Carla is a normal woman living with her two little daughters and a teenage son after her husband died. One evening, something grabs Carla in her bed and puts a pillow on her face, so she leaves with her kids, fearing that a burglar attacked her. However, it is an invisible ghost, an entity that keeps harassing and violently attacking her in the house, even raping her in the bathroom. Carla seeks help from psychiatrist, but nobody believes her. Finally, two parapsychologists go to her house and take photos of a blue beam of light on the ceiling. They make a replica of her house in their laboratory and try to capture the ghost in liquid hydrogen. The ice breaks, though, and Carla hears the voice of the entity at her home, but continues living her life.
One of the most disturbing movies of the 20th century, “The Entity” was briefly shown in cinemas during its premiere, but was so unsettling that it was later on rarely shown on TV, since many female viewers were simply too traumatized by its concept of a ghost rapist. Having a human villain is awful, but at least comprehensible; a monster as a villain is much more disturbing—but an invisible ghost that can strike anytime, anywhere, and one cannot know what it wants, that is intolerable. It is a meditation on the human fear of helplessness, done through the allegory of society ‘silencing the victim’ to suppress the uncomfortable truth: the heroine Carla (an effective Barbara Hershey) is a victim of rape of a higher power, but nobody believes her, or they tell her that it never happened. This phenomenon happens when some people are afraid of some higher power, and thus ignore or whitewash its crimes out of fear. Also worth noting is that at one point in the film it is mentioned that Carla was sexually abused as a child by her father, and thus the entity might be her father’s ghost, a symbolic stigma of the bad memories plaguing her. An alternative interpretation of the story could be the human fear of unexpected, sudden health problems—seizures, a stroke, a heart attack—from which there is no adequate cure.
In one of the most frightening sequences, Carla goes to take a bath, when the entity attacks her, and puts the shower curtain over her head. In another one, her boyfriend shows up at her home and gives her a present, and he then goes to refresh himself in the bathroom, brushing his teeth and putting some mouth spray, but as he opens the door of the bedroom, he spots Carla lying naked on bed, screaming for help, while the invisible entity is squeezing her breasts, shown only as lumps on her chest. This even goes so far that the entity pushes the gas pedal while she was waiting in her car at a red traffic light. Unfortunately, the writing of the film is limited, since the dialogue is banal and routine, while the characters are one-dimensional (the psychiatrist, for instance, has only one feature: he doesn’t believe Carla no matter what; teenager Billy is just confused all the time); the one-note “heavy pounding truck” score is effective at first, but cannot carry the same old tune for all of the six attacks throughout the story, making it repetitive; whereas the open ending is unsatisfactory, though it did offer a fascinating little forerunner to “Ghostbusters”, since the parapsychologists try to capture the ghost. Not as scary as much as it is haunting, “The Entity” is a weird hard-core horror in its concept, yet still seems serviceable today.
Grade:++
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