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Dis­cov­er the psy­cho­log­i­cal sub­text of this shock­ing 80s horror

15 May 2017

Words by Anton Bitel

A woman in a dark room, surrounded by bright blue and white lightning bolts, creating an intense, dramatic atmosphere.
A woman in a dark room, surrounded by bright blue and white lightning bolts, creating an intense, dramatic atmosphere.
Sid­ney J Furie’s The Enti­ty is deeply dis­turb­ing but essen­tial viewing.

The first five min­utes of Sid­ney J Furie’s The Enti­ty intro­duce its pro­tag­o­nist, thir­tysome­thing Car­la Moran (the extra­or­di­nary Bar­bara Her­shey), in a dynam­ic, fast-cut sequence. A rapid suc­ces­sion of scenes shows her work­ing in an office, then study­ing in a night class, then return­ing to her LA home, where she locks the front door behind her, checks on her two young sleep­ing daugh­ters Julie and Kim, greets her teenaged son Bil­ly (David Labiosa), and retires to her bed­room upstairs.

All these scenes are marked by their brisk pace, and by their vision of a woman con­stant­ly in motion. Though Car­la may strug­gle to pay the rent, this sin­gle moth­er is on the go and work­ing to do the best for her­self and her fam­i­ly. She is the embod­i­ment of female inde­pen­dence and progress.

By the film’s sixth minute, all that for­ward momen­tum is brought to a jud­der­ing halt as Car­la is attacked and raped in her own bed, with a jar­ring, bru­tal phys­i­cal­i­ty that feels like an assault on the view­er too. By the time the three chil­dren have rushed into the room, Carla’s assailant is nowhere to be seen. You just had a bad dream, that’s all,” a con­fused Bil­ly reas­sures his moth­er – but the assault repeats itself, becom­ing a ser­i­al pat­tern of inti­mate, non-con­sen­su­al incur­sions against Carla’s per­son, leav­ing scars, bruis­es and bite marks as evi­dence of a tor­menter who oth­er­wise remains invisible.

The ambigu­ous nature of these attacks – all at once vicious­ly cor­po­re­al and oth­er­world­ly in nature – is brought into sharp focus by the dif­fer­ent groups who end up try­ing to help Car­la. Dr Phil Snei­der­man (Ron Sil­ver), a staff psy­chi­a­trist at the uni­ver­si­ty clin­ic who takes a not alto­geth­er wel­come shine to Car­la, is insis­tent that the attack­er is mere­ly a psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­jec­tion of Carla’s own past trau­ma, while a team of para­psy­chol­o­gists, led by Dr Eliz­a­beth Coo­ley (Jacque­line Brookes), quick­ly sets about try­ing to mea­sure, record and even cap­ture her invis­i­ble assailant. The film itself gets to have it both ways, gen­er­at­ing hor­rif­ic genre thrills from the scenes of assault, while fur­nish­ing plen­ty of social and psy­cho­log­i­cal sub­text to all its super­nat­ur­al violations.

Car­la comes from a his­to­ry of vio­lence, and is sur­round­ed by invis­i­ble men. Abused by her father (who was a priest) as a child, she fled home, and mar­ried at age 16 – although a fatal acci­dent took her hus­band away from her while she was still preg­nant with Bil­ly. Her sec­ond part­ner – old enough to be her father” – van­ished after the birth of Julie and Kim. Her cur­rent boyfriend Jer­ry Ander­son (Alex Roc­co), also notably a lot old­er than her, is con­spic­u­ous entire­ly by his absence for the first half of the film, and treats her both as a child and a sex object, insist­ing that she put on the lin­gerie that he had bought for her for his home­com­ing’ (an expres­sion res­o­nant with sex­u­al unease).

Mean­while the hus­band of Carla’s best friend Cindy (Mar­garet Blye) is also only heard rather than seen for the first half of the film, and is anoth­er men­ac­ing male fig­ure with an insid­i­ous stran­gle­hold over a woman (“I ought to leave him,” says Cindy, you know, if I had the courage I would.”).

The home that Car­la shares with her chil­dren is full of look­ing glass­es, mak­ing it a ver­i­ta­ble hall of mir­rors whose sur­faces reflect and refract the many phys­i­cal out­rages that Car­la endures. One rape scene comes just after she has exam­ined her face in the bathroom’s trip­tych of mir­rors, and involves her face being force­ful­ly pushed into a mir­ror. After anoth­er noc­tur­nal intru­sion, she smash­es all the mir­rors in her bedroom.

In this reflec­tive envi­ron­ment, it becomes easy to fol­low Dr Snei­der­man in regard­ing Carla’s assailant as a mir­ror to her psy­che: an imag­i­nary man­i­fes­ta­tion of the sex­u­al trau­ma which she suf­fered in child­hood at the hands of her abu­sive father, and from which, even in adult­hood, she can nev­er escape.

Yet on anoth­er, wider read­ing, Carla’s oppo­nent is the ever-present, repres­sive pow­er of patri­archy itself, which, whether in the form of Jer­ry, of Snei­der­man and his pipe-smok­ing, patro­n­is­ing col­leagues, or of a deter­mined, demon­ic hyper­mas­cu­line male­fac­tor, can­not brook the notion of a woman run­ning her own house­hold free of male influ­ence, inter­fer­ence and control.

I won’t fight you,” Car­la tells Snei­der­man, sub­mit­ting her­self, at least at first, to his sci­en­tif­ic scep­ti­cism despite know­ing to be true what he dis­miss­es and denies: that there is some­thing deeply irra­tional afoot. Lat­er she echoes these words again, say­ing, I’m going to coop­er­ate with him,” only this time, in a dis­turb­ing par­al­lel, she is refer­ring not to Snei­der­man but to the trans­gres­sive pol­ter­geist whose man­han­dling of her while she was asleep led to a shame-rid­dled orgasm.

All that remains for Car­la is ago­nis­ing sur­ren­der. Reflect­ing all the men who want a piece of her or casu­al­ly fail to respect her auton­o­my, Carla’s attack­er – invis­i­ble yet tan­gi­ble, dis­em­bod­ied yet deeply destruc­tive – is a fig­ure for the ingrained misog­y­ny which so many women must learn to accom­mo­date in their lives. His only words – indeed, the final, shock­ing words of the film – give full expres­sion to his domes­ti­cat­ed brand of casu­al, woman-hat­ing priv­i­lege: Wel­come home, cunt.”

Frank De Felit­ta adapt­ed the screen­play for The Enti­ty from his own 1978 nov­el of the same name, and both were loose­ly drawn from the real-life case of Doris Bither – but Furie broad­ens the themes to cre­ate a dia­bol­i­cal vari­a­tion on the woman’s pic­ture”. Charles Bernstein’s melo­dra­mat­ic orches­tral score brings a touch of Hitch­cock, while the rape scenes come, for all their wrench­ing aggres­sion, with a sur­re­al­ly abstract qual­i­ty owing to the perpetrator’s absence.

Here Car­la learns both to fuck the patri­archy, and to live with it, in the hope that her children’s gen­er­a­tion might have it bet­ter. Invad­ing a sim­i­lar domes­tic space to William Friedkin’s The Exor­cist and even Tobe Hooper’s Pol­ter­geist, The Enti­ty is a bit­ter­sweet mod­ern ghost sto­ry that drama­tis­es the awful com­pro­mis­es and sac­ri­fices that women make every day just to get by in a man’s world. Essen­tial viewing.

The Enti­ty is released by Eure­ka Enter­tain­ment on Blu-ray on 15 May, 2017.

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