The Entity (1982)Repeat predators are allowed to thrive because people are unable or unwilling to perceive that the threat exists. The Entity (1982) is the story of Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey), a single mother of three who is suddenly attacked by an unseen entity, beaten and raped by this formless assailant. As the episodes endangering her continue, she reaches out to Dr. Phil Sneiderman (Ron Silver), who believes that the attacks are psychological, not supernatural, and desperately tries to connect with Carla to ensure her safety. But since Phil and his colleagues cannot comprehend the reality of Carla's plight, she struggles to protect herself from this malevolence that threatens her and her family every night.
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The Entity is a horror movie, but the horrors of the story are more acutely felt in the terrible violations inflicted upon Carla. In essence, The Entity is a metaphor for how some people respond to victims of sexual assault; even trained, professional clinicians like Dr. Sneiderman, frankly, block out the idea that Carla's experience is supernatural, because his experience and training has formed a prejudice in him, coloring his diagnosis. Phil is a good man who comes to care for Carla greatly, but his approach to treating her fails to show the kind of trust in Carla that is necessary for her to cope with the aftermath of her assault. Like an empirical psychologist should, he looks at the evidence available. He probes and discovers that Carla had an upbringing with psychologically unhealthy sexual incidents and a past which promotes certain logical conclusions, those also shared and cultivated by his comrades. But the unfortunate result of this diagnosis is akin to the response which is sometimes applied to rape victims, that "she was asking for it" or that "it wasn't really rape", which is ultimately as inappropriate here as it is for victims of sexual assault, spectral or otherwise. People's reactions to the assault vary, like her boyfriend, Jerry (Alex Rocco), who cannot cope with the idea of a spirit linked with his lover, a reaction which justifies the apprehension Carla had with sharing the reality of her assault with him in the first place. She is scared of his incredulity, but also of being judged by him. Following one episode where the entity ravishes her as she sleeps, she is ashamed by her physiological response to the event, and feels guilt, blaming herself, unable to qualify her feelings of being violated. Practically as terrible as the assault itself is how she is made to feel unsure about how her closest friends and family will react to her, fracturing her emotional stability as well as her sense of safety.
The entity's motives are difficult to gauge. At first, the suggestion that Carla is suffering from mental break--that it's all in her head--seems to be in the interests of whatever the entity is. The assaults happen when she is alone; they are brutal, fast, and frequent. The attacks happen just like that of a home intruder, slamming doors, shattering lamps, and the violence which follows is hateful and designed to terrorize Carla, perhaps to convince her not to seek help and to run, which is largely her response at first. But after time, after Carla solicits a group of parapsychologists at the university, the entity openly manifests for them. Why? Like any victimizer, the entity thrives on bullying Carla, establishing power; after this has been done, he--and by all accounts, the entity is male--looks for newer thrills, and does so by displaying his power over Carla in a public way. Even whether the entity is a spirit of the departed or some demon is never officially established. A conversation Carla has with Phil in her kitchen about her past includes a brief conversation about her late husband, Mario, who died in a motorcycle crash when she was pregnant with her son, Bill (David Labiosa). It could be inferred that the entity may be a jealous ghost of Mario, but even this has little credence, since Carla's description of her abuser--foul, big, perhaps aided by two smaller entities--doesn't bear any similarity to her memory of him. The entity is described by one of the parapsychologists as exhibiting traits in keeping with a "poltergeist"; coincidentally, Poltergeist was made in the same year as The Entity, and establishes at one point that a poltergeist is tied to a person not a place. What this means is that for whatever reason, as Carla observes, she was "chosen" by her attacker, and in keeping with the metaphor of sexual assault, it doesn't necessarily mean Carla did anything to provoke it or even that there was a connection to begin with--scrutinizing the victim is not only fruitless, it is counterproductive.
The Entity is a suspenseful film, established with the first attack taking place very early into the film, and creating a constant sense of anxiety over the impending next assault. This is done with long, pregnant pauses as Carla hopes for peace in a moment of solitude in her room, with every tick of her nightstand clock ratcheting up the tension. This is also driven home by the musical score by Charles Bernstein, including the intense selection called "Relentless Assault", which bangs a percussive beat like a heart pounding after being shot through with adrenaline. So affecting is the piece and indicative of dreadful danger to a woman at the hands of a predatory male that it was appropriated by Quentin Tarantino for a pair of key scenes in his film, Inglourious Basterds. The camera looms on shots of a lamp, a mirror, a clock for longer than usual, teasing the audience and keeping us as nervous and rattled for the inevitable subsequent attack as Carla is. Even Carla's house becomes an unfriendly realm, since the idea that the attacks are linked to the location is reinforced for a good deal of time until the entity assaults her in her own car. You get a feel for the Moran home, as many shots in the film take place in various rooms there, but it very quickly no longer feels like a home, any safety of it stripped away. Following the Moran family's first flight from the house, the place ends up feeling more like a crime scene; when they return, they move through the house, preparing for danger lurking in the shadows. From the street, the house on a hillside is shown to be like any other, but one notable shot when Carla returns home by taxi is shown flush with the street, giving the house an off-kilter, unnerving look, a sensation now inseparable from it after the attacks. When Carla recruits the parapsychologists to attempt to record the spectral assailant, the process shares more in common with a science experiment. When they attempt to contain the entity, they create a simulacrum of her house in a gymnasium, and her home actually becomes a research project, a process which strips away much of her privacy and effectively turns her into glorified bait. The focus on the house and the dissolution of its role as a secure place underscores the associations with home invasion and assault explored in The Entity, where an intruding spirit is not benign, and makes this clear by attacks both physical and psychological.
Recommended for: Fans of an intense and terror-inducing horror film, based on the novel by the same name by Frank De Felitta, which in turn was loosely based on the 1974 Doris Bither incident. It is also a chilling metaphor for both people's reactions to sexual assault and the loss of a sense of security following a home invasion.
The entity's motives are difficult to gauge. At first, the suggestion that Carla is suffering from mental break--that it's all in her head--seems to be in the interests of whatever the entity is. The assaults happen when she is alone; they are brutal, fast, and frequent. The attacks happen just like that of a home intruder, slamming doors, shattering lamps, and the violence which follows is hateful and designed to terrorize Carla, perhaps to convince her not to seek help and to run, which is largely her response at first. But after time, after Carla solicits a group of parapsychologists at the university, the entity openly manifests for them. Why? Like any victimizer, the entity thrives on bullying Carla, establishing power; after this has been done, he--and by all accounts, the entity is male--looks for newer thrills, and does so by displaying his power over Carla in a public way. Even whether the entity is a spirit of the departed or some demon is never officially established. A conversation Carla has with Phil in her kitchen about her past includes a brief conversation about her late husband, Mario, who died in a motorcycle crash when she was pregnant with her son, Bill (David Labiosa). It could be inferred that the entity may be a jealous ghost of Mario, but even this has little credence, since Carla's description of her abuser--foul, big, perhaps aided by two smaller entities--doesn't bear any similarity to her memory of him. The entity is described by one of the parapsychologists as exhibiting traits in keeping with a "poltergeist"; coincidentally, Poltergeist was made in the same year as The Entity, and establishes at one point that a poltergeist is tied to a person not a place. What this means is that for whatever reason, as Carla observes, she was "chosen" by her attacker, and in keeping with the metaphor of sexual assault, it doesn't necessarily mean Carla did anything to provoke it or even that there was a connection to begin with--scrutinizing the victim is not only fruitless, it is counterproductive.
The Entity is a suspenseful film, established with the first attack taking place very early into the film, and creating a constant sense of anxiety over the impending next assault. This is done with long, pregnant pauses as Carla hopes for peace in a moment of solitude in her room, with every tick of her nightstand clock ratcheting up the tension. This is also driven home by the musical score by Charles Bernstein, including the intense selection called "Relentless Assault", which bangs a percussive beat like a heart pounding after being shot through with adrenaline. So affecting is the piece and indicative of dreadful danger to a woman at the hands of a predatory male that it was appropriated by Quentin Tarantino for a pair of key scenes in his film, Inglourious Basterds. The camera looms on shots of a lamp, a mirror, a clock for longer than usual, teasing the audience and keeping us as nervous and rattled for the inevitable subsequent attack as Carla is. Even Carla's house becomes an unfriendly realm, since the idea that the attacks are linked to the location is reinforced for a good deal of time until the entity assaults her in her own car. You get a feel for the Moran home, as many shots in the film take place in various rooms there, but it very quickly no longer feels like a home, any safety of it stripped away. Following the Moran family's first flight from the house, the place ends up feeling more like a crime scene; when they return, they move through the house, preparing for danger lurking in the shadows. From the street, the house on a hillside is shown to be like any other, but one notable shot when Carla returns home by taxi is shown flush with the street, giving the house an off-kilter, unnerving look, a sensation now inseparable from it after the attacks. When Carla recruits the parapsychologists to attempt to record the spectral assailant, the process shares more in common with a science experiment. When they attempt to contain the entity, they create a simulacrum of her house in a gymnasium, and her home actually becomes a research project, a process which strips away much of her privacy and effectively turns her into glorified bait. The focus on the house and the dissolution of its role as a secure place underscores the associations with home invasion and assault explored in The Entity, where an intruding spirit is not benign, and makes this clear by attacks both physical and psychological.
Recommended for: Fans of an intense and terror-inducing horror film, based on the novel by the same name by Frank De Felitta, which in turn was loosely based on the 1974 Doris Bither incident. It is also a chilling metaphor for both people's reactions to sexual assault and the loss of a sense of security following a home invasion.