The unbelievable true story behind the pretty good horror movie The Possession

polygon.com:

Horror movies based on barely true stories are a dime a dozen. There’s the Conjuring movies, based on the mostly fabricated cases of Ed and Lorraine Warren, The Amityville Horror, and The Exorcism of Emily Rose. But few of those movies have ever had a history as interesting or complicated as that of the supernatural demon movie The Possession, a movie about a supposedly real box haunted by a dybbuk, a demon-like spirit from Jewish mythology.

The movie, produced by horror legend Sam Raimi, follows a man named Clyde. Recently divorced, Clyde is struggling to find common ground with his two daughters. In a bid to make his younger daughter happy while she stays at his new house, which is basically in the middle of nowhere, he buys her an old-looking box at a yard sale. The box, we know from the movie’s prologue, is haunted in some way, with a spirit that speaks to its owner. Eventually we learn that the box is haunted by a dybbuk that wants to possess the young girl, and the movie devolves into another rote exorcism movie in the third act.

Before that, though, The Possession is pretty good. It’s fast-paced and creepy, with hosts of massive insects that seem to spawn from the box, a few great sequences with an invasive hand that seems to belong to the demon, and some really tremendous-looking effects work. On top of that, it’s interesting to see the trappings of an exorcism movie removed from the specific iconography of the Catholic Church, even if the Jewish elements feel a little tacked-on rather than integral to the story. Even still, it’s a worthy addition to the possession genre. But none of that is the best part of the movie.

The best part of The Possession isn’t the movie itself, but the “real” events that inspired