Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is a 1971 horror film about a recently institutionalized woman who has bizarre experiences after moving into a supposedly haunted country farmhouse and fears she may be losing her sanity once again.
Q: When you watch this film today, do you like it?
A: It’s like watching an old dream.
From the website dedicated to the film, the answer is from the film’s composer Orville Stoeber.
For Halloween, and the days beyond, I suggest a movie that I dare you to watch alone with the lights, and your other devices, turned off, and a window open in a room you can’t quite see from your lonely spot in the house. It’s a film that has a growing reputation and is now available on blu ray, well worth finding if you want something you’ll feel and think about as the Halloween items at stores turn from ghouls into Santas.
Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, directed by John D. Hancock, sounds like one of those cinematic children of Whatever Happened To Baby Jane movies, of which there are more than there need to be. When I first stayed up late and sat down to watch it on TV, on Night Owl theatre in Columbus Ohio that’s what I expected and wasn’t necessarily looking forward to. Why? Because these films, the children of Baby Jane not Baby Jane itself, are what I put into a group I call Scooby Doo Endings; movies that seem to be supernatural but turn out to be elaborate hoaxes, ridiculously impossible elaborate hoaxes to be precise. Instead of evil as a protagonist the stories are about trying to drive somebody crazy to get their money or their property, snore… Historically horror films and fiction move in and out of the supernatural. The elaborate explaining away of anything possibly beyond reality at times has served to allow mainstream publishers to print such material or for censors to pass for release a horror film. One argument would be that monsters and for kids and not for adults or “serious” publications. That’s a way of not admitting, that it’s too disturbing for a mass audience to deal with the supernatural in a serious way.
The 1960’s were dominated by supernatural horror films, many of them period films, by the end of the 1970’s the slashers had taken over after the climax of the supernatural film The Exorcist happened, after that came the children of Psycho films and Giallo stepchildren, the Slasher films era.
Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is a catchy but misleading title. The only ‘us’ scaring her is the talented filmmakers. The film on one level is a modern day vampire film, a tiny bit along the lines of the well regarded Romero film Martin. I prefer Jessica to Martin not only because I prefer stories that suggestively hint at the supernatural better when they actually are, or could be, supernatural. Martin exists to totally demystify vampires and without some element of mystery, to me, vampires aren’t as convincing or fascinating. Jessica’s vampire, like Martin’s, uses a blade instead of fangs to draw blood.
The argument for people who prefer “real” horror films because they can actually happen. The phrase it’s frightening because it could be real is the mantra for fans of this approach. In fairness this type of fan probably prefers films with a straight ahead plot with no twists or mystery to them.
I prefer horror that leads us to believe in the unreality or the supernatural as being the realm of deeply disturbing horror. I’d argue that most Scooby Doo structured movies totally fall apart as reality anyway. I’m more likely to believe in a ghost than I am a series of complicated hoaxes so good that they are convincing as ghosts. The best moments are the ones when you actually thought the monsters were real, not a guy in a suit or a projected image, or the product of drugs being slipped into someone’s soup.
If you’ll forgive one last explanation, there is nothing more irksome to an audience than to spend most of the narrative getting them to believe in the supernatural and then have it, all be a dream, or all turn into, “And I would have gotten away with it to if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids and your dog.”
Jessica’s monsters are vampires, but even more so the film’s focus is a potentially well-worn premise of a crazy person, recently cured, who returns into the outside world only to be confronted with events that, if shared with anyone else, will only be seen as insane and put our hero, Jessica in this case, back in a rubber room for life. As Dario Argento once said this type film is about “the volcano of the mind.”
One of the best of these, in short form, is Richard Matheson’s, Nightmare and 20,000 Feet, which puts a man in an airplane seeing a monster of the wing that nobody else sees. It is a Hollywood tradition that nobody is ever put away for having mental problems who actually has them, and or that they are made much worse by being put in a Cuckoo’s Nest. Like many Hollywood tropes (I hate that word but it’s become a modern day film writer’s go-to-word and it applies here) it may actually be a damaging lesson people may learn from watching too many movies.
Like many great movies, regardless of genre, the quality of the acting—and most of this film’s cast went or, or is still going on, with acting careers. In the lead, Jessica, is played by Zorha Lampert in one of horror films’ great performances. All her reactions and line readings seem spontaneous and unpredictable.
To this production package, she is the fading, or almost, star name cast in a semi-independent genre film. She’d been in a Warren Beatty film for god’s sake, not to mention being nominated for Tony awards for Broadway shows. She could have become a movie star but became something even less likely and under-appreciated, a working actor. And if her eventual obituary will say, “best remembered” for this film, well damn well deservedly so, it’s not unusual for someone with seemingly classier credits in bigger things to end up being known for being great in a genre film, it’s part of a rare thing in the world, the fairness of time overcoming the popular mainstream culture of the moment.
Unlike many of these films where everybody but the audience sees the lead character as sympathetic, Lampert as Jessica seems, as a friend of mind puts it, “A weird chick,” right from the start. There is as awkwardness to her, an apartness…. Her instability mentally seems possibly dangerous, or dangerous in the way of being in the presence of someone who might “cause a scene” at any moment.
Certainly what her friends and she are doing, driving around in a hearse, with LOVE written in one spot and a Diver’s flag sticker in the back, seems stranger now that it would have at the time. They go to a creepy small town in outer corners of the world, one that seems to be populated only by bandaged old men. Not to make too many analogies to the dangers of the 70’s which is when the movie was made and when it takes place, but anything done outside of society and the city was an expression of freedom at the time, don’t forget Woodstock the watershed moment, for the eastern young generation especially, was held at a rain soaked muddy farm in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania.
Here we have the backwaters and forgotten graves of Connecticut. Despite the already working cast of Hollywood actors—as opposed to the uneven nearly amateur acting found, still today, in independent films, the film feels like the independent films that mean so much especially to the horror genre. The town of old men are probably local “actors” (if you know what I mean by using those quotation marks) and there is nothing subtle about their dislike for ‘our heroes.’ They town folk vandalize the hearse by rubbing the word, Love, off of it. This sets up the love vs. evil underpinnings to the central issue, Jessica’s sanity, for the rest of the film.
The locations of this film seem authentic and are, they are moody and atmospheric but not created for the film but rather, found for the film. Fans can still find them and go, as Jessica does, to the graveyard to trace, by rubbing, the stone’s carvings and inscriptions to take with you. And Jessica seems to have taken something with her right away in memorable sequences of her tracings flapping against the wall in a floral bedroom. Even the sheets have a floral design, keeping the idea of being outside even while supposedly safe in bed. The bedroom isn’t about being afraid of what’s outside coming to get you, but what’s already in there with you and as she’s with her husband in the bedroom this makes his sexual presence part of a threat. Really it’s sexual dysfunction going on here. All the characters need one another and this need isn’t going to end well for anybody, other than the vampire.
This isn’t a horror film where the man is going to save the girl.
Now today watching the film you have the frozen in time old east coast elements confronting the now lost in time, hippies(I’m using this term loosely) gone to the country. Jessica, her husband and a male friend have sold everything and come here to try to live off the land and protect Jessica’s fragile mental health. It’s almost, for them, and end of the freedom lifestyle—though the film was shot in 1970—it feels more like a mid or later 70’s film and is largely free from people saying “Man” a lot. Good to great films always seem more contemporary than they are.
At the time you’d have the adults vs. rebellious youth tension which would put the young audience on the side of the hippies (producers of genre films especially knew the main audience for films were those under 30 even back then.) Watching the film now we have two authentic feeling cultures clashing and in the middle is the lost in both Jessica. So despite us feeling outside of her experience she’s the best thing we’ve got to identify with. We are further taken into her self-destructive head through great use of voice over thoughts—done as whispers—telling us what Jessica feels about everything.
A trivia question for a film fan, what director first used voice over in a film to express the inner thoughts of a character. The answer? Hitchcock. This film’s director John Hancock watched many Alfred Hitchcock films while rewriting and preparing to make this one (The finished film’s screenplay credits are both pseudonyms). Hancock claims now that the idea of using voiceover in this film came about during post production. If so, it fits so perfectly and adds so much to the film; it’s almost hard to believe this was the case. Lampert’s reactions and the unsettling whispered thoughts get under your skin and fit so perfectly it seems it must always have been intended this way—not to underestimate how a film can be made or broken in post-production. Director Hancock, it’s worth noting here, was the director who finished the later horror film Wolfen, replacing—during post production—Michael Wadleigh, the director of the famous Woodstock documentary, and also effectively ending Wadleigh’s feature film career. Hancock was heavily involved in Let’s Scare Jessica To Death’s post production, to the point that the composer calls him an egomaniac for being so involved with the music.
Voice over in films is not a sure bet. You can think of probably more parodies using it than real cases of it working. In this film it glues Jessica’s view of the unsettling events to her. Michael Caine in his acting instructional video—sort of the mental equivalent to Jane Fonda’s workout tapes—demonstrates how to make voice over work. Well Lambert knows the trick, even if she did it after the fact in this case. Once you hear her whispered “it’s blood, Jessica,” or “They won’t believe you.” it’s impossible to forget. Truer also to reality of schizophrenia which is the hearing of voices—rather than a common movie depiction of the person who turns out to not to really be there, as in say, Fight Club. Jessica doesn’t just hear her own voice, sometimes it’s that of the vampire or spirits or just so many it can’t be determined.
Now this is a first feature film for director Hancock, (an experienced stage director) and having admitted, himself, that he watched Hitchcock films you might expect this to be a Brian De Palma or John Carpenter exercise in Xeroxing the master, but it’s not. Hancock is less visually copying Hitchcock’s style, than taking various lessons anyone can, and even should take, instead. Principles of color as an expressive and organizing principal, use of extreme close ups or long shots, frames within frames, and so on. He also pays attention to how characters and things enter and exit the frame, or appear and disappear from it. This is something rarely talked about in Hitchcock’s style.
This does not seem like a stage director directing his first movie approach. In fact there isn’t much dialogue. There is almost as much or more of the internal voice over in the film than conversation scenes. Though the characters are believable there isn’t a lot of back story explained to the audience. These could be paper thin characters; in fact the script does almost nothing in that regard, and doesn’t need to as it turns out. Much of this is thanks to the performances.
But knowing the Hitchcock influence/education, you see instead the use of editing to create suspense and perhaps the voice over and very specific attention of sound and music, as a way to express character and create suspense and fear. Another lesson is that the film wastes no time, moving at a fast pace.
In a nod or just coincidence, this film features one of the great Victorian mansions in film, in this case a real location—still existing in increasingly dilapidated state. It has a disproportionately tall asymmetrical tower, here shrouded in real fog, again a ‘found location’ as good or better than one created in LA, but with the added bonus of being genuine. Though from what little can be learned about behind the scenes of this film the interiors were shot elsewhere which probably robs the film of more of this house’s personality. The tower seems to be built to watch for something, but what?
As soon as our group arrives Jessica sees an almost obscured figure rocking on the porch. This is one of the few moments of Jessica clearly seeing something that isn’t there. On repeat viewings you can try to figure out who this hallucination could be, there seems to be hints of blood. Right after this as they come inside she sees dark legs and feet run through frame, immediately her husband says, “Don’t worry I saw it too.” The following, search-the-house, sequence is suspenseful and has a well-timed shock to it, but what’s unusual is that Jessica is smiling during most of it because she knows it’s not just her. The audience is in suspense, Jessica isn’t.
The resident of the house they soon find is the vampire of the story. She is already in the house when our main characters arrive. Despite the lack of fangs and most of the trappings of traditional vampire elements do exist. On being the idea that a vampire must be invited into the home of those who become its victims. Here the situation is reversed but twice the vampire is invited to stay and the dialogue of the vampire in these opening scenes is typically loaded with thrown away lines about eternal life, like, “It’s been forever, or ages.” As perhaps happened more in the 70’s or certainly in films our group breaks out into a song which is also loaded with eternity and though on screen the duo of instruments is a bass and guitar, the bass is a low end rumbling bass synth—a tonality used in typical, and typically effective fashion throughout the film. The score is a bit like that of Halloween as far as being keyboard driven, the harsh sounds of synth mostly used for horror and suspense and the piano or guitar for more human elements. The electronic music is credited to Walter Sear. It’s a very effective score using sounds that are almost a heartbeat at times or almost wind.
Sound and music are key here, the opening sequences of the film, which we only learn later are flashbacks, symbolically introduce Jessica as coming out of hearse at the start, are accompanied by wind and nature rural sounds, insects and what’s probably a loon. The locations change but this general chorus of sounds remains, giving it a feeling of ominous unreality and unity.
The opening scenes are also a not-too-smooth mix of heavily edited location dialogue and post production dubbed voices, like Carnival of Souls or the original, Night of the Living Dead; this gives away the lower budget nature of the film, but also adds a layer of lonely unreality that, given the nature of these films, is strangely an asset. Of these three films only Carnival is beautifully shot film, Jessica has several distracting moments of over-lighting from Bob Baldwin, a DP with a long though not very distinguished career.
Primal natural forces work effectively in horror fiction. And a fundamental element of life is water, and right from the start this film puts us on a misty lake. The original title for script that became this film was It Drinks Hippy Blood and it was about a monster from a lake that kills Hippies. If you look up writer, Lee Kalcheim, mostly TV and comedic credits since this film was made, you can partly imagine what kind of film he had in mind, in an online interview he says he would have preferred his original comedic take be used on the film. Well Hancock, rewrote the script but the lake remains, and changed it into something, I’ll boldly say is much better, credit the film’s producer, Charles B. Moss, with allowing this to happen as long as the one mute character was retained along with blood drinking. (No actual onscreen blood drinking or killing occurs except at the finale.)
The lake scenes feature eerie shots of something under the water, perhaps the actress or a doll, they never fail to be frightening. Shot in October in naturally cold water the frantic reactions of the cast are probably propelled by the urge to get out of the water fast. These underwater shots supposedly helped land the director a high profile movie involving a shark and the dialogue here playfully refers to a shark in the lake as well.
The only explanation the film offers, or needs, for the ghost/vampire is that she drowned herself in the lake and a mention that she never got to wear that wedding dress. In movies vampires are usually created by being bitten by other vampires, creating a, which came first the chicken or the egg conundrum, but in folklore and fiction can be created by some sin—like suicide, in this case. In Asia there is the great term, a hungry ghost. The vampire here isn’t just drinking blood, in fact you never see that happen, but it’s drinking in Jessica’s sanity and devouring individual personalities—which has created a sort of Invasion of the Body Snatchers-like nearby small town.
Now credit for inspiration for the script that was shot is now given—by the IMDb, not by the filmmakers, as being from the novella, Carmilla—the most adapted work by Sheridan Le Fanu, a proto psychological horror writer. I don’t see much connection unless you are to say that any female vampire story comes from Carmilla. The source is also seen as the first lesbian vampire character, creating a whole genre of for H.L.A. film fans, nothing wrong with that as far as it goes. I just don’t see Carmilla as having much to do with this film.
Jessica finds in the attic relics of the house’s history. A knife and old white dress that she will later playfully put on—connecting her to the lost vampire who never got to be a bride—and allowing the possibility that Jessica may be Norman-Batesing-out, later in the story, assuming the costume of a vampire to kill—I’ll talk about the possibilities this is all just in Jessica’s mind later.
Also in the attic she sees a framed family portrait photograph in a silver frame—silver being a pure metal related to both vampire and werewolf destruction. In this photo only the vampire distractedly looking away from the photographer—setting the vampire as an outsider just as Jessica is. The photo reminds me of the disturbing final image of a photograph in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. Mariclare Costello, of the entire cast she probably has had the best career. She plays the attractive and dangerous ghost/vampire Emily, wearing a blood red shirt as well as her red hair. In this way she represents the tradition, I was going to say proud but it’s more odd, tradition of what Cartman on South Park would call, Gingers. The tradition continues still with this year’s Lucio Fulci-esque Hereditary.
The film sets up the elements of the supernatural but isn’t going to go, as Heredity ultimately does, into the protracted details, I prefer to word mechanics, of Satanism or paganism. The only overt moment of this, and it’s kind of a dud moment, is when Emily says out of the blue, “Let’s have a séance.” Luckily, for this film, it doesn’t need any spiritual or supernatural hokum to propel the story, only to set it up.
Jessica’s reactions to her husband, and their male friend, being alternately attracted to Emily show the sexual tension as accelerating the disasters to come. Effectively when Jessica feels her husband slipping towards Emily she is seen, not lusting, but longing perhaps a better word, for their friend—who spends most of his time driving a tractor around spraying poisonous pesticide on their apples. No one refers to this as their Eden, but Emily does come forward at one point offering an apple.
There is an unfortunate supporting mole (yes, mole, not role) in the film—low budget preventing using a mole they use a mouse and there is a bad moment where Jessica says it has no eyes right as we clearly see that it does have them. Oh well, like most small animals the mole is the first victim. Everyone genuinely seems to suspect that Jessica did it.
The best just pure dramatic scene is one in the previously mentioned floral bedroom where Jessica and her husband clearly break up. It’s ugly in its reality. I’m a big fan of horror in particular when it can make character drive the plot and vice versa. Which this films does really well. It’s tedious to sit through scenes in a film just there to establish character, you know in disaster films that you’re just waiting for the tidal wave to flip the ship over—for an example. In this case Jessica’s husband ultimate fate is because he leaves the house to go into town in order to call back to the city to get her back into the asylum.
From this point on the film builds quickly to its climax and a return to the beautiful images of a loan figure on a boat at dawn, or what now can be seen as sunset, that started the film with the same Jessica voice over, about the impossibility of telling nightmares from reality. All the credits, there is only a title card at the film’s start, roll over this image as Jessica slumps down into the boat. It’s a powerful thing to pull off repeated imagery and wording and have it actually mean something both more and different at the end.
At some point in my own directing life a, now sadly dead, critic who became a friend, John Thonen, said that my own films are about characters with reality problems. A good catch all phrase that I guess does apply to the films I’ve directed that I’ve had the most to do with, and in some ways could also be said to take some inspiration from Let’s Scare Jessica to Death. My most recent film Asylum Of Darkness people have asked me, so is the main character just crazy, is that what is going on? Director Hancock has said of his film’s ending that the beauty of it is that there is no answer to that question. Well, I have to disagree, for some reasons I’ve already mentioned about the dangers and failings of Scooby Doo explanations, but more so for some very specific-to-this-film reasons.
Let’s Scare Jessica to Death frequently cuts away to events that Jessica herself doesn’t witness and isn’t involved in and these scenes for the most part can’t be explained or understood as being ambiguous as to what happens. Unlike many films the main doubter of Jessica’s own sanity is Jessica herself in this film and for me that’s what makes the ending so tragic. We don’t doubt that she’s survived a supernatural onslaught, but she doubts it. She’s lost her battle to know what’s real and what’s not and that’s what’s so haunting.
Despite what I feel is a pretty cheesy poster, the film’s release was a success and it was a launching point for director Hancock into mainstream Hollywood production. He made a film of Bang The Drum Slowly with Robert De Niro and Michael Moriarty—who himself sadly later became considered too crazy and politically out of control to be employable. And then came his chance of a lifetime to direct the sequel to the then biggest movie of all time Jaws 2. I remember reading an article as production began with Hancock speaking about how he was portraying the town of Amity as collateral damage to the first films shark attacks. It’s now a dilapidated ghost town with chief Brody remaining to battle a returning shark, almost the ghost of the first shark for his own and the town’s soul.
To this end Hancock took time shooting paint peeling off of signs and shutters of empty homes banging in the wind. One scene in the finished film, attributed to Hancock, shows dark empty boats in a harbor moving slightly and eventually we see the brooding figure of a sharp beneath the surface, before its fin rises and slides by the darkened town. Well, all this sounds exactly like what you’d think Hancock could bring to the film, but he alienated lead actor Roy Scheider who felt Hancock should be shooting him, not deteriorating buildings, and Hancock says he became the victim of being a middle man between the producers and Universal Studio’s head who wanted wife Lorraine Gary to go out in a boat and rescue the kids at the end of the film, something producers Zanuck and Brown were totally against. It would take more painful sequels to finally achieve Gary going to sea. So Hancock was fired from the film; it’s worth remembering that Spielberg himself felt he’d be fired from Jaws on almost a daily basis.
The rest of Jaws 2 was directed by Jeannot Szwarc, retaining most of Hancock’s cast—many of whom are excellent—and the general script—like most Hollywood mega movies the scripts are shaped around the effects ‘gags’ and sequences. The novelization for the film, written from the script Hancock was making, reveals this pretty clearly, though it does retain a more moody approach, it also retains many of the same basic problems. Bill Badalato, Let’s Scare Jessica’s, co-producer, survived Hancock’s departure, and did production work on Jaws 2 and went on to a big Hollywood career, Top Gun being among his still on-going credits, which include some of Hancock’s follow up films.
Jaws 2 lacks much authentic atmosphere Hancock might have given it and which the masterful first film had—because to save money and time, most of it has sunny bright blue seed weed filled Florida waters and pretty beaches unconvincingly trying to be haunted old New England. It does deserve credit for not being a terrible as the sequels, and rip off shark movies that continue to this very day (as I write this The Meg, is still in some theatres).
Hancock feels he would have made a more valid film and that getting fired really damaged his career. Certainly the latter is true. But he didn’t stop, and hasn’t stopped, making films and those films show that he’s not a just a horror director. Like Szwarc, Hancock eventually made a Christmas film, Prancer, that’s become a seasonal staple—along with effective horror director Bob Clark’s A Christmas Story. Is there something about the spirits of the undead and the spirit of Christmas? If you can evoke one does that mean you can evoke other?
As far as genre material, Hancock did direct episodes of the 80’s Twilight Zone revival series—I can’t say I remember those as being of much distinction—which is true of most of that revival, which featured other genre favorite directors as well.
And he returned to a full on horror film called Suspended Animation, a film that tries and succeeds for the most part at balancing dark humor and horror, it’s not as unique and memorable as Let’s Scare Jessica… but also shows him to be pushing forward and not looking back as a filmmaker.
There is much more to learn about Let’s Scare Jessica To Death, but there isn’t much of a way to learn it out there. You can and should visit the only official website I quote from at the top of this article. Stephen King deserves credit for putting it on his list of essential films to see and more recently it ended up on some top 100 horror films of all times list—which is certainly deserves to be on. The DVD of the film is good looking and one can hope that OLIVE FILMS, who had done many other Paramount films, gets to do a blu ray of the film, along the lines of their recent deluxe editions with the extras this film deserves.