The Entity
Short description
A single mother living near Los Angeles begins experiencing violent attacks in her own home, including a sexual assault by an unseen force. When she seeks help from a psychiatrist, he attributes her experiences to childhood trauma rather than anything outside her mind, and the people around her grow skeptical of her account. Parapsychologists eventually take an interest in her case and attempt to measure and confront the presence, though their efforts prove difficult to control.
Sidney J. Furie directed the film, the fifth of the thirteen features he made, following Hit! and preceding Purple Hearts. Frank De Felitta wrote the screenplay, adapting his own novel, and Harold Schneider produced. Barbara Hershey plays Carla Moran, with Ron Silver as Phil Sneiderman, George Coe as Dr. Weber, Margaret Blye as Cindy Nash and David Labiosa as Billy. The credited cast runs to twenty-nine names and the crew to seventy-five.
Released by 20th Century Fox and American Cinema Productions, the film had a budget of nine million dollars and took about thirteen million worldwide. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.7 from roughly twenty thousand votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.9 from just over six hundred. A critics' rating of 5.6 from thirteen reviews places it below both audience scores. At 125 minutes, it mixes horror, mystery and thriller elements around its central case.
What's left behind the scenes
- Carla Moran’s teenage son recounted a case where an invisible entity fiercely attacked Carla and threw her, causing her to hit her head. The son tried to help, but he was also thrown, even breaking his arm. During the filming of the movie, the actor playing the son also suffered a broken arm (during the same scene), and something invisible ripped the curtains hanging in the window.
- In the scene where the invisible entity touches the chest of a sleeping Carla in the middle of the night, the special effects team used a body and breast dummy made of a material whose shape could be altered by compression or pressure.
- The method by which doctors diagnose Carla based on what she tells them about her own life, her relationship with her father, and her sexual encounters with other men, reflects the so-called Freudian psychodynamic method of diagnosis. This fact, and the fact that she has already been diagnosed with “hysteria,” makes “The Entity” one of the last films to show how Freudian methods and concepts (relating mainly to sexual relations and child development) were of great importance in diagnosis. Starting in the 1990s, Freudian methods like those shown in the film came to be considered superstitions.
- The plot of the film is based on the story of Doris Bither from California, who claimed to be constantly assaulted by the spirits of three men, two of whom hold her down, and the third rapes her.
- When the demon first attacks Carla, he hits her hard in the face, breaking her lip and causing it to bleed. In subsequent scenes, there are no traces of the broken lip.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
