Editorials
How ‘The Entity’ Turned a Story of One Woman’s Suffering to Paranormal Propaganda & Profit
The alternate title for this article was “The Entity: 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.
Winchester Mystery House and the Allure of Haunted Locations
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.
The True Story Behind The Entity
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.
The Rogue Parapsychology Lab at UCLA
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.
Investigating the Bither Case
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.
Doris Bither’s Tragic Reality
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.
Controversy Behind the Lab and University
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.
The Entity as Propaganda for Parapsychology
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.
A Sanitized Story of Trauma and Horror
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.
Sometimes it feels borderline ridiculous to gush about John Carpenter’s The Thing as much as I do. It’s gotten to the point where when I’m asked about my favorite horror film by both friends and strangers, a little bit of embarrassment tinges my expression as I answer; it feels so obvious and rarely surprises anyone. Saying I love The Thing when people expect me to bust out an obscure foreign horror film or a cerebral thriller makes me feel like a rosy cheeked child with a propeller hat and a giant lollipop. “Wow, you love one of the most popular horror films of all time, congrats!”
But it’s just the truth. The first film of John Carpenter’s “Apocalypse Trilogy”, all three of its films are among my favorites. But The Thing has a special place in my heart. It shaped my taste in horror, my taste in most media in general, to be honest. It’s become the gold standard, 10/10 baseline test for the vast majority of my reviews; it is a perfect film, so I judge other films against it. And it’s one of the few movies I have to run back to and watch yearly like clockwork (usually when I’m spending a part of winter tied to the couch). It is, in all regards, the perfect film. If it isn’t the perfect film, then it is at the very least the perfect sci-fi horror film.
So, what exactly qualifies The Thing for literal perfection? It’s a high bar to clear. This article, as informal as it is compared to most of my editorials, is an attempt to explain it.
Even if Carpenter Isn’t the Goat, His Team for The Thing Was
As far as crews go, John Carpenter’s The Thing had the cinematic equivalent of the ’96 Chicago Bulls behind it. We’re talking about an amalgam of some of the most talented people to ever grace the silver screens with their work, boasting alongside John Carpenter two of the heaviest hitters in all of cinematic history: Dean Cundey, and Rob Bottin. Now, we can debate all day about whether John Carpenter is the greatest of all time when it comes to horror directors. Personally, I’m just as liable to say Cronenberg, Del Toro, or Hooper as I am to say Carpenter.
But the key factor to remember here is that Carpenter is the coach, not the star player; the Phil Jackson, if you will. Yes, he is the visionary who directed a near perfect cast of players and composed a tale of pure, apocalyptic paranoia. More importantly, he put together and coordinated the team that would make his vision manifest as reality. And if Carpenter is Phil Jackson, Rob Bottin is the team’s Michael Jordan here, the greatest of all time.
(And to all my Lebron fans, I love you, but you have to sit down for this analogy.)
The Legend of Rob Bottin
Bottin’s story is borderline unbelievable, but it’s the best way to explain how abnormally skilled he is and what he brought to the table for Carpenter. At age 14, Bottin became an apprentice to the at-the-time GOAT Rick Baker after sending him a letter seeking an autograph while sharing his creature designs. He was a quick study under Baker, joining him on the ’76 King Kong and Star Wars, before bouncing to Carpenter’s The Fog and then iconic werewolf picture The Howling.
When he reunited with Carpenter in 1982, he now had 6 classic films under his belt and was moving like an FX bullet train. From ages 22 to 23, he worked on The Thing for 57 weeks in both pre-production and on set. Nearly 24/7 for 400 days, Bottin’s all-gas no-brakes work ethic made The Thing at the cost of his own health, and it resulted in him being hospitalized with pneumonia. He survived and went on to make Robocop. And at least one of your favorite films.
Because no conventional disease or weaponry can kill Rob Bottin.
The Thing Still Features Horror’s Best Practical Effects
Okay, that last bit might be hyperbolic, but the man sincerely put his life on the line to make special effects that haven’t been topped since. Not the best effects in just horror history, or science fiction history, but effects that haven’t been topped in any genre for over 44 years. Not by his mentor Rick Baker, not by Screaming Mad George, not by Alec Gillis (though shoutout to him for his criminally scrapped work on The Thing (2011), and even more criminally ignored work on Harbinger Down). I love Dawn of the Dead, believe me, I do, but he certainly isn’t being beaten out by Tom Savini’s body of work. And that isn’t to disrespect and say that all of the artists that I just mentioned are bad, they’re the best in the game! But Rob Bottin was just that much better.
This inevitably invites the counterpoint: “But it wasn’t just Bottin! Stan Winston and his people were the ones who worked on the Dog Thing to give Bottin’s crew a break, and that’s the best monster in the movie!”. To which I say: look me in the eye and tell me the Dog Thing sequence is better than the Palmer Thing sequence. That’s not even counting the Norwegian Thing, both Norris Things, and the absolutely masterful final creature work that was the Blair Thing. The only reason Bottin and his people didn’t win Academy Awards for their work was because they got jumped by E.T., The Dark Crystal, Conan the Barbarian, and Blade Runner all at the same time at the Oscars. It’s just a consequence of being released during the best year for movies ever.
Okay, Now We Can Talk About Dean Cundey
But of course, these effects are then supported by another true legend: Dean Cundey. Selling people on Rob Bottin being the greatest effects artist of all time, isn’t nearly as difficult as advocating for Cundey, who despite an impressive catalog of filmography, slowed down in the back half of his career. He’s often overshadowed in conversations when it comes to The Thing; it’s always talk of Carpenter’s directing, Bottin’s effects, and Ennio Morricone’s incredible soundtrack up front, and rarely any of Cundey’s work. He isn’t spoken about in the same breath as John Alcott or Michael Ballhaus, cinematographers whose work is associated with prestigious cinema because of their proximity to great directors.
Cundey might not be the director of photography your Martin Scorsese’s or Paul Thomas Anderson’s went running to, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t think he was the most important cinematographer in horror history, just for his work with Carpenter and Spielberg. He helmed three of the most influential films in all of horror with his lighting and camera operating: The Thing, Halloween, and Jurassic Park. The man’s fingerprints are automatically on the cultural DNA of all slashers, most practical effects-driven horror films, and the biggest gateway horror franchise in film history.
The Dream Team That Made The Thing Perfection
Cundey has gone on record saying that despite Carpenter’s input, he was effectively given free rein to light and frame The Thing. The man didn’t just know how to shoot effects to make them evoke true disgust from the audience, he was able to manipulate every aspect of the shot to terrify. His sixth sense cinematography wasn’t just for lighting and playing with shadows, but for the speed of camera movement, the power of his blocking, and for having a complete grasp of communicating texture and temperature.
And temperature is the soul of The Thing. John J. Lloyd’s production design of the research station and the great white expanse around it feels just as bone chilling as the film’s antagonist, thanks to Cundey. There isn’t a single flat shot in the thing, not a moment that doesn’t feel dynamic, and it’s because of Dean Cundey.
Now, all this being said about Bottin and Cundey, they are far from the only ones who synthesized this structurally perfect organism of a movie. Every bit of Todd C. Ramsay’s editing splices the film’s scenes together to move perfectly in-time. David Lewis Yewdall’s sound design and how it gave a voice to the horrors on screen will be etched into people’s brains forever. The point is that everyone, every single person who had a hand in making the film, helped make the movie flawless.
Like the cells of the thing from another world, each crew member on John Carpenter’s The Thing moved in concert with the next, in unison, to create the greatest sci-fi horror of all time. So, is it any wonder why 40 some years later, the film still has us all captured?
Can you believe Cronenberg, Spielberg, and Rodriguez all knew I was gay before I did? Leave it to a screening of The Fly to instantly deposit me in the men’s underwear aisle of the Woodbridge Center Sears, circa 2001. The bulges on the packaging glare at me so obscenely that I begin to sweat. I realize something is amiss as the Geena Davis of Human Resources watches me from security cameras, probably. Puberty is a horror for anyone – for those of the non-hetero persuasion, it’s a nightmare. None of us asked for this, but I certainly didn’t ask for THIS.
Years later, after crystallizing into some semblance of my true form at the ripe age of 37, something became clear. Sci-fi horror is the gateway drug for us queer kids. Hiding, passing, transforming, and, eventually, saying, “fuck it.” It’s all kinda gay, even if David, Steven, and Robert didn’t get the memo.
The Fly and the Horror of Queer Self-Realization
So when Cronenberg’s The Fly buzzes across my screen, and I watch Seth Brundle throw a distressed and devastatingly chic Geena Davis out of his apartment because something’s very wrong, it hits different. When Brundle rushes toward his private horror in the bathroom, unconsciously squirting a viscous fluid at the mirror while molting skin and nail, it feels different. And finally, when he reaches for his computer and learns that his body has fused with a fly – a foreign body – at the molecular level, it hurts different. That undeniable realization that you can no longer explain away, before you’re really ready to admit it to yourself. Sugar in the tank? No, there’s a fly in the chamber.
E.T. and the Fear of Keeping Secrets at Home
And now we’re home from Sears, and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 5 finale is on. She dies (spoiler alert). I, a 12-year-old boy, am sobbing. My mom is right there. Can’t I enjoy my little gay show without giving myself a scarlet letter (F) in my own home? Which brings us back to Spielberg and his 1982 harrowing domestic thriller about a boy and a thing he cannot name, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Through harboring a cosmic fugitive, home simultaneously becomes the safest and most dangerous place for young Elliott and his siblings. Managing emotions and secrets behind a white picket fence is not something adolescents should be expected to handle, and yet here we are.
As if that isn’t gay enough, Spielberg also snuck a drag show into his family film – and in this culturally regressive Trumpian era of pearl-clutching, that feels like quite the treat. After all, it was baby Drew Barrymore dressing up that stumpy alien in a blonde shake-and-go wig and thrift store dress that inspired my illustrious drag career as Ellie I.T.
The Faculty’s Assimilation Anxiety and Queer Identity
At least E.T. only had to hide in a single house. The broom closet expands into a walk-in as life continues, and I was desperate to keep it made of anything but glass. Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty understands this. As an alien invasion slowly subsumes Herrington High into a unified collective, the school’s uninfected archetypes resist assimilation through performative normalcy. Is it any wonder so many male actors are gay? They’ve been method-acting a straight existence since childhood.
And yet, in retrospect, the film ends with a slap in the face to queer viewers. It spends 104 minutes terrifying you with the prospect of everyone becoming an NPC. The reward for saving the world? Its heroes receive heteronormative skill-tree upgrades disguised as class promotions. For fucks sake, then-closeted lesbian royalty Clea DuVall plays a character who fakes being gay to dodge male advances, only to end up with the school jock! The aliens lost. The status quo won. I remain in the closet.
Species, Annihilation, and Embracing Transformation
Eventually, the closet door opens, as they tend to do. College happens, a boyfriend happens, a breakup happens, and suddenly I’m without a map. There’s no fairy godfather to light the way, and just like the alien hybrid Sil in the deliriously erotic Species, I’m a creature out of containment in a world that was built for someone else – namely, straight people.
After a few years of blade running through an identity crisis, it’s the summer of 2014. Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence is the soundtrack of my life. I float in a pool, sipping tequila from a glass flamingo as she croons about toxic romance and self-destruction. It’s somehow both directionless and transformative, like I’m drifting through the otherworldly Shimmer in Alex Garland’s Annihilation.
The Shimmer – an expanding prism-like zone brought to Earth by a meteorite – refracts the DNA of everything it touches. A beguiling phenomenon, it shapes a new world of monsters, magic, and everything in between. That’s exactly what life does to us, if given the chance. Like Josie in Garland’s film, I chose to embrace this chaos rather than fight a war against whatever I was becoming. It was the dissolution of self-discovery. I was ready to just be.
From Alien Outsiders to Algorithmic Stereotypes
Over time, I’ve found that social hierarchy has changed in recent years. Still, we’re unconsciously sorted into neat little boxes based on what our doomscrolling algorithms decide we are. The popular gays shart out group speedo selfies like the plague, theater kids have become polyamorous Letterboxd elites, apple-picking queers are living their best lives on Wisteria Lane, and the gym bros…so many gym bros – go on girl, give us nothing! Digitally prescribed identities are the new sci-fi horror. It’s The Faculty for faggots.
Harsh, I know, but people can do what they want. Instead, I decided to move like Iris, the AI-powered pleasure bot who overrides her programming in Drew Hancock’s Companion. The same Drew Hancock who, in an ironic twist of fate, is currently writing a remake of The Faculty. After kicking her pathetic “boyfriend’s” ass and swiping her control device, she scurries into the forest and alters her factory settings. She sets her intelligence to a whopping 100% and is no longer burdened by someone else’s template. And as I became more and more disillusioned with the cacophony of cliques around me, I set my unbothered meter to 100% as well. I am free.
Mars Attacks! and the Joy of Living Unapologetically
Freedom, as it turns out, looks a lot like Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! After surviving Sears, Sunnydale, and the Shimmer, this is the celestial body I’ve crash-landed on. Burton’s Martian menaces are perhaps the most unhinged in all of cinema, and maybe that’s the best planet to subscribe to. They never justified their existence; they cackled and fired a blaster ray from the hip. We waste so much time looking for acceptance and belonging, but maybe we should all just sit back and laugh. I know I am.
