10 Horror Movies You Didn't Know Were Based On True Stories

5. The Entity

The entity movie 1982
20th Century Fox

Based on the 1978 novel of the same name, The Entity stars Barbara Hershey as a woman who is sexually tormented by an invisible force. Both the film and the novel drew inspiration from the Doris Bither case, with Bither claiming that she was frequently attacked and raped by some sort of unseen entity.

Bither's claims came to light when she met Kerry Gaynor and Barry Taff, parapsychologists who investigated her story. Taff and Gaynor eventually discovered that Bither had a damaged past, with a long history of physical and substance abuse that would go some way towards explaining her wild claims about supernatural forces.

The author of the book and the writer of the film - Frank De Felitta - incorporated several elements of the Bither case into his story, including a woman being sexually assaulted by an invisible entity, the character's traumatic past, and two parapsychologists investigating the matter.

The film concludes by revealing that the entity was real all along, and despite Taff claiming that he had snapped pictures of such an entity in real-life, it's difficult to say what Bither was actually experiencing.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!