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Sidney Furie’s The Entity: Horror and rape culture
- Source: Horror Studies, Volume 13, Issue 1980s Horror Film Culture, Oct 2022, p. 251 - 266
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- 01 Mar 2022
- 01 Sep 2022
- 01 Oct 2022
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Abstract
In the 1970s rape became a central focus of second-wave feminist activism, and also, as censorship waned, a frequent narrative event in New Hollywood cinema, often, as a number of critics noted, in strikingly misogynistic forms. A few films, however, reflect and engage with second-wave feminism’s new perspectives on sexual assault. Sidney Furie’s The Entity (1982) uses its horror premise, a woman repeatedly raped by an invisible, aethereal attacker, as a powerful metaphor for what feminists termed ‘rape culture’. The film enlists our identification with, and sympathy for, its protagonist in her struggle against both the invisible rapist and against a medical establishment that denies the truth of her experience. Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To will be briefly considered as a film that reimagines the story of Jesus’s conception in feminist terms as sexual violation and Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 will be discussed as a representation of women’s experience of rape culture.