The 100 Candles Game:  The Last Possession is a new anthology horror film being released on UK digital platforms on 13th January courtesy of 101 films.  The film is a sequel to the similarly themed The 100 Candles Game which was released by the same company in 2020.

Horror anthology films have a long and distinguished history which stretches back beyond the British Amicus series of the ‘60s and ‘70s and the great Dead of Night (1946) to Paul Leni’s silent German Expressionist classic of 1924, Waxworks.  Leni pioneered the standard structure of these movies:  several self-contained vignettes linked by a wraparound narrative that is concluded after the final vignette that sometimes pulls in elements of the other stories. 

This structure is certainly true of the ‘100 Candles’ films.  However, both films carry the interest piquing credit ‘Based on a concept by Michael Kraetzev’.  The innovation is that the collection of vignettes stories here, called segments in the publicity, are pre-existing, having been hosted as shorts on YouTube or dedicated websites.  Both ‘100 Candles’ movies therefore serve as showreels for the directors, casts and crew involved, bringing their work to a general audience rather than just committed fans of the material.  A wraparound story has been devised directed by Guillermo Lockhart and Carlos Goitia.

The plots of both ‘100 Candles’ movies are much the same.  A group of young people play the occult 100 Candles game.  Each person has to tell a horror story then put out a single candle.  The game is said to attract dangerous forces so if you survive all 100 stories, you’ve won.  In this sequel the protagonists are brought together by the familiar modern trope of influencers visiting an alleged haunted / cursed property.  Vloggers Dylan (Nacho Francavilla), Amber (Josefina Farina), Cheryl (Justine Ceballos) and Koji (Zhon Li) visit Stonewall Mansion once owned by Lady Jane Fairfax aka The Black Countess (Magui Bravi), a vaguely Elizabeth Bathory type murderous occultist who mysteriously disappeared.  The Vloggers hope to create interest and expand their fan base.  Instead, they bring demonic forces into the world.

Although the audio of ‘The Last Possession’ is in English it brings together horror shorts creators from around the world, mostly from Spanish speaking territories, but also from Portugal, Germany and the US.  The stories cover a lot of genres:  possession, return of the dead, zombie apocalypse and demonic manifestations.  With earlier anthologies the full script determined pacing.  Working with pre-existing materials here has resulted in a more arbitrary approach and therefore a somewhat shapeless narrative that is rather meh.  Because the protagonists don’t meet their fates in the vignettes Lockhart and Goitia have to contrive situations where they get bumped off by the countess.

The 100 Candles Game:  The Last Possession and its predecessor are worth seeing.  They boast good photography and practical effects.  However, I think that they would have been better served by a more ambitious linking story to make sense of their disparate elements