‘I’d rather be dead than living the way I’ve been living…’
While I love ghost stories, they tend to be pretty samey. They usually feature a young family moving into a new home, a series of strange happenings that begin to escalate, culminating in some kind of showdown. The Entity, whilst undoubtedly and unapologetically a ghost story, does not follow this formula, and in many ways, it’s an utterly unique spin on a subgenre that too often relies on the same old tired tropes…
Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey) is an independent, single mother of two who finds her life destroyed following a series of sudden, supernatural attacks. These assaults are not just violent, but also sexual. Predictably, when Carla tries to seek help for these attacks, she is ridiculed, ignored and exploited (mainly by men). Dr Phil Sneiderman (Ron Silver), a psychologist, thinks he is helping Carla, but he is own stubborn pig-headedness prevents him from seeing the truth, while a pair of parapsychologists are only interested in Carla due to the potential rewards for proving the existence of a supernatural entity. The subtext is clear. When a woman is in trouble, men don’t help.
Based on a true story (or at least a real-life case), The Entity demonstrates in no uncertain terms what happens when a woman tries to report a sexual assault. The presence of a ghost is almost incidental to the film’s message, but without the vicious supernatural attacks, that message wouldn’t have the same power. The attack scenes are genuinely upsetting, rooted in an incredible performance from Hershey, and some truly gnarly sound design that would be replicated (but never bettered) throughout horror history. While not as immediately memorable or as iconic as Jaws or Psycho, the score here is just as effective. Truly haunting.
The Entity will always be divisive due not only to its graphic content, but also because of its third act pivot into pseudoscience, but aside from all that, and perhaps more importantly, it’s just a fantastic ghost story.
