Best Possession Horror Short Films
Possession horror is about identity theft at its most literal. Your body is occupied. The thing using your voice and your face and your hands is not you, and the people who love you may not be able to tell the difference. Short films are a particularly good format for possession horror because the central horror is a moment, or a series of moments, when someone you know becomes someone you do not know. Short films can isolate that moment and hold it.
What makes possession horror distinct from demonic horror is the human cost. The demon or entity is almost secondary. The real story is the person being lost, and the people around them who are watching it happen. That emotional center is what short possession films get to quickly and what makes them hit hard.
Why it works in short form
Possession horror works in short form because the uncanny valley between a known person and what has replaced them is most effective as a sustained image rather than an extended narrative. A short can dwell in that wrongness, in the face that is almost right, the voice that is slightly off, for its entire runtime. Features have to resolve the possession. Shorts can refuse to.
Films worth watching
A man whose wife has been acting strangely for three days reviews security camera footage from their house and sees the moment she stopped being her.
A woman realizes mid-conversation that her daughter has been answering questions about events from before she was born.
A man comes out of a seizure to find his hands in a position he did not put them in and a name written on the wall in his own handwriting.
A priest performs an exorcism on a teenage boy and the thing inside the boy tells him something about his own childhood that no one should know.
A twin whose sister died a month ago finds notes in her own handwriting she has no memory of writing.
A sleep study participant's overnight footage shows her leaving her room at 3am, walking to the window, and waiting there without moving for four hours.
Watch short horror on FinTV. Or find out which Scream trope you are.