The Entity (1982)

I am a huge fan of 70's horror movies, and am always searching for some new treasure. This movie is even more frightening than normal when you consider that it is based on a true story. It shook me quite a bit when I first saw it. Be warned that some scenes are very sexual in nature and disturbing. It's not gratutious sex like most bad "horror" flicks today. The movie depicts a woman who moves into a new house with her two children and after some time begins to be attacked by an unseen entity. She is left raped and bruised and thinking she's going out of her mind. The rape scenes are very tastefully done, but are hard to watch when you think that this supposedly really happened. It is not a movie for children. As an adult, I had to sleep with the lights on after the movie and really had a hard time being alone for a few days. This is not a blood-letting fest, it's not a teen sex/slasher film, and it's not a dark assylum like setting. It's a film that is at the top of my list of all time favorite truely scary, "can't go the bathroom alone" kind of movies.

By the way, if you liked this movie then you should try to get your hands on a made for TV movie called "Don't be afraid of the Dark". It scared me to death as a child, so much so that I remembered the name all these 20 some years. When I finally saw it again as an adult, it was still pretty creepy and worth the search.

When I first watched this movie, I was really skeptical... the whole premise of the movie was about a woman played by Barbara Hershey who claimed to be raped and beaten by ghosts (two would hold her down and one would rape her). But I watched the movie because it was indeed entertaining and if anything, it made you think and challenged the mind. But the more I watched it, the more disturbing it got. There are parts of the movie where you can see invisible hands fondling her breasts and her being physically attacked by an unknown "thing".

After watching the movie, I did a lot of online research to find out how true the movie was... and come to find out, the real woman's name was Carlotta Moran in Culver City, CA (which isn't too far from me) and it made news all over the place. There are documented facts from scientists, parapsychologists, and several neutral bystanders who have witnessed various one of the apparitions that attacked her.

The only part of the movie that wasn't really "real" was the ending where they capture the ghost. In the end, the entity was never truly captured and the real woman had to move five different times and it still followed her. She was raped 15 times during a 10-week DOCUMENTED investigation. The good news is that the entity eventually stopped following her after two years of a terrible ordeal and she would move further and further away from her home.

Here's something interesting:

In real life, the lady was being raped while screaming in her bedroom. Her 16-year-old son walked in and saw his mother being assaulted on the bed and tried to stop the ghost. He ended up being thrown across the room and broke his arm. When the scene was recreated in the movie, the ACTOR broke the VERY same arm doing that very same scene re-enacted. That's eerie.

The movie, as a whole... is not a horror movie. But it is very mentally disturbing because it really happened... credible people witnessed it. Whether you believe or don't.. doesn't really matter. But it's worth watching simply as a conversation piece. Definite five stars (even though it is VERY low budget and kinda cheesy) for originality.

Buy The Entity (1982) Now

Anchor Bay used to be one of my favorite companies to release older movies onto home video. They used to fill their DVDs and blu rays with loads of extras...but lately they have been slipping.

Now, with the blu ray release of "The Entity", we get nothing...not even a MENU!!! I have heard that the DVD re-release has the documentary and bonus features from the previous release...but they can't give the blu ray so much as a MENU???!!?!?! If anything, the blu ray should follow suit of other studios and allow MORE than the DVD due to the storage capacity. This is inexcusable...you load the blu ray disc in and it goes straight to the movie...even pressing the menu button gives you nothing.

Video and audio are a noted improvement. It's just a shame that they screwed up the blu ray release of this by including absolutely nothing extra (still baffled about the lack of even a menu...who does that these days???).

I'm terribly disappointed in Anchor Bay...they didn't just drop the ball on this...they deflated it.

Read Best Reviews of The Entity (1982) Here

I saw a part of this movie when I was a lot younger maybe six or seven and I remember I couldn't watch anymore of it because it scared me. All I saw was this woman screaming and being thrown all over the place by an unseen evil. I didn't even know what was going on. Almost 20 years later I rented The Entity to watch it in it's entirety.

Barbara Hershey stars as a single mother, with a checkered past, trying to raise her son and two daughters. One night as she's getting ready to go to bed an unseen force throws her across the room and smothers her with a pillow while raping her. She has no idea what has just happened and believes someone must've broken into the house. Upon finding that there was no entry into the house she believes maybe it's some sort of demon. At first she's hesitant to seek psychiatric help but after a second attack in her car she believes she has no alternative. She begins seeing a psychiatrist (Ron Silver). He tries to help by having her go into great detail about her past, telling her that these attacks are all in her mind. However, the more details she drudges up, the more frequent and violent the attacks become.

The movie is over 2 hours long so I could talk about the story forever. The Entity is powerful, mysterious and intense right up until the ending, which I thought was frustrating and a disappointment. I also thought that the music was perfect in this movie especially during the attack scenes. It is a highly intensive flick, it's definitely NOT for younger viewers. I guess the frightening thing about this movie is that was based on a true story. Whatever it is, The Entity is definitely worth seeing and I'm sure it's a movie you won't soon forget.

Want The Entity (1982) Discount?

Look out, folks, fasten your seatbelts. Like "The Exorcist", "The Entity" is based upon a drama that really happened, in Los Angeles. This is an excellent and very underrated terror movie that can easily make "Poltergeist" (released this same year 1982) look like a fairy tale. This story of a young and attractive woman, regularly sexually attacked by an invisible 'entity' is so believable, so realistic that we can't be nothing else but terrified, really chilled, from the beginning to the ending.

There is not any failed element in this movie, everything is perfect, from the special effects by Joe Lombardi and Stan Winston to the directing and self-adaptation, through the performance of always excellent Barbara Hershey who won the Prize as Best Actress in Avoriaz Film Festival, in 1983 in one of her best roles, and also Ron Silver's, perfect as the stubborn shrink. The chilling soundtrack is also ideal. But the movie is also remarkable because (and on the contrary of "Poltergeist"), it never tells us about the nature of this entity, we never know if it's a ghost, or a demon, or something else, even not a poltergeist... In the end the entity is neutralized, with liquid helium, but manages to escape and the film leaves us, filled up with questions with no response, exciting our imagination. This makes "The Entity" much more interesting to most of the poor, too predictible horror movies we can see today.

Another question with no response: where's the DVD? I'm very surprised because in France, there is a DVD edition of this movie...

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