What have I started? After I reviewed It Follows my brother decided to suggest another movie for me to tackle. This time it's the 1982 film The Entity and, coincidentally it was already on my list of films to review anyway. Granted it was further down the list until now (at least until after the obligatory Christmas horror movies and probably the Halloween series marathon in January), but it was at least on the list.
Carla Moran is an attractive single mother of three children living an ordinary life in California. She works, she goes to typing school, she goes home to her kids and everything is normal. Until one day, completely out of nowhere, an invisible force assaults and rapes her in her bedroom. The next day that same force seems to take control of her car and tries to kill her. As these attacks continue she goes to a psychiatrist for help, but he believes that it is all in her head and diagnoses her with "hysteria". In desperation Carla turns to a pair of parapsychologists in an attempt to understand and contain what is happening to her...
The Entity is another of those "based on a true story" horror movies, although it's probably got more in common with The Amityville Horror than, say, Psycho. The real-life "Carla Moran" claimed to have been abused by this invisible force from 1974, and alleged to have had numerous witnesses to these attacks, which she said even followed her from California to Texas. "Carla" unfortunately died in 1996, but regardless of whether or not her claims were true or false, the very idea of being repeatedly attacked and violated by something neither you nor anyone else can see is a terrifying one by itself.
The audience gets very little time to get comfortable with the film before everything kicks off. We're not even eight minutes into the movie before Carla is attacked for the first time, complete with a jarring, pounding music track that automatically startles you and sets you on edge - even more so when it ends up accompanying every attack by the Entity. At about two hours long you'd also expect the film to be either over-stuffed with supernatural phenomena or prone to long scenes with nothing actually going on; while some of the scenes with the various experts border on the latter, for the most part The Entity manages to pace itself pretty well, with the attacks occurring more or less regularly throughout, and spaced out with the various groups attempting to help Carla.
It's interesting to compare some of the themes of The Entity with those of It Follows, particularly in their attitudes to female sexuality. For the most part both films avoid being exploitative and voyeuristic, although in the case of The Entity there are one of two shots of Carla's naked body that might not have been really needed to progress the plot. On the other hand, the psychiatrists dismiss the attacks on Carla as being nothing more than that old Freudian bollocks of "hysteria", blaming it all on her supposed fears of sex and her own sexuality. Yes, they effectively slut-shame a woman claiming to have been repeatedly raped and all but tell her that all she needs is a good hard rogering to cure her. With that in mind, is it any wonder that Carla ends up choosing to risk her life with jets of liquid helium being aimed at her rather than keep working with those psychiatrists?
You don't have to believe in the supernatural to find The Entity scary. The unseen assailant is of course one of the classic horror tropes - and if you think about it, even if all of this was just in Carla's head, the very idea that your mind could betray you like that in inflict such things on you is scary in itself.
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