Remember the scene in
Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds
where SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) sneakily appears at a restaurant
alongside movie theater owner Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) and the
soundtrack starts in on a menacing outburst of percussion and heavy electric
guitar strumming as Shosanna recalls Landa as the man who murdered her family
when she was still a child?
While meant to signify Shosanna’s horror upon the realization that her family’s killer is standing right behind her, my own thoughts drifted away to a far more deeply disturbing terror as I recognized where the dreaded music written by Charles Bernstein was in fact sampled from: the 1982 supernatural shocker The Entity.
While meant to signify Shosanna’s horror upon the realization that her family’s killer is standing right behind her, my own thoughts drifted away to a far more deeply disturbing terror as I recognized where the dreaded music written by Charles Bernstein was in fact sampled from: the 1982 supernatural shocker The Entity.
Loosely based on the
nonfiction novel The Entity by Frank
De Felitta (Audrey Rose) who adapted his own novel for the screen concerning
what became known as the Doris Bither case, director Sidney J. Furie’s film
concerns single mother Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey) who lives at home with her
two young daughters and older son and quickly finds herself the victim of an
unfathomable horror. In the simplest way
I can put it, The Entity depicts the
terrified young woman being brutally gang raped by evil spirits…over and over
and over again! When psychiatry with Dr.
Sneiderman (Ron Silver) and medical examinations turn up dead ends, the bizarre
and unstoppable sexual assaults continue in frequency and intensity. Much like Poltergeist,
parapsychologists are contacted but they can only do so much to help
themselves.
Part of what makes The Entity so deeply disturbing isn’t so
much the repeated unprovoked unstoppable spectral rapes occurring seemingly
without warning or relent, but who is unlucky enough to see them happen
firsthand. In arguably the film’s most
horrific scene, Carla is preparing a birthday party for her young daughter
replete with cake and ice cream. After
blowing out the candles in a moment of joy, Carla is lifted off her feet
by…what? Thrown onto the couch as her
son tries to come to her rescue, the poor woman is brutally gang raped right in
front of her sobbing and terrified children.
Looking at this scene now, I have to wonder just how you could direct a
scene like this and what you tell the tear streaked child actors.
Barbara Hershey, it goes
without saying, attacks the role with utter fearlessness, conveying this woman’s
terror, hurt and increasing anger towards an incomprehensible and unstoppable
evil. Where so many other actresses
turned this sort of thing down, Hershey goes the full distance. Special attention also goes to Ron Silver as
the psychiatrist whose character is more or less designed to be an adversary
for the audience to hate but he portrays the man with conviction and
plausibility. Mostly though, this is
Hershey and the effects department’s film who together create an unfathomable
horror not seen onscreen before or since.
Though the film’s director would sadly go on to direct the infamous Cannon Films’ Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, this is clearly the high watermark in his career. In a recent poll, Martin Scorsese cited The Entity as one of the scariest films of all time and I couldn’t agree more. Watching this for the first time in broad daylight with the window blinds open, I was thoroughly terrified from beginning to end and at times my shock ranged from the horrors depicted onscreen to the notion that anyone would make a film about this subject at all. One thing is for sure, until the day comes that someone outside of the 2003 Bollywood remake Bawa decides to remake this, there will never be a horror film quite like this again!
- Andrew Kotwicki