ABCs of Horror 3: “L” Is for Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

Paste’s ABCs of Horror 3 is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?

There are few cinematic burdens equal to being the female protagonist of a psychological horror film. To know that something in your environment is deeply wrong, corruptive or just plain evil … but to be simultaneously cursed by the genre’s tropes to the impossibility that anyone will believe you when you try to explain what is going on. The title character of Let’s Scare Jessica to Death actually understands this better than most in her position–she doesn’t immediately run screaming to her husband when strange things start happening in their new rural home, only to be rebuffed by assurances that everything is fine. No, Jessica knows full well that she won’t be believed, and that’s part of what makes the film such a dour, memorably bleak experience. She goes out of her way to hide the horrors she’s experiencing from the men around her, in a vain attempt to will the world back to normality. Take a guess as to whether that works out for her.

The paranoia of Jessica (Zohra Lampert) is easily understood by the audience from the opening moments of director John Hancock’s morose (northern?) gothic story. Recently released from some kind of vaguely defined mental institution into the care of husband Duncan (Barton Heyman) and their hippie friend Woody (Kevin O’Connor), Jessica is cautiously joyful at the prospect of moving away from the anxiety-inducing sprawl of New York City for a more pastoral existence on a small coastal island town accessible only by ferry. But after she spots the visage of an ethereal-looking young woman for the first time shortly after arrival, she immediately goes on the defensive, her inner monologue assuring her that she shouldn’t mention anything about what she hears or sees. “Don’t tell them,” she immediately asserts. “They won’t believe you.”

Except … is that actually Jessica’s inner monologue at all, or a projection from outside that is forcing its way into her subconscious? It’s a little convenient, after all, that the new home meant to be shared by the trio has come fully furnished with a fourth occupant, a squatter named Emily (Mariclare Costello) who also bears a striking resemblance to a woman in a musty old portrait in the attic–a woman who supposedly drowned in the nearby pond nearly a century earlier. Like “David” in Adam Wingard’s The Guest only a few days ago in this series, Emily has the motions of her “Well, I really should get out of your hair” routine down pat. But everyone is so charmed by her, there’s never any question of whether she’s going to be leaving.

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is often lumped into the canon of vampire cinema, and for obvious reasons–they literally use the word “vampire,” for one, in describing the legend of the the young woman who drowned in the pond, but remained as a specter roving the countryside forever afterward. And yet there’s almost no resemblance to the classic gothic vampire of Bram Stoker–nothing about reflections or garlic, sunlight, holy water or native soil. Emily may indeed be a bit on the bitey side, but even the thought of blood-drinking feels inconsequential. It’s not about the blood; it’s about mental and emotional domination. Nor does the film ever feel like a proper vampire film–it’s more like a lesser, Polanski-style psychological freakout. With that said, it’s no Repulsion, but it is oddly engrossing all the same.

Credit here is due to elements such as sound design and jarring transitions, as in the sequence where Jessica visits a henhouse to buy eggs and is confronted with the screaming anarchy of thousands of captive birds–a visual that can’t help but evoke what she likely experienced at the mental institution. The viewer is never allowed to feel comfortable in watching Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, as even the uplifting moments are always punctuated by unease that undermines them. Case in point: In the midst of a cheerful little dinner scene with her now quartet of a family unit, Jessica looks down at her piece of meat, pooling in red juices, and that unbidden voice softly speaks to her, saying “It’s blood, Jessica … blood.” There is no literally vocalized threat, but there doesn’t have to be–every glance from the gaggle of strange, addled men on the island communicates a steadily building resentment. The predatory “vampire” seems to be playing with its newest acquisition.

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death closes strong, in a nightmarish kaleidoscope of bloody imagery, the full influence of the island’s rotten core seemingly laid bare. Of course it’s impossible to say for certain how much of what our unreliable narrator experiences is technically real, but that’s beside the point–what matters is that we feel Jessica’s desperation, and we do. It’s the kind of unsettling but languid, suffocating but aimless horror movie that is rarely made in this day and age, something seemingly entirely without commercial viability. And yet, more than 50 years after release, the film’s reputation is arguably more polished now than it’s ever been. Like the girl in the pond, it seemingly hasn’t aged a day.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.