Wrong Entity

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In one of those weird synchronicities the universe likes to play, the very next day after I watched The Entity (2015) and wrote a blog post on it, this happened.  In yesterday’s post I noted that I couldn’t remember where I’d read about the movie, or who had recommended it to me.  I couldn’t even be sure which The Entity it was, since I didn’t write down the movie’s date.  The next morning I had the privilege of watching Claire Donner, of the Miskatonic Institute, talking about The Entity and it immediately came to mind that it was she who’d suggested I might like it (or might not).  Also, that I got the wrong one.  I haven’t had the opportunity to watch the one actually recommended yet, but it brings back to mind just how the Miskatonic Institute contributes to understanding horror.

The Institute has asked me to present a course this coming October and I will be posting more on that closer to the time.  It got me to thinking about a couple of things.  One is that I missed some major horror films growing up.  When I “got religion” in high school (I always had it, of course, and saw no problem with enjoying monsters too) I began to steer away from horror.  In college I had a dating occasion or two to watch horror, but it really only started again in earnest after being booted out of academia.  I was interviewed in seminary by a sociology grad student interested in why people watch horror, but my watching was (and still is) circumscribed by lack of cash flow.  The Entity made quite a splash in the early eighties, but it took someone in the 2020s telling me about it before I realized I probably should watch it.

The other thing Donner’s talk brought to mind is how religion and horror relate.  Such films are scary because of an existential threat—THE existential threat.  There’s nothing more powerful than God, but in such movies God can do nothing.  I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I suspect that’s true.  It’s certainly true of The Exorcist, with which it’s sometimes compared.  God doesn’t deliver Regan McNeil, no, Fr. Karras does.  And only by sacrificing himself to do so.  The existential threat has to involve a universe entirely out of kilter.  What is a God that’s powerless (it’s implied) to drive out evil?  The exorcism in The Exorcist doesn’t work, does it?  Yet there’s some benevolent force in the universe that gives us synchronicities and, it seems, is looking out for goodness in an often cruel world.

Entities

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When you’re a regular scholar, you take notes.  I’m not a regular anything, I guess, and I’ve fallen out of the habit of noting who makes movie recommendations to me.  Many of these come from books, but I don’t always remember which book made what suggestion.  In my list of movies to watch is The Entity.  The thing is, there are at least five movies by that title.  One of them was free on Freevee, so that was the one I watched.  I’m not sure it was the right one, but since it featured something like a demon it represents my interests in Nightmares with the Bible.  This one was, for the record, from 2016, or 2015, and directed by Eduardo Schuldt.  Like Paranormal Activity, it’s “found footage” from hand-held cameras and it made me more woozy than scared.

Based in Lima, it’s in Spanish and claims to be from the dark web.  I don’t have any desire to go there (the dark web, that is.  Lima would be okay), but the movie wasn’t that frightening.  It was like Sinister and Ringu’s unholy offspring.  With a bit of Blair Witch Project as a sibling.  A curse from the Inquisition brings this into the realm of religion and horror.  Film students working on a class project learn that those who see a certain film are going to die.  Being modern people, they’re skeptical so, of course they watch it.  The thing about religion is that it’s unrelenting.  It doesn’t give up just because people stop believing.  Movies like this underscore how we keep turning back to religion to frighten ourselves.  You can guess what happens to the students.

The thing is, I’m not sure that I watched the correct one.  Film scholars now make a habit of citing movies by not only title and year, but also director’s name.  There are a lot of “Entities” out there, and if you take the article off there are even more.  I’ll probably end up watching a few of them, but since I didn’t write down which book, or which friend, made the recommendation, I’ll never know if I got the right one.  I keep a list to try to prevent myself from just going for whatever’s free on the weekend because you generally get what you pay for when you do that.  Even though I ended up a bit nauseous (from the camera movement) I was glad to have seen this.  There were some good moments in it.  And I can tick one off my Entity list.