Highly taut and suspenseful ghost story starring Barbara Hershey as a single mother who is repeatedly attacked and raped by forces unseen in her California home. Though her children witness one of the attacks, Hershey follows the counsel of a psychologist played by Ron Silver, who believes her “attacks” are psychic trauma from her childhood and a reaction against her relationships with men.

The attacks – one in which two smaller sets of hands apparently hold Hershey down while her phantom tormentor violates her – grow worse and follow her away from home. Hershey invites university parapsychologists to investigate and they record bizarre phenomenon. In an effort to prove the haunting scientifically, the ghost hunters build a replica of Hershey’s home and attempt to prove “the entity” has mass by using liquid nitrogen to capture it.

Barbara Hershey – a gifted actress who never seemed to compete for the roles Jane Fonda, Faye Dunaway or Meryl Streep won – is great in this. She gives a tough, no holds barred performance. The Entity is a hard R-rated horror movie that’s not for kids, and that quality I appreciated as well.

The screenplay by Frank DeFelitta was based on his book of the same name, drawn from a supposedly real paranormal case he helped investigate in 1976. The film version is much less interested in maintaining the illusion that this case actually happened – like the retarded Amityville Horror movies – and more interested in exploring what happens when modern psychology and memory regression fail to explain the unexplained.

I would have preferred more subtlety from journeyman director Sidney J. Furie adapting this story (Lady Sings The Blues was his career high.) The movie does work as psychological horror to a degree due to the dual explanations it offers for the haunting, but I have could done without the electric charges and goofy ghost lights that seem straight out of a Roger Corman drive-in feature. There is a strong character drama in here that debates the ability of modern psychology to provide an explanation or answer for everything.