What Happened to Doris? isn’t a remake of The Entity, one of the most notorious and disturbing horror movies of the ’80s, but is based on the true story that inspired it. Still, approaching the Doris Bither case and its sensitive subject matter was a daunting task.
The 1974 paranormal case investigated Doris Bither’s claims of being sexually assaulted by an entity in her Culver City home, one that in turn inspired a number of horror films, including The Entity, which sees Barbara Hershey’s character violently raped by an unseen threat repeatedly. It’s the type of material that understandably causes trepidation.
That hesitation is what made director Nick Simon (The Girl in the Photographs) ultimately say yes, despite initially balking at the idea.
Simon explained to Bloody Disgusting at Fantastic Fest, where the film premiered, “Well, it was the idea, when it was pitched to me, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, there’s a true story of The Entity, we’d love you to direct it.’ I was like, ‘Oh.’ I didn’t want to read it. Why do you remake that? Also, how do you remake that in 2026? Well, then you start reading the script, and then I start talking to the writer, and [Thomas Fenton] is very collaborative. He built this relationship with the real Brian Harris, her real son. Once we started talking to him, and now knowing all the things that really happened, it became a more interesting story. Like, ‘Okay, well, this story is very current, and it’s not about that.’ I feel like the takeaways could be: you look at it as a story in 2026, it’s very relevant. I think also being scared of something is probably the reason you should do it.”
Being afraid of Doris Bither’s story is also what ultimately made its stars, Heather Graham ( Suitable Flesh, They Will Kill You ) and Mimi Rogers (Night Nurse, Ginger Snaps), say yes too.
“I thought it was really terrifying,” Graham said of the script. “I was really scared. Horror is so big, and it reminded me of just being haunted by my own thoughts, like, ‘Thank God I’ve never been haunted by whatever, like a demon.’ But the idea of it felt like a universal, relatable, scary thing. Then when I talked to Nick, he was just such a cinephile. You knew everything about every movie. Obviously, you seem very lovely and kind. When you’re making a scary movie, you want to feel like you have this empathetic person there that wants to tell the story in a way that’s really pro-woman, which [Nick Simon] is.”
Rogers agrees, “I thought the script was really scary, but I was also fascinated by the idea that it was based on things that had actually happened. And that Doris Bither was a real woman who had these real experiences and that there was this parapsychology department at UCLA. I did a lot of reading about it because I honestly wasn’t familiar, but I’m a big fan of horror movies that have an emotional core and that are a story as opposed to just blood and guts and gore. There’s been so many brilliant ones mentioned: The Shining, The Omen, The Exorcist, and Sinners, my favorite movie of the last five years easily. So I was actually quite excited to come on board.”
“Also, the idea of a woman not being believed and that was a central part of the story, I thought that was cool,” Graham adds.
Graham leads as Doris Bither, while Rogers plays Dr. Lillian Ross, the sole woman and leader of the parapsychology department. As such, the characters form a special bond forged by, well, the men’s skepticism toward Doris’s harrowing plight.
Both actresses acknowledge a lot of that bond was easy to tap into and already well formed on the page. Rogers also pulled from experience: “Nick and Tom, the screenwriter, were very collaborative. I had the freedom in some of the scenes that I have with Doris; I had the freedom to sort of expound upon or clarify certain ideas. It’s a subtle element that Dr. Ross had a daughter who’s no longer with her. So I think, I’m a mother, I have a very strong maternal instinct and it definitely played into my feelings for Doris.”
Unlike The Entity, Simon gives his paranormal menace an actual form, one inspired by his own nightmares. “I had a weird dream about being bitten by a man with baby teeth,” Simon reveals. “I don’t know why. I woke up, I’m like, ‘That’s got to go into something.’ Anyway, so I ended up talking to my friend Mario Torres, who’s a creature designer, worked for Guillermo del Toro, and he’s done amazing things. I told him about it; he was like, ‘I’ll sculpt that.’ Then, randomly, it came to the design of Mr. Whosit, and I had just read No Country for Old Men again, and I started thinking about Anton Chigurh, how much I love that hair in the movie. I’m a huge Coen Brothers nerd. And it’s like, ‘Well, it’s 1974. Well, if we had an Anton Chigurh kind of vibe with black eyes and then baby teeth.”
Don’t expect to see Mr. Whosit much, though. “We were really deliberate. We had to plan everything, and I was trying to build as much dread in the film. Another thing we were really trying to do was stay with Doris. It’s her movie; we want to stay with her the entire movie. We really wanted to try to focus on the PTSD angle of it. That’s why there are a lot of moments where she’s just by herself in her own head, because when she’s with her kids, she’s trying to be a mom and trying to focus on that. Hopefully it comes across.”
What Happened to Doris? made its world premiere at Fantastic Fest (our review), with release info TBD.
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