This Master’s thesis is a short possession film co-directed by Mojtaba Zarghampour and Mahdi Hosseingholi, made as a practice-based research project. The mould in it is not an effect. It is a living organism, cultivated on photographic emulsion, feeding on the gelatin that holds the image.

Possession films are usually told from the side of the person under threat, and narrative cinema is built so that its images are looked through rather than at. Here both were turned around. The film is told from the side of the force doing the taking.

The story starts with a man who spends the night alone in his office. He senses something in the office facing his, tries to photograph it, and the pictures come back stained. A voice on the phone stays with him through the night and grows more controlling as his own sight begins to fail. The stains move from the photographs he takes into everything he sees, until nothing is left uncontaminated.

This thesis asks how a force that neither perceives nor speaks can hold the position a film is told from. Narratology has no place for it: every narrator it recognises still assumes someone behind the image who sees. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s abjection, the thesis defines this position and calls it the otherness; not a character, not a monster, but the condition of what has been cast out, now doing the telling.