The Entity

A horror film set in Los Angeles. Carla is a woman with three children. She works by day, goes to a typing course at night, and runs the house alone. One night she is attacked in her room. There is nobody there; the door is shut, the window is shut, and only her children are in the house. It happens again. In the kitchen, the bathroom, the car; each time by something unseen. She goes to a doctor. A psychiatrist explains it as a response to trauma and questions her past. Carla will not accept it. She says what she is living through is real and nobody believes her. From there the film runs two lines side by side. The psychiatric explanation on one, students of parapsychology on the other. The students come to measure the house. Temperature, light, movement; recording devices are set up and something is recorded. In the end an experiment is built. A copy of the house is constructed in a laboratory and Carla is placed inside it; the aim is to freeze the presence with liquid helium. What the narrative is interested in is not a ghost but not being believed: the film's real tension comes not from the attacks but from what she describes being constantly turned into something else. The psychiatrist does not mean harm. He genuinely wants to help, and precisely for that reason he presses her harder. Barbara Hershey carries the part physically. The narrative gives her all the weight, and the assault scenes are genuinely hard to watch. The music is very loud. The sound design is deliberately disturbing and overwhelms the image in some scenes. The source is presented as a real case. There was an investigation in California in the 1970s following a woman's report of similar claims, and the film comes out of that. Barbara Hershey, Ron Silver, David Labiosa and George Coe are in the cast. Sidney J. Furie directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes psychological horror of the 1980s. Who it is not for: nearly everyone; the assault scenes are plainly rape scenes and the film shows them again and again.