L'emprise

Actually, "The Entity" isn't a haunted house movie as much as it is a haunted person movie since the ghost or "the entity" only follows the main character around. What makes this movie darker than say "Poltergeist" is that we hardly ever see the demon that causes all the trouble. We only see what it does and that's raping its poor victim without remorse.

A story such as this could easily have become campy, especially since it was made in 1981. Surprisingly, "The Entity" still holds up very well. The performances are convincing, the characters are believable and the special effects are reduced to a minimum. The whole script comes dangerously close to losing its balance when in the last third of the movie a team of parapsychologists turns up and has some "really rad ideas" on how to destroy The Entity. However, thankfully the movie doesn't go too much over the top.

The weak points of "The Entity" are that it's not too scary and too long, both for the sake of maintaining veracity since this is supposedly based on a true story. As a horror movie it could have used better pacing and some jump scenes. The score is minimalist in that it's only a thunderous beat that kicks in as soon as The Entity turns up. What worked well in "The Thing" is a bit too little here. The same can be said about the ending. An open ending can be a good thing, but there should at least come a satisfying climax before it and at the end the main character's situation should have changed for better or for worse. "The Entity" kind of just stops without the heroine achieving anything.

A remake by Hideo Nakata is in the works and it seems to be a good idea to hand the project to an Asian director as the rawness of the story would probably get lost in the hands of an American. Here's one original movie that can be bettered as much as it could be worsened. We'll see what happens.