Fantastic Fest Review: What Happened to Doris?

For the last decade and a half, audiences have endured The Conjuring films, big-budget propaganda for infamous self-proclaimed demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren. Always purportedly based on real stories, those films ignore that the cases that the notorious scam artists inserted themselves into involved real people who were going through something horrifying. Whether you believe there was something supernatural going or not, they endured absolute violations that made no sense and were bad enough for them to risk ridicule.

Thank goodness that the Warrens were never part of the Bither investigation or by now we’d have been subjected to a tacky spinoff about that. Instead, director Nick Simon (The Girl in the Photographs) and writer Thomas Fenton (Saw IV) could come to the story of Doris Bither with fresh eyes for the deeply disturbing What Happened to Doris?

Not that there wasn’t a prior film version. The Bither case was famously adapted in 1982 as The Entity, an uncomfortable watch because it took a salacious spin on the case. In 1976, Culver City resident Doris Bither reported that she had been attacked in her home by an invisible force that had invaded her home. What made Bither’s case stand out was that she claimed she had been sexually assaulted by this spirit.

What Happened to Doris? sticks close to the facts of the case as researched and reported at the time. This is another factor that makes the Bither case so fascinating, since she didn’t call in an exorcist. Instead, in a stroke of luck, Bither bumped into researchers from the Parapsychology Lab at UCLA in the occult section at a bookstore and opened her house to one of the few real scientific investigations of a haunting. Yes, now we can’t even keep English Literature departments open, but in the 1970s universities would allow what was basically the Ghostbusters to push human understanding.

That incredible meeting is depicted in What Happened to Doris?, with Bither (Heather Graham) trying to convince the professionally skeptical parapsychologists Gordon (Marcus Coloma) and Tayor (Morgan Peter Brown), who initially write off her pleas as phantasmophilia (look it up). There are some tweaks to the facts, as that meeting was with Barry Taff, who was on his own in the store, and the film upgrades the volunteer-run Parapsychology Lab into a full department under Dr. Thelma Moss (Mimi Rogers), who was real.

The way Moss bulldozes through Gordon and Taylor’s sexist disbelief in Bither’s rape claims is just one indicator of how this version of haunting horror varies from both The Conjuring films and The Entity, neither of which would dare to really spotlight how invasive this would be. The physical evidence alone, the bruises and bite marks that Bither endured, show that something was happening, and Fenton and Simon don’t flinch from other realities of Bither’s life – not least that, with three kids by different fathers, a socially acceptable drinking problem, and a contentious relationship with her eldest son, Ricky (Daniel Ferrell), she wasn’t the mid-Seventies vision of an ideal mother.

The sheer maliciousness of the entity – dubbed Mr. Whosit by the youngest Bither, Sylvia (Island Austin, Insidious: Out of the Further) – is captured in the overnight investigations by the UCLA team. It’s in the combination of shock and utter mundanity that What Happened to Doris? become absolutely terrifying. It doesn’t need to push into CG nonsense, as one pivotal scene with middle kid Brian (Kayden Alexander Koshelev) just crossing a room at night more unnerving than every overblown moment in the whole Insidious franchise. When the entity reveals itself, the withering “I told you so” look that Graham as Bither shoots the investigators could pierce the veil.

The film’s refusal to abide by all the standard spook show antics of such films until the final act makes it feel more real, more incisive, more disturbing. Whether it will make a believer of you or not, you’ll understand why Doris Bither was prepared to let people think she was crazy.

Fantastic Fest runs Sept. 17-24 at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar. Badges and info at fantasticfest.com. Follow our coverage at austinchronicle.com/fantastic-fest.