. And that’s the last we see of Harrison Ford.
The role is far from Ford’s first screen appearance. He’d already worked with Francis Ford Coppola on The Conversation and George Lucas on American Graffiti, and had dozens of television appearances. But the swaggering-yet-vulnerable Harrison Ford persona had not yet been developed. He would play a somewhat similarly villainous character decades later in What Lies Beneath, but in that film he is playing against the expectations of the audience. Here, there are no expectations, and Ford has room to experiment. He takes a lot of chances. His performance feels influences by some of the more emotionally raw actors of the ’70s, in particular evoking (though your millage may vary) Dustin Hoffman and Robert Blake. It’s jarring, but fun to watch.
At 70 Minutes, ‘The Possessed’ Is An Easy Film to Watch
Ford isn’t in most of The Possessed, but the whole thing is barely more than an hour long (it was 90 minutes with commercials), so you can definitely watch it for him. (It’s on Youtube.) There’s actually quite a good cast surrounding Ford. Joan Hackett, as Ms. Gelson, is complex and poignant. Hackett was married to the playwright Neal Simon, and a few years later would be nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Only When I Laugh, which was based on one of his plays. Diana Scarwid, who would be Oscar-nominated for her work as Joan Crawford’s daughter in Mommie Dearest, gives a lively performance as the class valedictorian.
The film itself has a natural feel, although it lacks in excitement and feels underpopulated. It makes you aware of the distinction between Exorcist knockoffs and Carrie knockoffs. Both sub-genres are about possessions. But The Exorcist’s Regan is possessed by a demon, occupied by an evil force. Carrie is possessed by herself, giving into her own deepest desires. The Possessed believes it is the first kind of film. When Leahy meets Ellen for the first time, he tells her that evil is a force that shows up for no reason and doesn’t make any sense. However, when we find out which character has been possessed, even though we see them in full vomiting demon-face, it makes perfect sense. Each of the flame attacks align with this character’s psychological needs. Obviously, you can tell a scary story with either structure, but it was the confrontation with pure evil in The Exorcist that really left scars. You don’t encounter that here.
