Sidney J. Furie’s first horror film since his brace of British-made chillers Dr. Blood’s Coffin and The Snake Woman in 1961 is a slickly made but unpleasant tale of supernatural rape supposedly based on a true story. It was scripted by Frank De Felitta from his 1978 novel of the same name, inspired by the case of Doris Bither from Culver City, California, who contacted parapsychologist Barry Taff in 1974 claiming that she’d been repeatedly sexually abused by one or more invisible assailants. De Felitta’s fictionalised account of Bither’s claims was a bestseller, and the film version went into production in March 1981.
In Los Angeles, single mother Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey, at the start of a career revival in the 1980s) is raped in her home by an invisible assailant and her home is disrupted by inexplicable supernatural. With her three children, Billy Moran (David Labiosa), Natasha (Julie Moran) and Kim (Melanie Gaffin) she temporarily flees the house but soon returns and not long afterwards is almost killed when her car goes out of control. She seeks help from psychiatrist Dr Phil Sneiderman (Ron Silver) but is dismayed when, after a further violent attack, he dismisses her wounds as self-inflicted – he believes that the incidents stem from Carla’s troubled childhood and adolescence. More attacks occur (including the eponymous entity tricking her into having an orgasm while she sleeps), one of which is witnessed by Carla’s best friend Cindy (Margaret Blye) who encourages her to visit a book shop specialising in the occult. There, Carla meets two university parapsychologists who take an interest in her story and agree to investigate with their team leader, Dr Elizabeth Cooley (Jacqueline Brookes). This leads to the team setting up a recreation of Carla’s home at the university in the hope that they can lure the entity in and freeze it with liquid helium…
There’s a deeply unpleasant leering quality to The Entity, a tendency to ogle Carla’s body while it’s being abused, as in the film’s most memorably striking image, that of her prone on her bed being groped by her invisible assailant (the admittedly very good effects are courtesy of Stan Winston and his team). Some may dismiss it as irrelevant, but the fact that the film always focusses in on Carla during the assaults puts the viewer uncomfortably in the position of the assailant, seeing the assaults entirely from its perspective.
Carla’s back story is peppered with the sort of lazy detailing that marks her as one of life’s victims even before whatever her assailant is (we never find out) turns up – sexually abused by her father (one would expect that the fact that he was a priest might play a role in the story but it’s just a throway bit of background detail), married and widowed at 16, left with a child to raise on her own, remarried to a man “old enough to be her father”… She’s had it tough all her life and one can’t help but feel that all this detail has been added just to make sure that we’re on her side, as if the horrific experiences she’s now having aren’t enough to make us root for her. It could have been even less pleasant had a subplot expanding on Sneiderman’s claims that Carla is having incestuous feelings for her teenage son not been cut.
We might want to give De Felitta and Furie the benefit of the doubt and read the story as that of a woman being victimised by literally faceless men, the assaulting force a manifestation of the patriarchal society that constantly fails and abuses Carla. But then we get that moment when she orgasms during one of her assaults and suddenly it all starts to feel very weird indeed. There are some instances where the entity-as-patriarchy argument seems to being made with more rigour – Carla is certainly surrounded by men who are either predatory (Sneiderman takes an unprofessional interest in her), patronising (the medical team she’s referred to falls back straight away on that old standby hysteria) or just plain awful (her current lover, another older man named Jerry (Alex Rocco) turns up very late in the day, tries to get her to wear the sexy underwear he’s bought her then heads for the hills after he sees her being assaulted) but if that’s really what the makers were aiming for, they keep undoing their argument with scenes that feel like belong in a cheap exploitation film.
When it’s not being sexually leering, The Entity is trying to make a scientific case for what’s happening to Carla and ends up looking extremely foolish indeed. It culminates in an absurd final act in which the spectral rapist is briefly frozen in liquid helium, escapes when the resulting iceberg (just how big is this thing meant to be?) explodes and turns up again to utter its one line of dialogue, a misogynistic threat against Carla in a damp squib finale before the film ends telling us that Carla and her children are now living in Texas and is still being assaulted if less violently and less regularly.
The best thing about The Entity by far is Barbara Hershey who gives a superb, committed performance as Carla. She was cast only ten days before production began after Jill Clayburgh, Sally Fields, Jane Fonda and Bette Midler all turned it down making her performance all the more remarkable given how little time she had to prepare for it. She deserved better than the film she’s lumbered with, but it’s terrific a turn (it won her the Best Actress nod at the Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival) that almost makes the film bearable. She’s certainly more impressive than the rest of the cast who are largely just there making little impression one way or the other.
The Entity opened in the UK four months before it did in the States and was met by angry protests from women’s rights campaigners who were disturbed by the level of sexual violence. Perhaps chastened by the reaction on this side of the pond, the US release was a low-key one with little publicity and what little there was changed tack from the more prurient UK promo imagery which largely focussed on a naked body double for Hershey. The advertising campaign made it abundantly clear that exploitation was the name of the game and, in the UK at least, one might have been forgiven for thinking it to be some sort of softcore sex/horror hybrid. Despite all that, the film was a minor hit with both critics and audiences (Martin Scorsese is a notable fan), despite being ridiculously overlong for what it is, packed to the rafters with half-baked psychology and all the other problems already hashed over enough here.
The EOFFTV Review 
Because of Scorsese´s recommendation I bought the film and have watched it twice. I was surprised how good it is and wondered a little that you have so little love for it and regard it as an “unpleasant tale”. Isn´t the whole horror genre not mainly about the most unpleasant aspects of human life?
I followed Carla´s ordeal with a lot of empathy and to me the film is well paced and entertaining and certainly not too long. Given the obstacles the ambitious director probably had to face he did a good job – firstly, the budget must have been much lower than reported, secondly, the production company was Cannon (the documentary “Electric Boogaloo” about them is worth watching.) The art work and the naked Stan Winston rubber doll sequence are clearly exploitative, as expected from a Cannon movie, but the rest of the film is not. The rapes feel violent but are – except for that one scene – shown in close-ups of Hershey´s face and together with the music and editing create all the violence. For me all of it is totally Carla´s and not the entity´s perspective, so I don´t see a “deeply unpleasant leering quality” at all.
Neither did I find the backstory or psychology “half-baked”, quite the contrary. Carla mentions to the psychiatrist that she felt happy about the deadly accident of her abusive boyfriend, and that is a thrilling key to this story. It is maybe weird to discuss the natural history of poltergeists, but at least the most famous and best documented case, the Rosenheim case, has a lot of parallels with “The entity” for example in that all Poltergeist activity was strictly correlated with the presence of a troubled woman. A similar situation was used as a great story element in “Paranormal Activity”…
About a rape victim being tricked into arousal as depicted in the film, that reminded me of the Netflix doc “The Keepers”, when a victim tells about her first orgasm while being abused. Hard to bear, but a fact.
The third act must have been a big problem for the writers. The true story approach would prohibit a happy end and cathartic resolution, although Carla does change for good, becoming a much stronger person than she was at the beginning of the film. But everything must get even worse in the third act before the film ends and that was difficult with the second act being so strong. So the third act had to leave the “true story” elements behind. Although the whole setup of contraptions to freeze the entity to me looked plausible enough technically. I hardly had to persuade myself that elite research institutions in the US would both have the knowledge and the money to do minor research like freezing a poltergeist with helium.
Scorsese´s recommendation also might have to do with Hershey having appearing for the first time on sceen in his first film, “Boxcar Bertha”. Roger Corman produced and definitely exploitation but very good. Hershey is simply phenomenal in both films.
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