Nick Simon’s next movie is What Happened to Doris? The film, written by screenwriter Thomas Fenton, is a retelling of the true-life haunting of Doris Bither.
If that name isn’t familiar to you, Doris Bither’s story was also the inspiration for the 1982 movie The Entity. Barbara Hershey starred in that as Carla Moran, but the character, and the main points of her story, were directly inspired by Bither’s story.
In What Happened to Doris, Heather Graham plays Doris Bither. The film reportedly focuses more heavily on Doris’s emotional struggles not just with the haunting, but with people not believing her.
As the true story goes, Doris lived with her four children in Culver City, California. Doris and her sons claimed to see semi-transparent entities in their home, Doris said she was physically assaulted. At least one of her sons claimed to have been physically attacked as well. At the time, UCLA had a Parapsychology Lab, and they began investigating after a friend of Doris informed them about her experiences. The ensuing investigation claimed evidence of poltergeist activity and the appearance of strange lights and figures, but the case was ultimately left open-ended.
Doris Bither died in 1999, and director Nick Simon said, while talking to The Horrored Girls, that one of her sons told him the ghost had followed her the rest of her life, and eventually killed her. Here’s Nick Simon’s full quote:
“The ghost followed her the rest of her life. And her son told me straight up, he eventually got her. That’s what her son told me. He killed her at the end in 1999.”
