Spiritual Home Invasions: A Double Feature

So after the last couple of weeks of artistically worthy, but at best “horror-adjacent” fare, this time, I really wanted to tackle some work that was clearly and unabashedly horror. I also thought it would be nice to take in something older, something I’d heard about, but had never gotten around to – to fill some gaps in my horror education. And so I’ve chosen a double feature, which I think makes sense, of The Sentinel (1977) and The Entity (1982). Right now, I don’t know too much about either, but have heard them spoken about with both a sense of admiration and infamy. I understand both films feature a woman experiencing horrific things in her home and not being believed, and that seems sufficient to pair them in this “Spiritual Home Invasions” double feature.

I don’t know how much there will be to say about each, but I hope to find something worth digging into. Let’s find out, shall we?

The Sentinel (1977)

Hmmm. What do you do with a film like The Sentinel? I mean Michael Winner’s film has a lot going for it – some scary sequences with high creep factor, a tremendous cast, a sense of mystery, paranoia, and intrigue, a chilling, downbeat ending, and it is just so very, very, very strange, with quirky inclusions that make it an easy film to love. It’s also derivative, plodding, steeped in a vein of religious horror that’s a turn off for me, and at one point feels quite mean in how a certain scene is cast. It also has some weird sexual hang ups that feel oddly regressive (and hence unpleasant), but at the same time, the way they surface are so gloriously bizarre as to elevate the whole film. It feels at once like a respectable, big studio horror picture and like a down and dirty bit of enjoyable trash that is just pulling out all the stops to shock and disturb. I loved it. I was bored. I rolled my eyes. I got unsettled. I enjoyed some jumpscare thrills. I put up with some distasteful religiosity. I clapped my hands with glee. I both appreciated and was bummed out by where it ended up. It was a peculiar 92 minutes.

Following the success of Ira Levinson’s tremendous work of Satanic paranoia and social horror, Rosemary’s Baby, and Polanski’s subsequent, pitch perfect adaptation (I don’t think I could oversell the value of either work), there was a boom through the 70s of novels, films, and novels adapted into films seeking to capitalize on a resurgent American terror of all things Devilish, often with a specifically Catholic bent (interestingly, Levinson, an Atheist, reportedly deeply regretted kicking off this trend citing how it often felt like an advertisement for the Church). Based on Jeffery Konvitz’s 1974 novel of the same name, The Sentinel is clearly one of these.

Model, Alison Parker (Christina Raines), wanting a more independent life for herself, moves out of the apartment she shares with her seemingly pretty nice, albeit warmly domineering lawyer boyfriend, Michael, and gets her own place in a beautiful, ivy covered Brooklyn brownstone. We learn of the difficult relationship she’d had with her father and the abuse and neglect her mother had suffered at his hands, and we understand how important it is for Alison to have her own space, her own career, her own life, separate from Michael, even if it means staying in a flat that might be haunted, where creepy banging sounds keep her up at night, overly friendly neighbors (who might not exist, might be dead, and might be evil) don’t respect her personal space, and the ghost of her father lurches out of shadows in the night.

Through all of this, Alison struggles with issues of trust between herself and Michael (who the police suspect had his first wife murdered), her history of suicide attempts, and a lapsed faith that she finds herself compelled to return to. Behind it all, a secretive cult within the Catholic Church, tasked with guarding the gates of Hell on earth, is trying to manipulate Alison into a responsibility and a burden she couldn’t possibly foresee, and which she doesn’t have the mental wherewithal to consciously agree to (oddly, this cult uses a bit of “Paradise Lost” as their mantra, despite the fact that Milton was a Protestant who was no friend to the Church). She has scary visions. She starts to lose her strength and collapse in public. She relives horrifying scenes from her childhood. She seems haunted at night, and maybe even kills someone, but nothing is quite clear. By its conclusion, all is revealed and resolved, but you’d be hard pressed to call the ending happy.

It’s a bit of a hard work to read. In many ways, it presents itself as a mainstream, reputable occult thriller. There are forces of good and forces of evil. We follow this struggle and empathize with this woman caught up in the middle of it all. When looking at the film wearing this mask, it all feels kind of reactionary. It’s when this woman strikes out to establish her independence that she is set upon by these terrors and when she is brought under the wing of the Church, safety and stasis reassert themselves. Furthermore, the horrors she encounters are often tied up in a presentation of sex and sexuality as something grotesque or threatening. A flashback to her childhood features a discovery of her father in a shocking sexual tryst, and one of the off-putting interactions with her new neighbors, a lesbian couple on the first floor, rests on their seemingly aggressive displays of sexuality in her presence. Beyond all that, as with much of the religious horror of the time, there is a meta-message inherent in showing these infernal horrors and understanding how the Church and faith are all that stand between them and our endangered souls.

But on the other hand, when viewed as an exploitation flick, cheaply ripping off other successful works to crank out popular entertainment, and those tropes of its particular subgenre are elided, in its commitment to the scare, to titillation, to gross out moments, and to absolute weirdness, this film rather sings and it feels easy somehow to look past the problematic politics of its form. Michael Winner, the director of, among other things, Death Wish I, II, and III, was no stranger to sensationalism, and boy does he bring that to this picture.

All of the scenes of hauntings/night time disturbances really succeed in being spooky, and at one point, surprisingly gory. A door opens and a shadowy figure appears behind it. It’s her decrepit, nigh skeletal dead father, his greying skin hanging off his bones. He attacks her and she lashes out, stabbing his side, slicing open an eye, and roughly hewing off his nose. Later, no one can find a body, but there’s blood on her clothes and when she returns to the room where it happened, it seems the carpet’s been changed and the furniture’s been moved. Who would do that, and why? Is she going mad? Is any of this happening? The paranoia and confusion land soundly.

The movie’s also helped by a rather impressive cast. There are lots of big names and faces of an earlier era of Hollywood stardom: Ava Gardner, John Carradine, Burgess Meredith (who is a hoot in this role), William Hickey (a treat as always), and many others. But it also features early performances from lots of recognizable up and comers: Jeff Goldblum, Beverly D’Angelo (who steals the show in her featured scene), Chris Sarandon (who plays Michael), Christopher Walken, and Jerry Orbach all make appearances. They aren’t all given that much to do exactly, but it is one of those movies where you’re constantly going, “hey – I didn’t know he was in this!”

But where the movie is really special is in its much referenced peculiarities. And they are both myriad and spectacular. Attending her father’s funeral, Alison relives a horrifying event from her childhood where she inadvertently walked in on her bony father having a threesome with two larger older women while they all eat cake, naked, in bed with their hands. If it were just the sex, that would be one thing – she found her dad openly fooling around in a way that her mom just had to know about and be shamed by. But the cake? It’s such a specific, fetishistic element to bring in that suddenly makes it jaw droppingly odd and grotesque. And then, to top it off, her father reacts to the intrusion by being infuriated to see Alison wearing a crucifix so he hits her and rips it off.

There is of course the scene where she is trying to get to know her neighbors and visits Gerde and Sandra (Silvia Miles and Beverly D’Angelo, respectively) who are both dressed in dance leotards. Not an odd question, Alison asks if they do Ballet, and when they don’t really respond, what they do for work.  Gerde responds that they “fondle each other” for a living and then leaves to make coffee. While she’s gone, Sandra, who seems mute, stares Alison down as she ferociously masturbates in front of her through her leotard. Alison sits there uncomfortably before finally passing on the coffee, extracting herself, and offending Gerde. It is, to say the least, a very strange sequence.

There is a climactic scene where demonic presences are closing in on Alison, and rather than any horns or bat wings, Winner just cast a crowd of people with real life physical deformities, mostly sourced from freak shows. He didn’t put any makeup on them or somehow dress them devilishly, so much as just strip them down to their shorts and send them shambling after her. On one level, it is a well-filmed scary sequence that avoids obvious, clichéd, overused infernal imagery. On another level, even though these are all adults, cognizant of what they were doing and paid for their services, it feels exploitative and not in a fun way. It feels gross having these real people with real physical issues displayed for their monstrousness to shock and horrify. I guess if they were all working in sideshows at the time, this is no different from their day jobs and probably gave them a good pay day, but with contemporary eyes, it doesn’t feel good.

But for my money, the most delightful weirdness of the whole film is when Alison’s neighbor, Charles invites her in for a surprise birthday party for his cat. It’s wearing a little hat and everything. And everyone in the building is there for this absurd, slightly eerie celebration. It’s all just on the other side of believable, but feels concrete at the time. And somehow, whenever we cut to the cat, it feels like it’s supposed to feel wrong, even evil somehow. But it’s just a cat wearing a party hat, and probably not so happy about the fact.

Many things about this film didn’t click for me – but there were also so many moments where I just sat in puzzled wonder, genuinely surprised by what I was looking at, and those little weird morsels of specificity all supported the horror, helped establish a very real sense of wrongness, of unreality, all of which really does pay off in a sad, disquieting ending where “good” wins, but it still feels like a loss. I don’t think I’m going to watch it every Christmas or anything, but I’m glad to have finally seen it.

The Entity (1982)

Wow. Off the bat, I‘ve got to say this was great – one of the best “new” films I’ve seen in a good while. I’ve also got to say it is not for everyone. The obvious content warning here is that the entire premise of the movie is a woman being tormented, assaulted, and raped by an unseen presence; hence if you just cannot bear to watch depictions of sexual violence, skip this one. If that isn’t an immediate deal breaker, seek it out because it is a great, worthy, scary, and I would venture, significant piece of work.

While not in any way explicitly demonic, I feel this grew out of a similar moment as the first film today as it was adapted from a novel that would seem to have been riding the coat tails of The Exorcist. Both this and Blatty’s novel claim to have been based on documented paranormal occurrences.  Both feature single mothers. Both center on a question of scientific analysis vs lived experience. But other than those superficial characteristics, this is entirely its own film. And what a film! Also, whereas The Exorcist is the poster child of religious horror pedaling faith rooted in the terror of radical evil, The Entity is a scathing, depressing, feminist excoriation of the banal ubiquity of gender-based violence in modern life. (Spoiler warning: I don’t think this is a piece that can be ruined by reading about the plot, so I will be discussing it in detail – but if you’d like to avoid that, go find it – I guess it streams on Starz in the States.)

Barbara Hershey delivers a powerful turn as Carla Moran, a single mother of a teenage boy and two young girls, who is systematically assaulted and abused over the course of the film by an unseen, but undeniably male, presence. It attacks her repeatedly in her home; it crashes her car while she’s driving; it wrecks the apartment of her friend, Cindy, in whose home she seeks asylum. Her psychiatrist is sympathetic but his certainty in the psychological, interior root of her experience contributes to a kind of gaslighting cruelty – as he tries so hard to help her, he only succeeds in making her feel like she’s going mad – denying what she knows she has experienced, telling those who have witnessed her attacks to stop playing along and enabling her delusions. Her masculine, older boyfriend, who is always travelling for work, can’t handle the reality of what’s happening to her (when he finally experiences it, he runs away and we never see him again). A team of Parapsychologists do believe her, but they are more excited at the prospect of their own legitimization than they are invested in ensuring her welfare. Her kids have seen horrible things (and her teenage son is injured by the entity while trying to rescue his mother) but no one believes them, and Carla needs to take whatever steps she can to see to their safety, and shelter them from witnessing more horrors.

Early on, after the first evening’s attacks prompt Carla to take her kids and flee her home, taking shelter with her friend Cindy, it is clear that Cindy’s husband isn’t going to accept visitors for more than one evening (he’s a gem) and thus stranded, Carla finds herself parking at the beach all day with her children. She clearly has nowhere else to go. Family isn’t an option (we learn later of abuse, possibly sexual, that she endured growing up). She doesn’t seem to have any more of a support network. Finally, the sun setting, her little girls baffled by the events of the last 24 hours, and her teenage son frustrated at being kept in the dark, she gives in and takes them home. She doesn’t seem to have any other options. And when the next day the mysterious force takes control of her vehicle while she’s driving and crashes her car, it is evident that she can’t just move, leave the house, and start over. This trauma, this violation will follow her unless she can somehow resolve it. And like a more run of the mill abuser, it will try to separate her from her friends, restrict her ability to move, try to isolate her, and break her spirit.

This is a great, compelling horror movie, but it is not what you might call a fun watch. Though no one is killed throughout the whole piece, the scenes of assault are truly horrific and incredibly heavy (that weight only slightly lessened by cinematic appreciation for the technical prowess with which it’s all executed – stellar acting, in camera effects, and a bravura practical gimmick involving Hershey’s head on a mannequin of Carla’s body with suction cups inside to give the impression of invisible hands pressing on her assaulted flesh). Furthermore, there is a growing dread that there may be no solution, that this is just the world that Carla is stuck in, that no one is willing to, or even can, help her, and that she is totally alone in suffering through this recurrent nightmare. It is bleak and shocking and it has stayed with me long after the credits rolled.

On those scenes though, I do think they are very well handled. On one level, they are very direct – there is no skirting around the issue or sugar coating what is going on. This is a film about rape, about abuse, and it starts in the first ten minutes. At the same time, I feel it is all filmed in a non-exploitative manner. The camera never leers. You never feel that there is a sleazy interest in titillation (which can be found in, for example, many “rape-revenge” movies of the 1970s). Even when clearly displaying assaults on her naked form (such as the above mentioned mannequin effect), I personally don’t feel she is objectified, or that her suffering is exploited for cheap thrills. It all feels awful, but also serious minded, and the camera always takes Carla’s perspective, is on her side. This is her experience, and we are with her throughout it.

And that experience is absolutely one of horror. Sure – on one level, there’s well done spooky haunted house stuff. There is a really scary sense of the malevolence and violent power of this unseen and unknowable presence. The horror movie of it all works great and the filmmaking is propulsive – there isn’t an angle that can’t be Dutched – focus that can’t be deep – and Charles Bernstein’s score is abrasive and compelling. But beyond that, it really deals with Horror with a capital H. (This will rather get into spoiler territory if you want to avoid that sort of thing.)

Worse than the brutality of any given assault on screen is the sense of inescapability. The person trying the hardest to help her is her therapist (Ron Silver brilliantly walks a line between help and harm), but he is really only making things worse. Fueled by knowledge of her abusive childhood, he is blinkered by a Freudian reading of her current experience, and though he is desperate to help her heal, he consistently does everything in his power to rob her of agency, to break her. The team of parapsychologists don’t deny her experience, but they happily risk her life to further their careers, while still failing to contain the threat. The only person who gives any real comfort is her friend Cindy when she witnesses an attack and confirms Carla’s sanity.

But by the end, it is really clear that there is no way to bust this ghost, to cleanse this house, to rid herself of this assailant. She can’t run from it. It won’t let her drive away. Science is helpless in fighting it. This, this sexual violence, this demeaning, masculinized brutality, is just what the world is, and there is no way out if she plans to keep drawing breath. Herein lies the true horror – the revelation of and reckoning with an unbearable truth. It is exhausting and grim and infuriating, but it is. And thus, the only solution available to her is to choose survival and endurance, because the alternative is unacceptable.

Two striking, significant moments come quite late in the film. First, working with the parapsychologists to trap the entity, Carla serves as bait in a simulation of her home which they have rigged to protect her in a safe chamber while trying to freeze the spirit with liquid helium. It doesn’t work, and as their plans are falling all around them, the presence corners Carla, forcing her against a wall, and she finds the power within to defy this thing, and to live. With recourse to nothing but her own will, she stares down her invisible assailant and has a few short but powerful lines:

Then, in the final scene, we see her return to her now empty house, taking one last look before leaving to try to build a better life elsewhere. The door slams shut and the entity utters its sole, crude, assaultive line of the whole film, “Welcome home, cunt.” With a small, resigned smile, she opens the door and leaves. We then read that after moving, the attacks continued, but lessened over time.

It’s a bit of Nancy Thompson turning her back on Freddy and taking back whatever power the fear she’d felt had granted him. It’s a bit of Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum, as used in The Handmaid’s Tale a few years later. Sometimes the horror just is – the world is not just – the worst things happen to people without cause. Sometimes things can be changed. And sometimes they can’t. In the face of that absolute and insurmountable wrongness, one can be destroyed or one can find a way to keep going. Carla continues, and chisels out for herself a modicum of freedom, of life. It is a chilling, depressing, and yet, in its way, empowering conclusion to a difficult, moving, significant film.

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So in the end, these were not particularly similar movies, though they do have some overlap: not being believed, an invasion of the home, a kind of victory which still feels terrible. Of the two though, The Entity really impressed me – I think it deserves far more acclaim as a kind of classic – but I suppose the extent to which it’s a difficult watch keeps it off many people’s lists. The Sentinel, on the other hand, isn’t exactly a great film, but it is rather a hoot – more of a trashy, spooky good time, somewhat soured by religiosity and exploitative stunt casting.  But while my ‘double feature’ may not have quite clicked, I’m happy to have finally seen them both.