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Misogyny Incarnate: The Unspeakable Truth of The Entity

Misogyny Incarnate: <em></em>The Unspeakable Truth of <em>The Entity</em>

When The Entity opened in London back in 1982, it attracted protests for its lurid, inherently repellent premise: a thirty-two-year-old single mother of three in Los Angeles is repeatedly raped and brutalized by an overpowering, malevolent invisible being. Any takers? I think not. Yet, strangely, apart from Leonard Maltin, who pronounced the film “atrociously exploitative,” film critics in the United States barely batted an eyelid. The headline of the New York Times’ negative review, “Spooky Days,” was a massive understatement, to say the least. The Entity did have a notable champion in Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas—and what’s more, Martin Scorsese included it on his “Scariest Horror Films of All Time” list. (The movie’s star, Barbara Hershey, had played the title role in Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha, and would later play Mary Magdalene in The Last Temptation of Christ, which may explain why he paid attention to the film.) Still, despite this small group of fans, it has remained a relatively obscure cult object, in no small part due to its audaciously unpleasant exploration of unspeakable subject matter.

First, here’s the origin story: The Entity is based on a 1978 novel by screenwriter and film producer Frank De Felitta. His novel was inspired by the real-life 1974 case of Doris Bither, who claimed that she and her three sons had seen semitransparent apparitions of roughly human shape in their Culver City home that had physically and sexually assaulted her. After seeking psychiatric help, Bither turned to the parapsychology department at UCLA, which opened a ten-week investigation and observed, but mostly failed to record, any of the multiple instances of what they believed to be poltergeist activity, including balls of light flitting around Bither’s bedroom. De Felitta made contact with Bither and the UCLA investigators and based his novel on their accounts, although it’s likely that Bither was the proverbial unreliable narrator—apparently a deeply troubled woman whose alcohol and drug use and impoverished circumstances exacerbated her presumed underlying mental-health issues. In fact, most of what she claimed happened to her during her ordeal was never corroborated by any independent witness. 

There was another issue: the UCLA investigation ended inconclusively, and so De Felitta’s story had no ending. No problem: he simply invented one. When he went on to write the screenplay adaptation (reportedly Roman Polanski was interested in the project), he adeptly streamlined his material without discarding anything important—and retained what some may feel is a preposterous third act (both the film’s director and star would later refer to it dismissively). De Felitta’s novel is reasonably well-written and certainly not a trashy horror cash-in—he takes the story seriously and develops a three-dimensional portrait of his protagonist (renamed Carlotta Moran and then subsequently renamed Carla Moran for the film). The director who took on this project was Canadian-born Sidney J. Furie, who has a long, uneven, but sporadically interesting track record, having chalked up forty-four features, a dozen TV credits—and counting. The Entity was his twenty-first feature and his third horror film (although winningly he rejected the horror label, preferring to see the movie as a suspense film). Shooting in sequence, Furie demonstrated a dynamic and tightly controlled hand, using his trademark canted frames and extensive use of split diopters (which simultaneously hold foreground and middle or background characters or objects in sharp focus) to maintain a feeling of deep unease—ably assisted by composer Charles Bernstein’s dread-inducing high-pitch musical drones.

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