Taglines: Death is only the beginning.
The film opens as two priests are in the middle of an exorcism. Hannah Grace (Kirby Johnson) is possessed by an inhuman force, and her body painfully contorts. Her father Grainger (Louis Herthum) sits by her side as he desperately waits for the priests to do their work and pleads with Hannah to fight her demon. Suddenly, Hannah’s body rises, and she appears to have a hold on the priests. She sends one flying against the wall where he is impaled through the head, while the other priest starts to choke. Grainger grabs a pillow and smothers Hannah until she stops moving.
Three months later in Boston, Megan Reed (Shay Mitchell) is heading to a job interview at Boston Metro Hospital. Her friend/AA sponsor Lisa (Stana Katic) has hooked Megan up with a job working the graveyard shift in the morgue as an intake assistant. She goes through an interview with Dr. Lewis (James A. Watson, Jr.), who shows her the ins and outs of the area and asks if she can handle the position since a lot of people have quit on him because they couldn’t handle the solitude around corpses, as well as the smell. Megan assures Dr. Lewis that she can handle the job.
Megan starts later that evening. She meets two security guards at the front, Ernie (Jacob Ming-Trent) and Dave (Max McNamara) before heading into the morgue. She works until an EMT brings in a fresh body. In the middle of her work, Megan starts to get haunted by a recent traumatic memory. As she worked as a police officer, she was facing a perp and hesitated to shoot him until he turned around and fired his gun. The man shot and killed her partner then ran off. The guilt and horror of it led Megan to abuse pills, which landed her in rehab.
The next day, Megan is visited by her ex, a cop named Andrew (Grey Damon), who is there to pick up the rest of his stuff. He questions whether or not her new job is a good idea, and the two have a brief argument before Andrew decides to go home. Megan returns to work that night and finds a hooded man (Grainger) standing outside asking to be let in. She rightfully doesn’t trust him, and he starts to angrily order her to let him in until Megan threatens to call security on him. Moments later, an EMT named Randy (Nick Thune) shows up with the body of a young woman who was apparently being mutilated as she was found.
Megan steps outside to help Randy, not seeing Grainger sneaking inside behind her. After Randy leaves, Megan inspects the body, which turns out to be Hannah. She tries to take pictures of the body, but the camera and computer don’t work. Other weird things happen, like a tremor in the room, or the drawer with Hannah’s body not staying shut. When she goes back to see the body, she notices flies around Hannah, and a whole swarm of them when she lifts off her sheets, but this turns out to be a hallucination…possibly.
Megan hears something outside and goes to check it out, but she finds nothing. She goes back into the morgue to find Hannah’s body is gone, and she sees Grainger trying to take it away. She goes to confront him, and he tries to attack her with a knife, but Megan disarms him and waits for security to come get him. As Grainger is getting arrested, he yells to Megan that Hannah isn’t really dead.
After Megan returns Hannah’s body, she gets a call from Andrew to check up on her since he heard about the incident, though she doesn’t notice Hannah’s body moving. When Megan does get a look at Hannah, she sees her mouth open and exhale. She gets Lisa to meet with her now that she’s freaked out. Lisa tells her she can go home if she wants, but Megan insists that she needs to do this. She tells Lisa about Hannah breathing, but Lisa says that corpses release air sometimes when they are moved.
The Possession of Hannah Grace (also known in some countries as Cadaver) is a 2018 American supernatural horror film directed by Diederik Van Rooijen and written by Brian Sieve. It stars Shay Mitchell, Kirby Johnson, Stana Katic, Grey Damon and Nick Thune, and follows a former policewoman who encounters the supernatural while working in a morgue.
Principal photography on the film began on November 8, 2016, in Boston, Massachusetts, with the production team including director of photography Lennert Hillege, production designer Paula Loos, and costume designer Deborah Newhall. Filming would also take place at New England Studios in Devens, Massachusetts. The film was shot entirely on a Sony α7S II camera, marking the first time a feature film was shot using a mirrorless full-frame camera.[
The film was released in the United States on November 30, 2018, by Screen Gems. As of January 13, 2019, The Possession of Hannah Grace has grossed $14.7 million in the United States and Canada, and $20.1 million in other territories, for a total worldwide gross of $34.8 million, against a production budget of about $9.5 million.
In the United States and Canada, the film was projected to gross $3–7 million from 2,065 theaters in its opening weekend. It made $2.6 million on its first day, including $625,000 from Thursday night previews. It went on to debut to $6.5 million, finishing seventh. Due to it being a “low-budget cash grab in the current slow marketplace,” anything over $5.5 million would have been considered a success by Sony. In its second weekend the film dropped 51% to $3.2 million, an above-average hold for an horror film (which typically drop at least 60%).
The Possession of Hannah Grace (2018)
Directed by: Diederik Van Rooijen
Starring: Shay Mitchell, Grey Damon, Kirby Johnson, Nick Thune, Louis Herthum, Stana Katic, Maximillian McNamara, Jacob Ming-Trent, Marianne Bayard, Adrian M. Mompoint, Matt Mings
Screenplay by: Brian Sieve
Production Design by: Paula Loos
Cinematography by: Lennert Hillege
Film Editing by: Stanley Kolk, Jake York
Costume Design by: Deborah Newhall
Set Decoration by: Kim Leoleis
Music by: John Frizzell
MPAA Rating: R for gruesome images and terror throughout.
Distributed by: Sony ScreenGems
Release Date: November 30, 2018
Visits: 52
