Review of The Entity (1982) by Adam M — 13 Mar 2013

I asked myself, could this really be good or just weird exploitation?

Scorsese likes it. Maybe because the heroine is like a martyr for everyone who only has to live through traumas that can be explained without reference to the spiritual. It's as though she's been chosen for this miserable, unremitting, incurable fate from among her fellow mortals, chosen to be punished from the beyond, while the punishing force savors her mortal helplessness. In this case, the punishment coincides with all her vulnerabilities as an underprivileged single mother.

The movie would have been ridiculous without Barbara Hershey's sensitive performance and Stephen Burum's camera angles and perfect framings. They both must have put in a lot of energy. The movie's horror is unisex, since the evil entity has no clear limits in a way the genre hasn't prepared us for. The evil is free to leave her bedroom and follow her around, basically stalking her, threatening her at every turn, seemingly capable of killing or torturing her at whim, with no definite intention. Not sure about the outrageous line of dialogue the ghost had... It seems like a gift to Molly Haskell's thesis about women in the movies. The Entity is a good symbol for the patriarchy though, the invisible, ubiquitous rapist interfering with the progress of a woman's life, while very few believe her.