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
What’s in a Look? The Jason Voorhees Redesign Controversy
The Jason Voorhees redesign sparked heated debate, but is the backlash overblown? Dive into Friday the 13th’s formula and fan expectations.
If you’re a longtime reader of Horror Press, you may have noticed that I really really like the Friday the 13th franchise. Can’t get enough. And yet, I simply couldn’t muster a shred of enthusiasm for piling hate on the new Jason Voorhees redesign that Horror, Inc. recently shared with an unwitting public.
Why the Jason Voorhees Redesign Controversy Feels Overblown
Hockey mask? Check. Machete? Check. Clothing? Yeah, he’s wearing it. I really didn’t see the problem, but very many people online pointed out all the places where I should. The intensity and specificity of the critiques shot me right back to 2008, reminding me distinctly of watching Project Runway with my friend’s mom while I waited for him to get home from baseball practice. What, just me?
But the horror community’s sudden transformation into fashion mavens got me thinking about other things, too: the character of the franchise as a whole, how Jason Voorhees fits into it, and why I feel like this reaction has been blown out of proportion. (A disproportionate reaction to a pop culture thing? On my Internet? Well I never.)
What Does A Jason Look Like, Anyway?
What confused me the most about this reaction was something I couldn’t quite get a bead on. What does Jason Voorhees look like? His look, both masked and unmasked (especially unmasked), changes wildly from film to film, even when he’s played by the same person (in three consecutive movies, Kane Hodder played a hulking zombie Jason, a shiny slime monster Jason, and a Jason who was mainly seen in mirrors and looked like his face was stung by a thousand bees). And then there’s the matter of him being both a zombie child and a bagheaded killer before receiving his iconic hockey mask.
However, if you synthesize the various forms of the character into the archetypical Jason Voorhees, the one that most people might visualize in their head when told to imagine him, the result doesn’t not look like this new redesign. Frankly, I even think “redesign” is too strong a word for what this is. This image shows a dude in outdoorsy clothes wearing a hockey mask. It looks enough like “Jason Voorhees” to me that my eyes just slide right off of it.
What Do We Expect From Friday the 13th, And What Do We Need?
Ultimately, many people clearly disagree with my assessment of this redesign, which led me to ponder the franchise as a whole. If there’s something to complain about with this new look, that implies that there is a “right” way and a “wrong” way to be a Friday the 13th movie.
This I can agree with. While the franchise is wide-ranging and expansive to the point that it has included Jason going to space, fighting a dream demon, and taking a cruise ship from a New Jersey lake to the New York harbor, the movies do still follow a reasonably consistent formula.
Step 1: Generate a group of people in a place either on the shores of Crystal Lake or in Crystal Lake township (they can travel elsewhere, but this is where they must start).
Step 2: Plunk Jason down near them, give him a variety of edged weapons, and watch what happens. One girl survives the onslaught, and sometimes she brings along a friend or two as adjunct survivors. Bada bing, bada boom, you have yourself a Friday the 13th movie.
If you fuck with that formula, you’ve got a problem. But beyond that, there’s really not a hell of a lot that the movies have in common. Sometimes you have a telekinetic final girl, other times you have a child psychologist. Sometimes the dead meat characters are camp counselors, but other times they’re partiers or townies or students attending space college.
Hell, even the people killing them aren’t always the same. Look at Pamela Voorhees in the original movie or Roy in A New Beginning.
So why this protectiveness around the minutiae of Jason’s look?
It’s Us, Hi, We’re The Problem, It’s Us
I don’t mean to discount everyone’s negative opinions about this Jason redesign. There are a multitude of aesthetic and personal reasons to dislike what’s going on here, and you don’t have to turn that yuck into a yum just because I said so. But I think we’ve had online fandoms around long enough to see how poisonous they can be to the creative process.
For instance, was The Rise of Skywalker a better movie because it went down the laundry list of fan complaints about The Last Jedi and basically had characters stare into the camera and announce the ways they were being fixed?
Look, I’m not immune to having preconceived disdain for certain projects. If I’m waiting for a new installment in a franchise and all that I’m hearing coming out of producers’ mouths is “prequel” and “television show,” those are fighting words.
However, the constant online pushback to projects that are in early development might be one reason it has taken us so long to actually get more Friday the 13th (I’m talking in addition to the long delays amid the lawsuit, of course). It’s been more than a decade and a half without a new Jason vehicle, and that time keeps on stretching longer and longer.
What Fans Really Want From a New Jason Voorhees Movie
Instead of just letting the creative tap flow and having a filmmaker put out the thing they want to make, then having somebody else take the wheel and do that same thing for the next installment, it seems like producers are terrified of making the wrong move and angering the fans, which has prevented them from actually pulling the trigger on much of anything.
Look, we survived A New Beginning. And Jason Takes Manhattan. Even Jason Goes to Hell. A controversial misstep can’t kill the immortal beast that is Friday the 13th. I say let’s just let them make one. Having something tangible to complain about is better than having nothing at all.
Editorials
Monstrous Mothers: Unveiling the Horror in ‘Mommie Dearest’ and ‘Umma’
The horror umbrella is massive and encompasses many subgenres including thrillers, sci-fi, and even true crime. I like to quip that movies like Mommie Dearest and Priscilla belong to the latter category. I even point out they have final girls surviving their monsters, but like most jokes, there is a lot of hard truth behind that. To be clear, Mommie Dearest is highly contested even by Christina Crawford, who wrote the book about the abuse suffered at the hands of her alcoholic guardian. However, the fact remains that there is an abusive mother terrorizing children at the heart of the horror. This is a tale as old as time in the genre, and we see these themes of motherhood, mental illness, and generational trauma often. So, why do we typically forget this movie when discussing titles like Psycho (1960), Run, Hereditary, etc.?
I challenged myself to fill a gap in my cinema history this month and watched Mommie Dearest. I was very familiar with the movie due to how many drag queens reference it and because of Joan Crawford’s villainous reputation. However, I had never seen it in its entirety before, which is weird because I write about my own maternal baggage often. Without ever seeing the film, I knew this movie, categorized as a drama, belonged under my favorite genre label. Some sources even try to meet in the middle and classify it as a psychological drama, which is a phrase that does a lot of heavy lifting to remove itself from what it actually is. After all, what else should we call a film about being abused by the person who should love us most other than horror?
Does Mommie Dearest Belong in the Horror Genre?
The horror umbrella is massive and encompasses many subgenres including thrillers, sci-fi, and even true crime. I like to quip that movies like Mommie Dearest and Priscilla belong to the latter category. I even point out they have final girls surviving their monsters, but like most jokes, there is a lot of hard truth behind that. To be clear, Mommie Dearest is highly contested even by Christina Crawford, who wrote the book about the abuse suffered at the hands of her alcoholic guardian. However, the fact remains that there is an abusive mother terrorizing children at the heart of the horror. This is a tale as old as time in the genre, and we see these themes of motherhood, mental illness, and generational trauma often. So, why do we typically forget this movie when discussing titles like Psycho (1960), Run, Hereditary, etc.?
Mommie Dearest recounts a version of Christina Crawford’s upbringing by Hollywood royalty Joan Crawford. It depicts her as an unstable, jealous, manipulative woman who only holds space for her beliefs. As with most abusive parents, she takes out her frustrations and feelings of inadequacy on those around her. Specifically, those who cannot fight back due to the power dynamics at play. This version of Joan is a vicious bully, which feels familiar for many people who grew up with an abusive parent. How many of us never knew what would set our parental monster off, so just learned to walk on eggshells? How many of us grew up believing we were the problem for way longer than we should have? How many of us normalized the abuse for so long that it carried over into adulthood, letting us believe being mistreated is just part of living?
Watch the trailer for Mommie Dearest
The Lasting Impact of Abusive Parents in Horror Movies
While my mother wasn’t the active bully in our home, part of my struggle with her is her complicitness in the hell she helped create for all of us. Which is why, while I don’t think Mommie Dearest is a great film, I believe it’s a decent horror flick. It made me want to revisit a better movie, Umma, that also dealt with motherhood, mental illness, and trauma. Iris K. Shim’s 2022 PG-13 horror sees Sandra Oh playing a single mother who has not healed. After growing up with her own mother, who was especially cruel to her, she has built her world around that trauma and forced her daughter to live within its walls with her. As someone who was severely homeschooled by a woman who still really needs to find a therapist, Umma hits me in my feelings every time.
Watch the trailer for Umma below
Maternal Monsters: A Common Thread in Psycho, Hereditary, and More
Before the film starts, Oh’s character, Amanda, has turned her back on her family and cultural heritage. She has built a life that she’s not really living as she hides in her home, afraid of electricity due to the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mom. So, when her uncle shows up with her mother’s ashes, she is triggered and haunted. All of the issues she hasn’t dealt with rush to the surface, manifesting in ways that begin turning her into her deceased mom. Amanda does eventually force herself to confront her past to avoid becoming her mother and hurting her daughter. So, while Umma is different from Mommie Dearest, it’s not hard to see they share some of the same DNA. Scary moms make the genre go round which is why movies like M.O.M. Mothers of Monsters, Serial Mom, Mother, May I?, and so many others will always pull an audience by naming the monster in the title.
I doubt I am the first person on Norma Bates’ internet to clock that some of horror’s most notorious villains are parents, specifically moms. I’m also sure I cannot be the first person to argue Mommie Dearest is a horror movie on many levels. After all, a large part of the rabid fanbase seems to be comprised of genre kids who grew up wondering why the film felt familiar. However, I hope I am the first to encourage you to watch these two movies if your momma trauma will allow you to hold space for a couple more monstrous mothers this month. Both have much to say about how we cope with the fallout of being harmed by the people who should keep us safe.
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