The Entity (Sidney J. Furie, 1981)

This came to my attention as the film of interest for being the film used by Peter Tscherkassky to make his Outer Space (1999), but otherwise dismissed as forgettable big-budget early 80s nonsense. But in his recent book Mysteries of Cinema, Adrian Martin makes a case for Furie's film, and he's quite right. It's a very efficiently done, entertaining - but in places genuinely distressing - horror about supernatural sexual assault, Barbara Hershey is very effective as the protagonist Carla, and there's a nice dose of De Palma-style split diopter shots to keep things off-balance in a very period way. The fact that - for the audience -  there's never for a moment a doubt that supernatural forces are involved is refreshing, and helps contribute to the fact that the film is also, for a fair amount of its length, an allegory about women's stories of assault not being believed. (A scene of white-coated doctors shrouded in various types of cigar and pipe smoke discussing Carla's case is a particularly clear instance of this.) The fact that the film is resolutely a genre thriller makes the allegory all the more effective, because it never becomes "the point". And also - how closely must the makers of Ghostbusters watched this film? It's full of little points of connection (similar casting [Hershey is rather Sigourney Weaver-like]; bits of dialogue, other business [the device the parapsychologists carry when they first visit the house])... Any film with a connection to Ghostbusters is off to a good start, in my book.