How can you make demon possession frightening?

Being possessed by a foreign entity seems very tame in the stories where I have seen it. The event doesn't have the gravity that I feel it should, and the person usually goes back to living a normal life if they are freed. I always felt that being possessed should be taken more seriously as a traumatic experience that people dont just come away with unscathed. I came up with an idea that i believed accomplished that.

Demonic possession is done through a magical ritual which can bind a demon to a human being, allowing it to cross over from their reality into ours. In the process, the demon forcefully bypasses the barrier that separates the soul from the individual, completely taking them over. The victim is left fully aware of their situation, and is in constant pain while being possessed. The demon has access to its abilities in the host body (stength, speed, etc) but remains under the control of the caster. In a country where magic is commonplace, this is seen as a spiritual form of rape, the ultimate violation of a human soul. It is treated as one of the most evil acts an individual can commit on another person.

The victim was captured and subjected to this against their will, so people understand that. But while most will regard hIm as a victim, many would see him as corrupted and dangerous even after they are freed. They are forced to deal with the trauma of possession as well as being distrusted by others, even worse than murder.

I think this lends gravity to the situation and instill's a measure of fear into the setting. But Since it is obviously a sensitive subject, I wanted to explore it in a respectful and meaningful way. How can I expand on this concept? What can I do to play up the horror aspect of this?

The Exorcist can provide some good insight.

The concept in and of itself should be frightening, but due to Status Quo Is God, often the scarier aspects are tossed aside in most media. Making the victim remain fully aware of what's going on should be more than enough, and all the consequences that naturally follow. Losing control of your body to a hostile entity, who then goes around committing horrible atrocities, and everyone thinks it's you? Especially if rather than full-on puppet possession, the demon instead makes it seem like the victim is still in control of their actions and is just acting on their baser instincts and desires, thereby also adding an element of self-condemnation. There's a lot of ways to make it quite horrifying, as long as you follow up with the after-effects.

One way to look at possession as a scary thing would be to compare it to possession as a good or neutral thing. You could do this in your story or you could just look up RL religions and some possibilities that are practiced today.

One thing you could look up — if you're interested in researching relevant religious stuff — would be the concept of "horsing." This is ideally when a benign or familiar deity possesses a worshiper for one reason or another. It's kind of like being ridden as the horse (hence the name of the term).

Demonic possession, then, would be like some asshole jumping on you — the "wild horse" — and trying to break you as one would break a wild horse. I'd think this would be pretty traumatic for a human, especially if the character is shown to be able to "buck" the demon off only for it to come back.

An issue concerning the scariness of the situation in OP is that the character has to be abducted and restrained. This would give the audience a sense of safety "so long as I'm not tied up like that, I can't be in this situation" or something like that. If the situation is presented as an event that could happen to anybody, then it'll probably scare more people.

edited 13th Apr '17 9:54:23 AM by WaterBlap

If I'm not mistaken, "horse/horsing" as a religious term is heavily associated with Voodoo/Vodun, and it's mainly done by the priests (or a priest is there to keep an eye on whoever's the horse). Most other faiths don't seem to use that specific phrase—more often, willingly letting a spirit/deity take over is called "being [Spirit/Deity]'s vessel," or just "possession," without The Exorcist's connotations of unwillingness/violence.

Ever try to walk to the bathroom while your body is pretty definitively trying to fight off a bad 'flu? You know how to move your legs the appropriate way - you don't even think about it most of the time - but suddenly you have to seriously fight just to totter around like a drunk or a toddler.

Your balance is off, the air feels weird, your throat tastes funny, your body is weak, etc. Worse, you only know that you're not dying because you've had it before, and it didn't feel any better then either, but you've stricken the specific memories from your mind and only retain the idea that it was a lousy few days to exist.

You're miserable and a waste of crude matter when you're like that, is what I'm saying, and you're hoping to get better. The only saving grace is: you can sleep it off, and no one else needs to see - or worse, smell - you expelling stuff from all your orifices.

Now keep in mind that everything I've said here is your body fighting off a virus invasion, and the fact that you still feel it means it's doing so successfully. Imagine how much worse it could be. Radiation poisoning, lung cancer, actual rape, dismemberment, AIDS - the list of things our bodies don't quite have the ability to bounce back from is uncomfortably long.

We're a vulnerable species, and we try to pretend that's not the case. We fool ourselves into believing that things will be all right, and that we're better than our weaknesses. This demonic possession you're describing - it strips all of that away, whenever and wherever the victim is involved.

And then there's that word. It's a word that implies victimization - continuing and ceaseless. "That person is a victim" will always have a couple of 'invisible' words in it: "That person is [always going to be] a victim".

The social stigmatization of being 'not yourself' for an extended period of time is... debilitating. Like being the prime suspect in a capital crime, but never actually charged. Your guilt or innocence is irrelevant, because everyone "knows" you did it.