What's still Haunting Ford?

August 4, 2000
by Michael Tunison

HARRISON FORD'S ROLE IN A 1977 TV THRILLER THE POSSESSED FEATURES SOME DOWNRIGHT SCARY PARALLELS TO WHAT LIES BENEATH

Part of the fun for the audiences currently crowding into theaters for the blockbuster WHAT LIES BENEATH is seeing action movie icon Harrison Ford at work in the context of a new genre -- the supernatural thriller. Over the years, Ford's screen characters have battled Imperial Storm Troopers, renegade Replicants, Nazis, artifact looters, corrupt cops and terrorists of all nationalities, but he's never had to contend with vengeful disembodied spirits before... right?

Before WHAT LIES BENEATH, Harrison Ford found younger women attractive in THE POSSESSED. Well, not exactly. You have to go back -- way back -- but it turns out the Ford canon does indeed include a similarly themed piece, albeit one with a much lower profile than his current smash. And while the star is loath to draw too much attention to the fact, this earlier work shares some eerie parallels with WHAT LIES BENEATH. On May 1, 1977 -- mere weeks before STAR WARS would make Ford a star overnight -- NBC aired THE POSSESSED, a third-rate EXORCIST knockoff rarely seen today (it was intended as a potential TV pilot to feature James Farentino - think X-FILES with an exorcist in place of FBI agents ). Indeed, the hilariously bad TV demon-possession chiller about mysterious fires bursting out at an all-girl's school would be of virtually no interest today were it not for Ford's charismatic supporting turn as -- get this, WHAT LIES BENEATH fans -- a science teacher having an affair with one of his students.

Diana Scarwid stars with Harrison Ford in WHAT LIES BENEATH and ironically starred with him in 1977 in the TV film THE POSSESSED. Other elements the two movies have in common include leading ladies who become possessed by spirits and climactic scenes that take place around water. Spooky, huh?

And there's more. A standout member of THE POSSESSED's cast is a 21-year-old Diana Scarwid, who plays the best friend of Ford's jail-bait girlfriend. Yes, that's the same Diana Scarwid who, 23 years later, portrays Michelle Pfeiffer's sarcastic New Ager best pal in WHAT LIES BENEATH. Reminded of THE POSSESSED during a press day for WHAT LIES BENEATH, Scarwid laughs at Ford's ultimate fate in the earlier movie. "He gets locked in his classroom in one scene and just combusts," she recalls.

For his part, the famously terse Ford was quick to dismiss THE POSSESSED when EON resurrects the memory of it during an interview. Does that make the flick something of a skeleton in his closet? "No, no," he says. "It was a television movie-of-the-week that I did many, many years ago. I'm surprised that even Diana remembers it." For those who don't, the 76-minute POSSESSED stars TV regular James Farentino as a gloomy former priest who apparently wanders the countryside looking for ways to battle "the evil." He's stubbornly cryptic when asked to explain further -- all we really know about him is that he lost his faith and now favors a black turtleneck and sportcoat combo that never lets modern viewers forget they're watching a relic from the late '70s. WHAT LIES BENEATH pairs Diana Scarwid and Harrison Ford in a film similar to THE POSSESSED, a TV film released just prior to STAR WARS, Ford's springboard to fame.

He's obviously an exorcist, but John Sacret Young's hackneyed script avoids that word like the plague -- no use drawing more attention than necessary to the rip-off factor. (Especially with the Richard Burton-starring EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC debuting in theaters that same year.) The hero is summoned to a private girl's high school where a series of inexplicable fires has broken out. His investigation leads him to the science classroom where, in an amusing precursor to the famous archeology class scene from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK four years later, a bespectacled Ford instructs a gaggle of adoring girls on the biology of spiders.

Later, the illicit relationship Ford's character is having with a young student played by Claudette Nevins (TV's MELROSE PLACE) is revealed in a surprisingly frank scene that reminds us how convincingly Ford played nasty types in pictures like AMERICAN GRAFFITI and THE CONVERSATION before STAR WARS cast him in his more familiar role as a dashing if somewhat flawed hero (a mold it took WHAT LIES BENEATH to break decades later).
While Ford understandably might prefer to keep the guilty secret of his association with THE POSSESSED buried away forever (not unlike the way his character in WHAT LIES BENEATH hides his own past sins), the actor need not be ashamed of his spirited performance in the earlier picture.  With his youthful looks and shaggy haircut unmistakably placing the teleflick next to STAR WARS chronologically, his presence in THE POSSESSED momentarily generates a kind of electricity it sorely lacks when Farentino and co-star Joan Hackett are at center stage. Too bad the future Indiana Jones gets offed so early in the proceedings. He disappears just as the relationship between his character and the young girl is getting interesting.

Scarwid went on to have a busy career in films (MOMMIE DEAREST, STRANGE INVADERS, PSYCHO 3) and TV productions such as TRUMAN and IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK before her potentially career-changing role in the mega-hit WHAT LIES BENEATH. Likewise, she is the most impressive of the young actresses playing THE POSSESSED's mischievous students. It's a minor disappointment when her character, like Ford's, has an unfortunate encounter with a demon fire part-way through the movie. Interestingly, while she can now claim to have appeared in two Harrison Ford movies, Scarwid still has yet to actually perform opposite the screen legend. In WHAT LIES BENEATH, all of her scenes are with co-star Michelle Pfeiffer.  "We didn't have any scenes in [THE POSSESSED] either, so I haven't worked with him," Scarwid says. "Maybe one day."

Ford-philes interested in checking out this non-classic Satanic thriller for themselves may have to do some hunting. A trip to the writer's corner video shop turned up an old tape, but several other stores around Los Angeles didn't carry it and Amazon.com doesn't so much as list the title. Indeed, some exploitative home video distributor would seem to have missed the boat by not re-releasing it in time for WHAT LIES BENEATH recent theatrical bow. Not to give anybody ideas (Anchor Bay are you listening?)  Only the denizens of the spirit world know for sure if a newly packaged version of THE POSSESSED will emerge to haunt Ford in the future. We'll venture one guess, though - if the telefilm does float up from the depths, he probably won't be doing a DVD audio commentary.

Fair Use Notice

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Harrison Ford Web is making such material available in an effort to promote research. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.