When you’re a regular scholar, you take notes. I’m not a regular anything, I guess, and I’ve fallen out of the habit of noting who makes movie recommendations to me. Many of these come from books, but I don’t always remember which book made what suggestion. In my list of movies to watch is The Entity. The thing is, there are at least five movies by that title. One of them was free on Freevee, so that was the one I watched. I’m not sure it was the right one, but since it featured something like a demon it represents my interests in Nightmares with the Bible. This one was, for the record, from 2016, or 2015, and directed by Eduardo Schuldt. Like Paranormal Activity, it’s “found footage” from hand-held cameras and it made me more woozy than scared.
Based in Lima, it’s in Spanish and claims to be from the dark web. I don’t have any desire to go there (the dark web, that is. Lima would be okay), but the movie wasn’t that frightening. It was like Sinister and Ringu’s unholy offspring. With a bit of Blair Witch Project as a sibling. A curse from the Inquisition brings this into the realm of religion and horror. Film students working on a class project learn that those who see a certain film are going to die. Being modern people, they’re skeptical so, of course they watch it. The thing about religion is that it’s unrelenting. It doesn’t give up just because people stop believing. Movies like this underscore how we keep turning back to religion to frighten ourselves. You can guess what happens to the students.
The thing is, I’m not sure that I watched the correct one. Film scholars now make a habit of citing movies by not only title and year, but also director’s name. There are a lot of “Entities” out there, and if you take the article off there are even more. I’ll probably end up watching a few of them, but since I didn’t write down which book, or which friend, made the recommendation, I’ll never know if I got the right one. I keep a list to try to prevent myself from just going for whatever’s free on the weekend because you generally get what you pay for when you do that. Even though I ended up a bit nauseous (from the camera movement) I was glad to have seen this. There were some good moments in it. And I can tick one off my Entity list.