Misogyny Incarnate: The Unspeakable Truth of The Entity

Features—

Oct 23, 2024

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.

The Entity’s opening credit sequence establishes Carla as a working mom who’s taking an evening adult-ed typing course and raising a teenage son and two preteen daughters. They live in a small, nondescript tract house in a nondescript neighborhood. (Scorsese observed that the “banal settings . . . accentuate the unnerving quality.”) Wearily arriving home late at night, she checks in with her son, Billy (David Labiosa), who’s working on a car engine in the garage, then lovingly tucks in her sleeping daughters and turns in for the night. Five minutes into the film, as she’s getting ready to go to sleep, out of nowhere, she’s smacked in the face, thrown onto her bed, and smothered by a pillow while an unseen attacker rapes her. Furie holds the camera on Hershey’s face and eyes throughout the violent act, while composer Bernstein’s deeply disturbing, once-heard-never-forgotten music cue—a kind of harsh, mechanical pounding with a repeated dissonant piano note—establishes that Carla is being violated by something utterly inhuman. That cue, employed whenever Carla is attacked, is one of the things that makes you realize this is no run-of-the-mill horror film. (Quentin Tarantino lifted and put to use that cue in Inglorious Basterds.) Responding to Carla’s screams, her children rush in and, crying hysterically, she urges her son to search the house. But as he says, after his search, “there’s nobody there.”

We’re unmistakably in the punishing realm of ne plus ultra transgression. Over the course of the remainder of the film’s 125 minutes there are four more incorporeal sexual visitations, each more physically explicit than the one before—one in the presence of Carla’s children, who are helpless to prevent the attack, and the most explicit and appalling as Carla’s boyfriend-cum-fiancé Jerry (Alex Rocco) beholds her naked body as it’s groped by invisible hands. Both Billy and Jerry attempt to fight off an attacker they can’t see but are thrown tumbling back. And the attacks don’t end there: the entity attempts to kill Carla by taking control of her car in mid-traffic, unleashes an electrical discharge on Billy that knocks him cold, tears Carla’s bedroom apart—and later explosively wrecks the living room of her best friend, Cindy (Margaret Blye), who has provided Carla with what had so far seemed a safe haven.

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.

Misogyny Incarnate: The Unspeakable Truth of The Entity

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