Having recently written an article on killer beds, part of me kinda briefly contemplated doing a piece on spectral sexual assault. However, that just feels like it would be a mean-spirited exercise in comparison. A spot of lackadaisical searching online – RIP my Google history, incidentally – didn’t lead to much. Pretty much the death-knell in my interest was discovering a scene in spoof film A Haunted House where Marlon Wayans gets raped for comedic purposes. Nah, thanks: I’m good. There’s also a gay Rape Ghost in Robot Chicken, voiced by Seth Green, and some suggestion that An American Haunting goes there, though its PG-13 rating leaves this ambiguous. However, it does appear to be a more common trope in India: what is it with Bollywood and rapey ghosts?
For as well as the Bollywood remake of The Entity, which will be reviewed below. there was another Indian film, 2011’s Haunted, which covers the topic. It’s actually a double ghost story. A piano teacher tries to attack his student, only for her to whack him across the head with a candlestick. His ghost then returns to complete the job, driving the victim to suicide, and her spirit then haunts her residence too. A real estate agent charged with selling the house has to go back in time and prevent the original assault. That does actually sound like a decent plot. It’s also the first Bollywood movie made in stereoscopic 3D. so it may end up reviewed down the road, once I can source it.
The following year, the same country also produced Avunu. Its IMDb synopsis reads, “The spirit of a serial rapist who’s body is chopped into tiny pieces, mixed into concrete that’s used to build a house, haunts it and terrorises the newly weds who move in there.” Wikipedia says it is “loosely based on” The Entity. Based on the unsubbed version present on YouTube, and pictured top, this seems more plausible than the IMDb review which references The Sixth Sense. I dunno, maybe there’s an Indian cut in which Bruce Willis gets a bit handsy? The movie proved successful enough to receive a sequel three years later, in which “The lustful spirit of Captain Raju stalks Mohini till the end.” It’s also on YouTube without subs, should you be interested.
Below you’ll find reviews of The Entity and Hawa, which were both available to me in versions I can understand. 🙂
The Entity (1982)
Rating: C-
Dir Sidney J. Furie
Star: Barbara Hershey, Ron Silver, David Labiosa, Alex Rocco
To the film’s credit, it doesn’t hang around at the start. I was expecting significant set-up, introducing us to the characters, then things going bump in the night for a bit, slowly escalating from there. Nope. Barely five minutes in, and single mom Carla Moran (Hershey) is being slapped about, tossed around her bedroom like a rag-doll and sexually assaulted by something invisible. It’s done in about a minute, which had me thinking the entity needs to talk to its healthcare provider about stamina. Shot in tight close-ups, I wasn’t even sure what had happened. What was it? Why was it targetting Carla? How can it be stopped?
I hope you’re not at all interested in the answers to those questions – because the film certainly isn’t. Instead, it adopts a languid pace – there’s almost two hours to fill after the rape – with Carla visiting who is surely the worst therapist in the world, Dr. Phil Sneiderman (Silver), who simply refuses to acknowledge his patient’s experiences, even after subsequent attacks break the wrist of her teenage son, Bobby (Labiosa). He blames everything on repressed trauma from Carla’s youth, and/or repressed incestuous feelings for Bobby. To be fair, she does have enough psychological baggage to fuel a convention. Her out-of-town boyfriend Jerry Anderson (Rocco) isn’t much help: then again, she doesn’t bother telling him anything, so hard to fault him for being somewhat surprised when he witnesses an attack.
Eventually, she bumps into a pair of Dollar Store Ghostbusters, whose plan involves building a replica of Carla’s house in a university gym, and freezing the spirit with liquid helium when it shows up. This works about as well as you think it would i.e. not at all. But it’s all okay, because the end caption informs us, Carla and her family moved to Texas, and the entity largely got bored and drifted off or something. This is all based on the “true” story of Doris Bither, but largely demonstrates the problem with trying to adapt such things. Without the ability to answer questions, you’re left with something missing most of the key elements typically present in this kind of story. It desperately needs an Indian burial ground, or something, to provide structure. Instead, we get random sequences like the entity taking over Carla’s car, once, and for no particular reason.
While filmed before Poltergeist, it came out afterwards, leaving The Entity feeling a bit of a second tier knock-off. Quite why this made Martin Scorsese’s list of scariest horror movies escapes me. Hershey is decent enough, I will say, but it’s clear she wasn’t up for the nudity required. Those scenes are about the worst “stick your head up through a hole in the mattress on top of a mannequin” I’ve seen in a major Hollywood movie. You wonder why they bothered with her; probably because every other actress they asked, declined. Though let’s be grateful, we were as a result spared the sight of Bette Midler being spectrally ravaged.
Hawa (2003)
Rating: B
Dir: Guddu Dhanoa
Star: Tabu, ImShahbaan, Shahbaaz Khan, Mukesh Tiwari
This is generally (and rightly) regarded as an unofficial Indian remake of The Entity, with its story of a woman menaced by a sexually violent ghost. However, there are a lot of other influences to be enjoyed here, right from the start. The opening scene sees a car driving over a rickety bridge, which feels like a Himalayan version of the one in The Evil Dead. In the third act, it gets bored with The Entity – understandably, I feel – and switches to wholesale and blatant theft from Poltergeist instead. Between these, there’s a sequence which could have come from Christine. If you want a tour through the highlights of eighties horror in two hours, you could do a lot worse.
Indeed, I’d argue for this improving on the original Entity in several ways. There’s considerably more set-up here, introducing us to divorcee Sanjana (Tabu), and showing us her life before assaults start. She is moving to a new bungalow with her two incredibly annoying kids, and her brother, who is confusingly called Vicky (Khan). Things immediately seem off, and steadily escalates until the first of multiple spectral rapes. We care about Sanjana more this way, and while this is much less graphic, for obvious reasons, it feels as if the attacks go on longer to compensate. It’s effective. Abandoning the previous film’s finale, probably its weakest element, is another wise move. Indeed, there’s effort put into providing a “credible” rationale for events, something The Entity didn’t bother with.
For a bit, it felt like they might be going with the ghost being Sanjana’s father, who molested her as a child. However, they opt instead for variations on the Poltergeist theme. Sanjana has to save her child by descending into a real “Indian burial ground”, hohoho, from where a criminal’s spirit was unleashed by a lightning strike. The effects are decent, certainly good enough to compare with those from twenty years previously. The sequence where one daughter is sucked out of her bedroom into another world has a couple of genuinely impressive shots, and the spectral hands savagely caressing Sanjana’s body are also well-executed. Dhanoa does have a tendency to hysterical excess, though that kinda goes with the territory.
At least he opted to skip any musical numbers, something not every Indian horror movie does. For that, I thank him. Tabu delivers a strong performance: she is one of India’s leading actresses, making her only foray into the horror genre. So it’s like watching the Bollywood version of Meryl Streep get repeatedly fucked by a spook. Not a sentence I expected to write today. Her character helps hold attention, especially when the pace sags a bit in the middle, as Sanjana tries to convince her sceptical doctor (Khan) of events. He eventually brings in an expert (Tiwari) – supposedly a parapsychologist, though he acts far more like an exorcist. Regardless of how undeniably derivative proceedings all are, it was considerably better fun than expected.