The alternate title for this article was “Exploiting Abuse for Ghost Stories, Profit, And Fun”, but I figured that would be too much of a downer.

I am a skeptic about the paranormal. I always have been, and I probably always will be. Do I wish all ghost hunters out there would find something other than the occasional sparkly orb? You bet. Do I want the Mothman and all his precognitive, disaster-causing diva moments to be real? I have the themed sweatshirt to prove it. But I often find the most interesting cases of supernatural phenomena to be the ones with interesting people at the center of them. It’s why I can get invested in someone’s personal ghost story, but something that tries to take an objective stance usually fails to impress; the evidence is usually circumstantial at best and manufactured at worst.

Take for instance the Winchester Mystery House, which was the subject of its own film in 2018 inventively titled Winchester. I will always find myself enamored with how a house with a bizarre layout became the subject of supernatural speculation over the course of decades because journalists just went running with it. The idea that a house might have just been built complicated on accident because an unbelievably rich person made it, someone who couldn’t spend all of her inheritance in one lifetime and did so incompetently, is to me much funnier and more interesting than it being a maze for evil spirits.

And this is why, when a picture starts to form of the person investigating “objectively”, I lose the forest for the trees and really start focusing mostly on the investigator.

This is how I feel about the story behind 1982’s The Entity. It’s a solid supernatural film, but its effects and illusions, its brutal horror, and its harrowing ending pale when put up against the very odd real-life people the film is based on; it’s a spawning point of pseudo-science in the intrepid age of the 70s, the birth of two celebrity parapsychologists, and the story of how an abused woman’s suffering became a golden goose.

FROM TRUE STORY OF TERROR TO SUPERNATURAL CINEMA

The Entity is an adaptation of the novel of the same name, which is heavily based on the 1974 case of Doris Bither. A single mother of four living in Culver City, she reported being attacked by three invisible, demonic forces that repeatedly sexually assaulted her throughout her life. Disbelieved by almost everyone, she ended up accidentally running into two of the biggest parapsychologists of all time, Barry Taff and Kerry Gaynor, who made it their mission to discover the truth—her truth. Bither took her case to their pirate parapsychology laboratory operating out of UCLA’s main campus—not funded or approved of by the university itself, they were just renting space in the neuroscience building and doing whatever they liked in the name of supernatural research. They had a dark room and a dream, and by Jove, they were going to find some weird stuff out there.

The lab saw a lot of visitors because, given it was the Age of Aquarius and a lot of weird experimental stuff was going on with psychedelics and new-age spiritualism, everyone wanted in on the psychic phenomena the lab was exploring. Everyone from director William Friedkin to officials with the U.S. Army’s very own Stargate Project visited to try and get a look; the latter would be one of the many government projects that would serve as the inspiration for Stranger Things, Scanners, Firestarter, and pretty much every Stephen King character with the shining, so thank them for wasting taxpayer dollars but bringing us some cool media in the process.

BARRY AND KERRY’S BIG INVISIBLE BREAK

The chief investigators on the Bither case were Taff and Gaynor, who spent nearly 3 months returning to Bither’s house, a condemned building where they claimed to have objects thrown at them by spirits and suffered through rapid fluctuations in temperature. Bither’s dilapidated home was just one of the signs of her many years of struggle; she reported being abused as a child and suffered from addiction to various stimulants for much of her life.

The few photographs that survived the investigation are your typical affair. Orbs floating through the frame, arcs of light, all seemingly thought to be the three invisible assailants. Few actual photos made it out due to errors in processing the film, but it didn’t quite matter; Taff and Gaynor had much more titillating stories make it to the mainstream without pictures, such as Doris’s son putting on a Black Sabbath record that went so hard it caused baseball cards to levitate in the room.

Much like in the film’s very memorable and very haunting conclusion, Doris Bither never got her closure; by most accounts, she continued to be terrorized by the entities on and off, but they eventually visited with such infrequency she didn’t bother reporting it at all. She eventually lost contact with anybody who had been following the case altogether. Taff and Gaynor walked away from the investigation with more recognition, and author Frank De Felitta ended up making a worldwide best-selling novel of the events thanks to his correspondence with them and Bither. That book, The Entity, eventually became the film we know today, with Felitta adapting it into the screenplay which 20th Century Fox picked up. The rest is history.

The film’s main conflict is of course between our Doris proxy, Carla Moran (played by the unbelievably talented Barbara Hershey), and the singular Entity abusing her; though it was derided at the time for its exploitative scenes, many film scholars and fans find it a still relevant allegory for the force of sexual abuse on the psyche and the dismissal of sexual victimization among women who suffer it. I would have to agree. But the film also has what I believe to be some rhetorical goals related to the lab that the investigators belonged to.

UCLA VERSUS THE PARAPSYCHOLOGY LAB

Taff ended up being a technical advisor on the film, and it’s kind of obvious given the nature of his work and the way the plot is structured. It poses the characters of Sneiderman and Weber, the psychiatrist and university professor who deny Carla’s claims are supernatural, against Dr. Cooley (a stand-in for the real-life Thelma Moss who helmed the rogue parapsychology lab at UCLA and employed Taff and Gaynor). The movie does end in a way that villainizes Weber, as he runs away from the truth of the situation and elects to believe they suffered a mass delusion together. While the film doesn’t undercut the real Doris Bither’s story with a happy ending, it does very much paint the people who ran the university in a bad light.

I think the film has an agenda behind it, reflecting what I believe to be Taff’s personal beef with the university administration and those skeptical of his work. In another article, he identifies Dr. West, the head of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute during the late 70s, as a man trying to “bury him” and the parapsychology lab for the media attention it was getting. The university had put them between a rock and a hard place, as they could no longer fund themselves and occupy the space in the lab; they were also unable to accept any grants for psychic research from government agencies on behalf of the university because the field is pseudoscientific at best, and donor funds being spent on that research could have damaged the school’s reputation severely.

He claims he had prophetic dreams of the shutdown, which do strike me as at the very least, resentful of the situation, if not the university as a whole given their apocalyptic nature; these dreams include mentions of Dr. West’s sister who had died of cancer being depicted as a decayed corpse and a doomsayer for the lab, which is struck by an earthquake in his nightmare. According to Taff, West never found out about the dream, and the lab was subsequently shut down in 1978.

In this light, the film feels like propaganda for all the Bither researchers involved. And Taff’s story provides great insight into how the lab has been mythologized, and why that propaganda is valuable. As much as Taff would like to act like they were silenced by West and UCLA, the parapsychology lab is still the stuff of legends thanks to the Bither Case and The Entity, as well as all of Taff and Gaynor’s own media appearances. To a good chunk of paranormal enthusiasts, they are still the rockstars of parapsychology. They saw a lot of success from the case, success that no sources indicate Doris Bither saw a share of. To this day, Taff is still a technical advisor for films and TV.

THE SANITIZATION AND SIMPLIFICATION OF THE DORIS BITHER CASE

As cynical as it is, part of me feels there is a desire to be propped up as the good guys here, in a very black and white way that denies the grey that is introduced by skepticism of their explanation. It depicts a university’s desire to avoid political and financial hot water as selfish. It paints the lab as a bastion of dangerous information, holding the keys to precognitive and telepathic powers. And it’s a symptom of something that gives me pause whenever I watch The Entity. It’s too clean of an answer.

I think the narrative of The Entity itself does sanitize the likely reality of what was happening to Doris Bither, ironically so given it is thematically screaming about everything that happened to her. I think it rejects the idea that Bither’s suffering could have been more complicated than ghosts; it minimizes the real horrors Bither went through, her substance abuse and likely C-PTSD from a trauma-filled childhood. It ignores the poverty she was living in for something much more comfortably frightening. It’s hard to face that societal and psychological conditions might be harder to tackle than spirits and monsters for most people. Even if they had gotten rid of the entities, what about all of her other problems?

I’m not trying to disparage Taff and Gaynor for their beliefs. Still, it stands to reason that the fame and recognition they got from celebrities, the media, and the government might have driven them to embellish details and benefit from missing materials. It might have encouraged them to make a complex woman’s life simple. And at the end of the day, nothing really is ever that simple. Few things ever end neatly, and the Bither case still resonates today because of that.

Because despite its relatively small impact on the cinematic landscape, The Entity is the farthest thing from simple when you get a good look at how it came about.

Jigsaw, John Kramer’s Jigsaw specifically, is a wonderfully controversial character.

Opinions on him are heavily polarized: you either think he’s a complete crackpot with a flawed moral compass and horrible methods (hey, that’s me!), or you think he’s a justified if not profoundly broken person who targets flawed individuals and genuinely believes he’s doing the right thing (hey, maybe that’s you!). Either way, as horror fans you still kind of love him, and you still definitely love the Saw movies.

You might wonder how a guy plans out, gets the materials for, and constructs a chair that scalps you to death and still believes he’s doing the right thing over the course of the 2 months it would take to do that; you might also wonder why you still like him for it. But Jigsaw, his origins and motivations, are something American horror audiences have been taught to engage with positively for years now, not just from when they started watching horror movies, but from a very young age. I believe their philosophy and approach to justice is why the Saw movies make up the most politically American franchise in all of horror.

Through its view of a flawed America, to the man who thinks he can solve it by tying people to killing machines, to his disciples, to the very origins of the series itself and the political climate it came out in. Through and through, Saw is an excessive, torturous vision of American political ideology and the concept of the American man (or American woman, or American corrupt cop who basically turns into the Terminator by Saw 3D depending on what you identify as).

And I don’t mean this in the sense of that old joke that the Saw movies couldn’t happen in Europe because Jigsaw’s preventative healthcare would have caught the cancer early, and his wife wouldn’t have miscarried in that clinic robbery because she would have been on extended maternity leave. When I say the Saw movies are about American political ideology and the potential of the American person, I’m talking about the sense of American individualism we are all taught to identify with; and more specifically, Jigsaw’s individualistic philosophy as a response to a broken America.

THE POST-9/11 HORROR OF SAW

To talk about Saw, we have to start at the spawning ground of the political climate that Saw came out of and why people identify with it so much. Isaac Feldberg of Paste Magazine, among many other film scholars, posits that the Saw movies were an artistic release of distress in the face of the 9/11 terror attacks and the subsequent ‘war on terror’ the Bush administration and its political cohorts waged in the Middle East. It saw an unprecedented paradigm shift in the media, including publicizing images of torture out of Abu Ghraib and associated sites, that may have made fictional torture palatable in comparison to the real suffering audiences were now being exposed to by a 24/7 media cycle intent on shocking you to the core and capitalizing on your fears.

The Saw films became laughably more insane as things went on so it’s easy to forget, but the first film was mostly grounded (if you ignore a terminal cancer patient laying on the ground shock still for more than a day). It focused on unrelenting psychological and physical torture and, more importantly, on the idea of being surveilled by an unseen force and monitored closely, all in the name of making the world a better place and improving the lives of its citizens no matter how brutal you had to be to do that.

For many of us growing up and finding our sense of self in a post-9/11, post-Patriot Act world where that sense of surveillance heightened to another level, our identity as Americans became much more challenging to grapple with than previous generations. Saw ended up being weirdly poignant on a thematic level when it wasn’t busy making people chop off their own hands to fill a meat bucket to unlock a door. It resonates even today as bipartisan politics do little to elevate the most disenfranchised among us.

So, with all of this resonance and as fun as the films were on a surface level, its often yearly release became a beloved Halloween pastime, and the creation of James Wan and Leigh Whannell quickly became a genre staple. But this still doesn’t answer: it is entertaining and close to home, but why are Jigsaw’s motives so compelling to so many people outside of that entertainment?

NEW: JIGSAW BRAND AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM!

The Saw series is in many ways an offshoot of one of my favorite film subgenres, despite not being an action film. I’m talking about the vigilante films of the 70s and 80s, films like Death Wish, the crux of which intersects critiquing the American legal system’s failures with a literally and figuratively violent sense of individualism. The idea that any one person, no matter what walk of life you come from or political party you identify with, can do what the system isn’t willing to do. You are special! You can take out the morally wrong scum one bullet at a time! If you are sad and have a gun, you are ontologically good! Kill your sadness with firearms!

This message is of course far from intersectional, or logical, or even acknowledging of how the world actually works; it doesn’t address the systemic issues that cause random acts of violence and the destruction of low-income communities that allows violent and unstable individuals to be formed as people. It is all about using violence to solve the world’s ills, trying to force simple solutions onto complex issues. And they’re just films, but films can do two major things: popularize ideas, and impact other films.

Stefan Kriek, a lecturer at the University of Johannesburg, writes about the political liberalism of the Saw films in terms of the rampant individualism running through these movies. He touches in his article, “Saw: Liberalism’s Favorite Franchise”, on how the various Jigsaws have had a pretty unfortunately consistent record of targeting drug addicts, reducing the impetus of their addiction to unfortunate personal choice and moral failings on the individual level. The most famous example is Amanda Young, the second and arguably favorite of all the Jigsaws. Not only someone struggling with addiction, but with self-harm, who dies as a result of breaking her promises to John Kramer and rigging the tests to fail in Saw 3. She jumps ship on the individualistic ideas of Jigsaw, and is punished for it.

On an actual, textual, in-universe level, Jigsaw’s philosophy is a panacea that makes its users better. Jigsaw is the antidote to the ills of bad individuals because the ones who take up the mantle and follow the rules of the game are the “best” individuals: they possess almost unlimited funds to operate, have near superhuman prowess with machinery and medicine, and some even display raw physical capability. Most importantly, they employ a sense of uniquely punitive American justice that considers extreme physical and mental trauma as the one-size-fits-all rehabilitation program. It even works, considering Saw 3D heavily implies that a bunch of trap survivors become apprentices to Doctor Gordon, donning pig masks and becoming Jigsaws themselves. They conquer their demons, and can now help spread Jigsaw brand American individualism to others, one trap at a time.

Consider then the most hated character in the Saw franchise. Not Hoffman, the murderous cop boogeyman who disgraces the legacy of Jigsaw and eventually gets punished for it (a fitting example of how it’s not John Kramer’s ethos that ruins things, but people failing to live up to the code that do so). No, the most hated is Jeff Denlon from Saw III. He is everything the Jigsaws are not: mindlessly angry and ungrateful, failing to save others, impulsive, and depicted as slovenly even by trap victim standards. Fans of the franchise hate Jeff, mostly because by the third film, Jigsaw hits a turning point and begins to be coded as an anti-hero by the filmmakers, and by proxy the audience.

Jeff is the most unlikable character because he is portrayed as a villain against the power of Jigsaw the individual, despite being understandable in his misery. And by the time Jeff kills John, it is ultimately a meaningless effort; Jigsaw has ascended to immortality, through his apprentices and his worldview. John Kramer becomes a household name, with a considerable number of civilian fans as seen in Jigsaw. 

Though Saw X is chronologically the second film in the franchise, it is the teleological endpoint of the series as the latest film; it’s a full-on vigilante chase into Mexico where Jigsaw constructs his most elaborate ruse yet to punish a ring of medical scammers with brain surgery puzzles and giant radiation machines. He even walks off into the sunset like a cowboy riding out of the western, with a kind of found family. Jigsaw and company go on to take on abusers, cheaters, racists, scammers, the entire privatized healthcare system, other corrupt cops, and anyone and everyone who opposes their specific cure-all or fails their tests. Nothing is too big for the individual to tackle when they live and die by John Kramer’s (saw)blade.

THE POLITICAL MYTH OF JIGSAW

So ultimately, what is Jigsaw when all is said and done? Political scientist and author Alex Zakaras extensively writes about the origins of American individualism, and he views the growth of the ideology as being tied to political myths. Political myths, he says, are how we decipher and simplify the diverse nature of modern politics. One such myth, Zakaras sites, is “the self-made man”:

“For over two hundred years, this myth has taught us that our country is uniquely fluid and classless and that individuals invariably get ahead through hard work, ingenuity, and perseverance. It tells us, moreover, that Americans are a bold and enterprising people with the resolve and self-discipline to chart their own course in the world.”

Jigsaw is the fictional extension of the self-made man myth, but taken to the extreme. He says you can singlehandedly escape not only your circumstances, but take down all opposition, no matter how large. It’s not false that people can make something great of themselves through perseverance, but Jigsaw is a warped embodiment of this idea. It is the kind of thing you imagine as a child, one person saving the world from itself, ignoring all the circumstantial factors and context you operate in.

In a nation where most people are sick of being disappointed by systems with feet of clay, run by disappointing politicians around them (ones who are sometimes flawed and other times outright dangerous), it isn’t hard to understand why the idea of Jigsaw can be entertaining or empathized with. Jigsaw can be captivating philosophically when you’ve been taught that the individual, not the collective, is the solution to your problems. And if you find yourself unlearning that instinct, Jigsaw as an idea becomes more absurd than any traps or surface-level motivations you ascribe to him.

No one person, not even yourself, is going to save you.

In unprecedented times like these, you need to find community and help one another. You need to put your faith in mutual aid and learning from one another, because the system is certainly not set up for one vigilante to knock it down. Under this lens, the Saw movies really have become something more than the “torture porn” early critics derided them as: they have become, whether intentionally or accidentally, pure cinematic Americana. And in that Americana, an accidental lesson on putting your faith in others instead of ideas.