Thoughts on The Entity

   On Criterion I watched The Entity, a 1982 horror film directed by Sidney J. Furie (Lady Sings the Blues, Iron Eagle, Ladybugs), and written by Frank De Felitta, adapted from his novel based on Doris Bither, a woman in the 1970s who claimed to have been raped by a phantasm, and went under observation by UCLA doctoral students.

    Barbara Hershey starred as Carla, a fictionalized version of Bither, who is a divorced mother of three, and she is violently raped in her home by an invisible assailant, but cannot prove the attacks because the attacker wasn't seen by anybody. She is repeatedly attacked, in brutal and graphic ways, and once in front of her children, where her grown son tries to save her, but is thrown back by an unseen force and breaks his wrist. When the attacks happen, the room shakes, mirrors break, doors slam, and it's obvious that she is being haunted. The film came out the same year as Poltergeist, but whereas that film is more about a suburban family being haunted because their home was built on indigenous burial ground, this is more of a psychological horror film about women and trauma and institutional sexism.

    The attacks are really rough and difficult to watch, and aren't depicted as horror movie exploitation, but really focusing on Carla's trauma and effect on her mental psyche. Hershey is really incredible in this film, in likely one of the best performances of her career, in playing a woman who is trying to be taken seriously by reporting her assaults, but is brushed off and treated in a condescending manner by medical professionals. Her scenes feel much more terrifying and more realistic than most horror movies could show, because her pain as an assault survivor feels much closer to real-life experiences of many women.

    When she sees a psychologist (Ron Silver), he keeps letting his professional skepticism get in the way of believing her, despite that she has bruises on her body that she wouldn't be able to inflict herself, and keeps insinuating that her past trauma of childhood abuse is allowing her mind to manifest these attacks, not wanting to believe in the paranormal or anything outside of scientific reasoning.

    Carla reaches out to paranormal scientists to help her, much like how the family in Poltergeist do to exorcise their house, and the psychologist sees them as quacks and feels like they are derailing his work with Carla, and she is torn between the scientists who see her as a lab rat to experiment on, including putting her in a simulation of her house in a gymnasium to summon the ghost, and the psychologist who talks down to her and thinks she needs to be committed to a psychiatric institution. It places Carla as even more of a heroine, amongst a world of mostly men in the sciences who keep pulling her in different directions based on what they want out of her to feel like heroes.

    It's a really fantastic film, but I wouldn't recommend it for anyone who is a survivor of sexual assault, as the scenes of her being attacked are quite disturbing and graphic.