Misogyny Incarnate: The Unspeakable Truth of The Entity

It is Cindy who, earlier on in the film, convinces Carla to seek psychiatric help, which brings her to Dr. Sneiderman, a staff psychiatric intern at UCLA, played with great conviction and total believability by Ron Silver. Reassuring and initially coolly objective, Sneiderman can only attribute Carla’s problems to some profound mental issue—the return of the repressed, with a vengeance. Her bruises, bite marks, and subsequent injuries are diagnosed as psychosomatic. To him, the supernatural, down through millennia, has its roots in the troubles of the human psyche and projections of our desires. Carla reveals to Sneiderman that sex was a forbidden topic in her childhood home and says of her Presbyterian minister father that “when he held me it wasn’t the way a father should hold a daughter.” Over the course of their sessions, Carla becomes half-convinced that what she’s experiencing are delusions, but when the psychiatrist posits that these manifestations may originate in an unconscious incestuous fantasy—she describes one attack in which two small figures held her down while a stronger, bigger force raped her, i.e., Billy and her two little daughters—enough is enough. (A scene in which the entity induces a dream/fantasy of Carla having sex with her son was scrapped.) Each successive incident further solidifies Carla’s belief that she’s sane, until she finally tells Sneiderman, “I’m going to cooperate with him.”

Following Cindy and Carla’s chance bookstore encounter with two UCLA parapsychologists, the film switches from soft to hard (or half-baked) science as a team of experts subject the disgusting odors, cold temperatures, and weird light phenomena attributed to the entity to a battery of instruments and recording devices, intent on gathering concrete data. When the entity finally manifests itself to them—as an amorphous green form—the team’s leader, Dr. Cooley (Jacqueline Brookes), theorizes that they are dealing with a being from another dimension, or as one of her assistants puts it, “an external intelligence that has crossed over into our plane of existence.” A plan is hatched to isolate and capture Carla’s attacker in a controlled experiment—over furious protests from Sneiderman, who has admitted his feelings for Carla and been firmly rebuffed. An exact replica of Carla’s home is built in a laboratory, and tanks of lethal liquid helium are mounted above it with the goal of freezing the entity, at no small risk to Carla, who must serve as the bait.

Believe it or not, The Entity can be understood as a feminist parable. A showcase for Hershey’s fearless and committed performance (Jane Fonda, Sally Field, and Jill Clayburgh reportedly gave hard passes before it came to Hershey), it gives us something that used to be rare in the horror genre—a living, breathing, intelligent, three-dimensional woman. The film foregrounds the skepticism that rape victims often face. Carla’s credibility is even undermined by her son, who begins to equivocate about what he’s witnessed and experienced, and it’s only when Cindy confirms what she’s seen that Carla begins to find hope. If the entity is misogyny incarnate, the film finds in Carla a formidable and sympathetic heroine, one who ultimately emerges intact from the trauma of her harrowing ordeal, the damage to her self-esteem that Sneiderman’s well-meaning treatment has inflicted on her, and her reduction to a hapless test subject in the parapsychologist’s foolhardy experiment. Finally standing up for herself, she defies her unseen tormentor, declaring, “You can’t have me.” (But in the film’s chilling final scene, the entity speaks for the first time, gutturally uttering three words and effectively getting the obscene final say.)

I saw The Entity one Saturday in the fall of 1982 and emerged into the gloomy evening light feeling shaken but mainly just depressed. The well-established horror movie laughing/screaming effect—exemplified by The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Thing, The Evil Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and The Shining—was completely inoperative. This movie meant business, and it was impossible to like. 

Belatedly released in the U.S. in February 1983 after playing in the UK in late 1982, it placed fifty-five in Variety’s annual box-office rankings with a modest $13.3 million gross. The film receded into memory. And then in 1999, it was resurrected by Austrian experimental filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky’s sensational ten-minute found-footage film Outer Space. A 35 mm print of The Entity had come into Tscherkassky’s hands, and with no professed interest in the film’s content, he used an optical printer to reconfigure and resequence selected shots and sounds from a couple of scenes of violence and destruction and effectively exploded them. A battery of techniques are applied—multiple exposures, strobing, frame masking, sound distortion and slurring, image doubling and tripling, negative printing, reverse masking of snippets of dialogue, mirror imaging—until, at its crescendo, for a few moments the film itself seems to break down, slowly disintegrating into its components (sprocket holes, optical track) before returning to its opening masked images. The result is a black-and-white roller coaster of shuddering chaos that takes Outer Space to the brink of total rupture. It is a stunning tour de force, yet despite the fact that shots of Hershey are clearly legible, not many viewers would have had a clue about the source material. When I first viewed Outer Space, I knew within seconds what I was seeing. The Entity had returned.