10 More Horror Movies Way Darker Than Advertised

There’s no two ways about it: director Matthew Holness’ Possum looks bleak. With that signature grey and dreary aesthetic that the last seventy plus years have helped us associate with working class Britain on film, and the equally miserable-looking Sean Harris in the lead role, it could never have been otherwise.

And yet the film, which focuses on disgraced children's puppeteer Philip Cornell (Harris) as he’s forced to return to his hometown and shack up with his uncle (Maurice; Alun Armstrong), is so much worse than we could ever have imagined. Forced to confront his past and the trauma waiting for him around every corner while trying to figure out what to do with his life, Philip comes unstuck, spiralling into a sleepless, puppet-fuelled meltdown.

And the cause of his terror and anguish and the physical manifestation of his spider-like puppet Possum is not, as we might have suspected, his own guilt and failings, but the repressed child sexual abuse suffered at the hands of the very man he’s now forced to live with. And Maurice didn’t stop with Philip, as he, and the locked chest in the corner of his room, have everything to do with a local child who has gone missing, all revealed in a devastatingly dark climax.