The first clip from What Happened to Doris? arrived Thursday, two days ahead of the film’s world premiere at Fantastic Fest on September 20. Heather Graham plays the title role, and the footage ends where the real case started: with something under a child’s bed.
Director Nick Simon is working from the 1974 Doris Bither case, the Culver City haunting that put UCLA parapsychologists in a condemned house for roughly ten weeks and eventually produced The Entity. That is a great deal of freight for a 93-minute movie to carry, and the clip suggests Simon is not trying to carry all of it at once.
What the clip shows is small and domestic. Graham’s Doris has a daughter who has been talking to someone. The someone is lying under the bed. There is no creature reveal and no set piece, which is the most efficient possible argument that this version cares less about the entity than about the household that has to explain it to somebody.
The Case Behind ‘The Entity’
Doris Bither was a single mother of four living in a condemned Culver City house in August 1974 when she reported being attacked by an invisible force. Barry Taff, then working out of UCLA’s parapsychology lab, brought Kerry Gaynor and a rotating crew of roughly two dozen observers into the house. Over ten weeks they logged objects falling, lights, cold spots and odors, and came away with a handful of photographs of unexplained light patterns and very little else. Taff has been plain about the shortfall in the years since: the team arrived with instruments and cameras, and the evidence stayed elusive.
Skeptics have not been kind to the file. Investigator Benjamin Radford has attributed the whole episode to a family in crisis, loose investigative technique and confirmation bias, and the photographs have been read as ordinary exposure errors. Nobody has ever settled it, which is exactly why it keeps getting made into things.
The first of those things was the 1978 novel The Entity by Frank De Felitta, and then the 1982 film of it from Sidney J. Furie, with Barbara Hershey as the fictionalized Carla Moran and Taff himself consulting. That film is remembered for one of the ugliest premises in studio horror and for a Hershey performance that deserved a better decade. What it did not do was use Bither’s name. This one does.
That change is recent. The film carried the title Entity Within until shortly before Fantastic Fest, a nod to the 1982 picture, and the production company is still called Entity Returns LLC. Dropping the word from the title and putting the woman’s name in its place is the clearest statement of intent the project has made so far.
Who Made It
Simon’s last feature of note was The Girl in the Photographs, the 2015 slasher executive produced by Wes Craven and released after his death. The script here is by Thomas Fenton, whose credits include Saw IV. Steven Schneider, who produced both Paranormal Activity and Insidious, produces alongside German Michael Torres. GVN is handling distribution, and the film runs 93 minutes.
Simon told Cinema Scholars this week that the research went deeper than he expected. “I was aware of the story, but not to the level that we uncovered during the research,” he said, adding that “the DNA of this story ends up in all these other ghost movies because it is so well documented.” On Graham, he was blunt: “She understands how to tap into that vulnerable place.”
The Cast Is Deeper Than the Billing Suggests
Graham is the draw, and horror audiences last had her in 2023’s Suitable Flesh, where she spent a Lovecraft adaptation doing the hardest thing a genre lead can do and making body-swap acting legible. She is joined by Mimi Rogers, who has been quietly excellent in this space since Ginger Snaps, plus Marcus Coloma, Morgan Peter Brown of Absentia, Kevin Keppy of Smile, Daniel Reed Ferrell and Margo Parker. Mike Hatton joined the ensemble in August.
When You Can See It
What Happened to Doris? holds its world premiere at Fantastic Fest in Austin on September 20. No wider release date has been announced, which is normal for a festival launch and no cause for worry yet. It is one of several titles we flagged in our Fantastic Fest 2026 lineup preview, and on the evidence of one clip, it is the one with the most to lose by getting the tone wrong.
