Editorials
How ‘The Entity’ Turned a Story of One Woman’s Suffering to Paranormal Propaganda– & Profit

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.
Editorials
The Evolution of Black Religion & Spirituality in Horror

Jobs for Black actors were scarce in the early days of Hollywood, but that didn’t mean there weren’t Black roles in the films being made. The silver screen had a ceiling for Black actors but not for our culture. White audiences got a gag out of the Black caricatures that white actors portrayed whilst the dehumanizing regurgitation of our culture was used for plot development. Thus, one of the very first Black tropes was born: the magical negro. The early media depictions of Black spirituality were a tool to villainize the community off-screen. Some could say we’ve come a long way since then. I would say we still have a ways to go. The progress is still worth reflecting on, though.
Christianity is one of the largest faiths practiced in the Black American community. But before the missionaries spread the good Lord’s word, most enslaved people aligned with West African religious practices: using herbs, charms, and other metaphysical tools. Tituba, an enslaved Afro-Caribbean woman, was one of the first women accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials— except they identified it as ‘hoodoo’ or Vodou. It was later demonized as the seed that sprouted the uprising of enslaved Haitian people. With these stepping stones (and American imperialism in Haiti), white screenwriters had fuel for a genre on the rise: horror.
White Zombie (1932) is one of the earliest examples of Vodou in horror and, considerably, the first zombie movie. It isn’t the most harmful, though. Black Moon (1934) made history for a few reasons: being violently racist and starring the first Black American actress to sign a film contract. There’s too much irony in that.
The depiction of voodoo in Black Moon, like many other common Black tropes, reinforces black inferiority to their oppressors and makes a monster out of Black men. It wasn’t until 1941 that audiences saw an authentic portrayal of a different Black religion: Christianity. The Blood of Jesus (dir. Spencer Williams) stars an all-black cast and follows a woman on her journey between heaven and hell. It was a turning point for Black cinema as a whole.
Narratives such as this, Def By Temptation (1990), and, most recently, The Deliverance (2024) depict the liberation that Black Christians often find in their religion. They draw a direct connection between identity and virtue. Ganja & Hess (1973), however, takes a different approach. Director Bill Gunn doesn’t offer the Christian God as an entity of power capable of salvation. The ending is representative of the religious guilt that weighted Hess Green (played by Duane Jones). Neither vampirism nor religion can save him from the trauma he’s running from.
Almost any Black film that I’ve seen, Tyler Perry included, involved Christianity to some extent. 2023 was the first time I saw a Black religious practice given proper respect on screen. Stay with me here– The Exorcist: Believer (dir. David Gordon Green). Rarely have I seen a positive opinion on this extension of the franchise. Unfortunately, DGG left a bad taste in horror fans’ mouths with his Halloween films. I don’t think it’s so much of his style rather than the loyalty that fans have for these franchises. They have high expectations that very few people can meet. I admired the way he represented the beauty of Haitian culture, though. Particularly, hoodoo was an integral part of the story in a way I haven’t seen in mainstream horror. It wasn’t evil nor was it dramatic. The rootwork healer isn’t crushing bones or conducting blood sacrifices. Its authenticity was commendable compared to the genre’s predecessors that have demonized this very spiritual work for decades.
The late, great Tony Todd added to the list of authentic Black spiritual horror films this past year with The Activated Man (dir. Nicholas Gyeney). Todd stars as a lightworker, named Jeffrey Bowman, who helps the main character defeat an evil, fedora-sporting spirit. He’s dripped out with a rose quartz bracelet and a mala necklace. Though the movie suffers in its respective areas, it’s a tick in the timeline. It’s one of the few times that a Black character has helped to defeat evil with a spiritual practice and faith that isn’t Christianity. Like The Exorcist: Believer, its depiction of Bowman isn’t an unstable practitioner leading with dramatics. It’s easy to get lost in the fine details– some movies won’t live up to our expectations. However, even the most disappointing watch can shift the trajectory of cinema. Where Black characters were once monolithic religious apostles, modern cinema is more willing to diversify Black characters beyond those tired tropes.
Editorials
The Art of Politicizing a Dumb Killer Clown Movie

“Horror is not political” is a recycled firestorm on the internet. The smoke smells the same as it did before, the burn isn’t that bright, and the outcome is always the same: we’ve done this dance before, and we will do it again.
Damien Leone has joined the club of Joe Bob Briggs and dozens of others who have voiced that very hollow opinion that “Horror is not political”. Because I do, I think above all else, above the very clear negotiation with the part of his audience who got angry, the very clear fear of backlash for actor David Howard Thorton’s admonitions of the current Trump administration and his support for the LGBTQ+ community, is…
Hollowness.
“Horror is not political” is not an opinion.
It’s an absence of opinion. It’s a platitude; it’s meant to appease people. It’s a free dessert for the person raging in the restaurant that their soup was cold and that they won’t stand for it. It’s bargaining.
Are the Terrifier films Political?
Hopefully I never have to bring up politics publicly ever again but this desperately needed to be said on behalf of the Terrifier franchise 🙏 pic.twitter.com/b7soIj9P33
— Damien Leone (@damienleone) February 3, 2025
Mind you, this is not a call-out of those people angry at the concept of political horror, and I doubt you could call it a call-in post either; chances are you’re not reading this if you feel that so strongly. The goal is to do what I always do: talk about movies and what they mean, and this current firestorm is a very convenient way of doing that. It’s a well-timed way to toast my analytical marshmallow (promise, that’s the last fire metaphor).
So, what are the politics of the Terrifier films that Damien Leone wants to put away while the irate hotel guests are here? The Terrifier movies are political beasts by their nature, and their killer, the beloved jewel of the Terrifier franchise Art the Clown, is just as political as his actor’s commentary on current-day America. Because through and through, Art the Clown is a monster carrying with him the shadow of sexual violence, a harbinger of how truly despicable that kind of violence is, and shows how the world is not set up to help its victims.
And Leone has said as much to support that.
After all, he believes he’s tackled sexual violence quite well in the films. In an interview with Rue Morgue, he goes on to elaborate why he believes just that:
“I think I’m just so comfortable [tackling sexual violence] because I was raised by all women that I don’t think about those things when I’m doing it. […] I’m not trying to offend, so there’s really nothing I’m not afraid to show. There’s things I won’t show; There’s lines that I try not to cross, believe it or not. No matter how grotesque and intense these scenes get, I always keep it in the back of my head like, ‘How far can we push it [..]?’
And I find it fascinating, because no matter how much negative space Leone leaves in terms of explicit sexual abuse on Art the Clown’s part, that negative space speaks just as loudly as if it was actually on screen.
The Politics of Clownery
On a meta-textual level, the extremity, the explosive and sensationalized nature of violence in the Terrifier films, the draw that most people go to see at the theatre, puts sexual violence on a pedestal of shame. It makes it untouchable. Horror is the genre that explores the violation of bodily autonomy, the violation of human life, most freely. In making a spectacle of the wildest and most nauseating kills most filmgoers will ever see, turning the killer into a Bugs Bunny-esque monster that’s always pushing the envelope alongside the filmmaker orchestrating him, and then setting boundaries on what Art won’t do, Leone has made a political statement about the truly reprehensible nature of sexual violence.
Art the Clown is bad, but he’s a surreal type of evil. He is jokes and gaffs at the expense of chainsawing couples and bashing people with spiked bats, not the mutants from The Hills Have Eyes, or the hallway scene from Irreversible. He is not the sobering, disgusting kind of evil most people run into in the real world. He is evil incarnate, sans sexual violence. Because if it’s too far for Art, it has to be a special kind of unthinkably cruel.
On a textual level, I think the enduring and surreal violence Sienna and Jonathan endure throughout the series is a perfect metaphor for continuing through life after an assault of that magnitude and cruelty. The aftershocks of violence that permeate your whole being, long after society expects you to have just “gotten over it”. To walk through life, afflicted by paranoia, self-doubt, and self-hatred. To navigate being around other people after having experienced that, and more importantly, living without justice for the crimes done to you, is unthinkable.
True Crime and Horror Collide
And the way that the Terrifier franchise mocks a true crime culture that trivializes that suffering, something a lot of horror fans have to decry as the space tries to worm into the horror genre at large, gives another layer of credence and reality to the misery of Arts victims. Victims who have to see their pain commodified and treated as a tool, something many victims of sexual assault themselves have been forced through thanks to true crime.
And despite each film seeming to end off worse than the last, Leone highlights the grace of a victim escaping that pain and trauma by giving Sienna the means to fight back. Supernaturally granted or otherwise, it is a perfect encapsulation of victims’ desires to overcome seemingly unending suffering, that will to live, to thrive, that burns bright in all victims. It’s a glimmer of hope in a mostly hopeless franchise, and it serves as a mirror to the light at the end of the tunnel many sexual assault victims strive to reach.
At the end of the day, artists don’t really get to buy in or buy out of how political their art is, the same way you don’t get to buy in or buy out of living in a political system. Much like Art’s random and unpredictable violence, it sort of just happens to you. It happens whether it’s the high concept art film horror, or what most people see as a bog-standard dumb killer clown movie. But to embrace that political nature is one of the most important things you can do as an artist.
To leave that meaning behind, to try and void art of the political messaging people might find in it, is to do a great disservice to the people who found comfort and joy in that message. Because once that vessel has been emptied of the love people can find in it, the hate people had isn’t going to stay inside of it for long.
That hollowed art won’t be overflowing with a new audience of people. It will simply be empty.