Directors Notes
Steve Stone - June 2012
The genesis of the film Entity began in late 2008 when I encountered, by chance, a series of remote industrial locations that seemed to be hiding some terrible secret from the past. Something awful had happened within those decaying walls, something on a large scale. But what was it? That mystery became an obsession for the next two years of my life as I began to research and work on a script with a working title of Beast and evolved into Entity.
The journey in writing Entity was a journey into a past, a past that contained a terrifying paranormal secret.
We are all products of our past, both shared and individually. We need to know where we came from. We need to know what formed us and, very often, what has hurt us, in order to know who we are now. But our relationship with the past is about balance. If we simply look back and stare then the past may consume us. Its injuries may cripple us still further. Its darkness may consume us. If we can, we also have to walk forward. We have to live in the here and now. Entity is about a past from which there is no escape. I imagined characters making the same journey to these decrepit deserted silos and imagined the secrets they would unlock.
The characters in Entity are a team working for an investigative paranormal TV programme called Darkest Secrets who, lead by a psychic, are devoted to unlocking the mysteries of the past. The mystery they investigate begins with a single clue: in 1998, in a remote Siberian forest, thirty four bodies were found in unmarked graves. No official explanation was ever offered for these deaths by the Russian authorities and three years later the case was closed. At the invitation of a Russian writer, obsessed with the case, the team travel to Russia.
In the spring of 2010 the team arrive in the remote Siberian forest where the bodies were found. But their journey leads beyond the trees of that forest to a remote location that is forgotten even by those who made it. They have encountered the same remote buildings I had done. But not only do they stand and stare into the darkness within those structures, they go further, and journey deeper into the nightmare of the events that took place there. With every step they make, the past folds in around them until there is no escape.
Entity is about our relationship with a terrible past.
The lesson would be look back but don't stare.