Sidney Furie’s The Entity: Horror and rape culture | Intellect Skip to content
1981
1980s Horror Film Culture
  • ISSN: 2040-3275
  • E-ISSN: 2040-3283

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 (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 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 ill be discussed as a representation of women’s experience of rape culture.

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2022-10-01
2024-04-26
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