They Won't Believe You: ‘Let’s Scare Jessica To Death’ (John D. Hancock, 1971)

Misunderstood upon its release, Let’s Scare Jessica To Death is now recognized as one of the finest horror films of the 1970s

The razor-thin margin between madness and sanity is an arena that horror films often exploit to comic extremes. A character experiences something so frightening that the film ends with them rocking uncontrollably on the floor of a padded cell, a breakdown caused by the horrors of this world — or, more often, from beyond it. Let’s Scare Jessica To Death (1971) begins with Jessica (Zohra Lampert) alone on a boat, quietly drifting across still water. Her head is hung low as she speaks in voice-over about how she can no longer tell the difference between nightmares and dreams. But John D. Hancock’s eerie debut feature film utilizes patience and restraint to explore the borderline of a woman being driven to madness by an increasingly hostile entity. When it premiered, its subtlety was misunderstood to be narrative confusion, but today its emphasis on atmosphere and its willingness to submerge itself in multi-layered psychological dramas makes it a forbearer of what so many horror films aim to achieve to this day.

We don’t know what Jessica went through yet, but we soon learn that she arrived in this place looking for a fresh start in a small New England town after a six-month stay in a mental hospital. Let’s Scare Jessica To Death is constructed around the idea that her mental state is under close observation by her husband, Duncan (Barton Heyman), and their friend Woody (Kevin O’Connor). Duncan left his position as the cellist in the New York Symphony to relocate with Jessica. He hopes to give his wife a chance to escape from the city and find herself again in a rural setting. The farm cost their entire savings. The move is a complete life restart that requires restoring the orchards and selling the left-behind antiques around the property in order to get by. The trio pull into town in their black hearse and a new voice in Jessica’s head starts driving her to the edge again. The beautiful young woman who has taken up residence in their formerly abandoned home doesn’t help matters either.

Their new Connecticut town barely has a pulse and the inhabitants are less than amused to see a hearse rolling through their quiet streets. The locals all appear to be of retirement age, have well-worn scowls, and sport bandages of varying severity. The late-stage New York hippies enter as a brash culture clash with the somber townsfolk. Jessica, Duncan, and Woody arrive with smiles, optimism, and fresh blood as they drive around the town’s central roundabout multiple times. The locals see it as an aggravating procession. There’s no laughter when the hearse goes by, but they do wipe away the word “love,” written in lipstick on the driver’s side door, at the first chance. The film’s original screenplay, written by Lee Kalcheim, was a horror-comedy titled It Drinks Hippie Blood that presumably relished in the death of hippie scum populating the countryside at the hands of a lake monster — who was to be killed by an American flag. Hancock obviously steered the production in another direction that more subtly incorporates the cultural conflict as an undertone in Let’s Scare Jessica To Death.

When the group pulls up to the farmhouse Jessica sees a red-haired woman sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch. By the time she’s looked to Woody and Duncan and back, the woman is gone and the chair is rocking so fast it squeaks. “Don’t tell them,” she says to herself. “They won’t believe you.” The fact that she heard someone whisper, “Jessica, why have you come here?” does nothing to ease her mind. She enters the house already wondering if the move was a bad idea, if she might not yet be well enough to be out of the hospital. But they quickly hear a noise upstairs. Woody smiles when he hears someone is in the house and returns with a bigger grin when he sees the alluring Emily (Mariclare Costello), who says she was living in the house because she thought it was abandoned. Jessica quickly feels relief that her mind was not playing tricks on her and invites Emily to stay the night.

The house itself is a large Victorian with surrounding orchards and river access. It is a prime destination for a rural reset. Against this backdrop their smiles all feel larger, but discontent also looms heavy. Houses are all weighed with history, but when Emily invites the group to perform a seance the first night it seems impossible that they won’t encounter a spirit. They sit together with a candle burning while Emily invokes the spirits of anyone who has ever died in the home. Everyone appears to be watching Jessica, the prevailing thought seeming to be if anyone hears anything it’ll be her. After failing to make contact, Emily asks Jessica to call out to the dead, which she does earnestly. She hears the name Abigail, and the words, “I’m here, Jessica. I’m here.” Jessica brushes it off and says she heard nothing, but surely recognizes the voice belongs to Emily, who stares through her, as if marking prey. She raises no alarms to the others that maybe there is something suspicious about their houseguest. This voice entering her head also subtly cues a change in Jessica: do the voices in her head even belong to her?

So much about Jessica is communicated through her eyes. Lampert gives an incredible performance navigating the complex emotions that she both feels and has projected upon her. She runs the gauntlet of emotion through the course of the film and never lets Jessica feel like a weak or helpless character. Her internal monologue gives us glimpses of her mental state and her fears that any slip-up will send her back to the hospital. Imperfections make her question herself, and she judges herself more harshly when she tries to imagine how the others are interpreting her wellbeing. Woody and Duncan watch Jessica so closely that they overlook warnings about Emily. Duncan seems especially high strung and it’s often Woody who tells him to calm down when Jessica says anything that seems like a yellow flag for her health. All the while, Jessica feels the weight of their eyes on her and smiling becomes a Sisyphian task.

From the start, the film aligns Jessica with the macabre. Her hobbies, particularly those centered in the graveyard, draw some raised eyebrows. The most animated we see Jessica is when she bursts out of the back of the hearse at a cemetery on the drive to their new home. She traces headstones onto oversized sheets of paper to hang as wallpaper on her bedroom walls. Tombstone tracings may not make the most inviting decor to most, but they certainly give a room an unmistakable ambiance, which the film will eventually take full advantage of. In her eyes it’s less a fascination with death and more of an appreciation of the beauty of tombstones that draws her to them. On one graveyard visit she pockets a mole that she finds crawling around and takes it home as an ill-fated pet. On other visits she sees a young girl in white standing on a hill who acts as an early source of menace. The girl runs away, barefoot, when Jessica approaches, leaving her to command herself to “act normal,” before returning to the hearse with her tombstone tracings in hand.

The house and farm are loaded with morbid visuals: Duncan’s giant cello case towers at the foot of the stairs like an upright coffin; Woody sports a gas mask while the pesticide-spraying tractor fills the orchard with a chemical mist; the riverfront teases that something sinister lurks just beyond the safety of the shore. These imposing images all affect the film in fatal ways, many as motionless or slow-moving images that hide in plain sight. There are no jump scares and the majority of the film’s scary scenes happen in broad daylight. The cover of darkness is unnecessary, as Hancock relies on horror caught in motion — fleeting visions disappearing into memories — to be the point of impact. The film’s funereal pace creates an atmosphere where any image or object could become a premonition of death. The most haunting visual comes when Jessica swims alone and sees a glistening image underwater. She hears her name whispered and sees a girl floating face down, her white dress and red hair bobbing. The shimmering stillness gives it an otherworldly quality, the surreal movement of water mixed with ghastly death. In a panic she swims back to shore, but, of course, Woody sees nothing in the water when he goes to look.

Among the attic and its various antiques is an old family photo framed in silver. While Woody tends to the crops, Duncan and Jessica load the car with the collection of antiques and ask the townsfolk, who circle up like a geriatric street gang and refuse to help them, where they can sell everything. They find an antiques store outside of town and the owner is a fellow ex-New Yorker. He is familiar with the family who first owned the house, the Bishops, and tells them about Abigail, the daughter in the photo. She drowned before her wedding and never even wore her wedding dress. The body was never found, though the woman in the photo looks nearly identical to Emily. Local lore says she roams the countryside as a vampire to this day.

The film has already made us question Emily and her background. The group bond with her almost immediately as she tells them that she moves from place to place with no real destination in mind. Her answers are vague and seem like someone who left a bad situation at home, all communicated through hippie lingo. Her words paint her as someone who won’t be restrained by the arbitrary lifestyle that society expects her to live, not as an undead predator setting a trap. Despite all the bloodsucking vampirism, Emily’s telepathy is the film’s great force of evil. She’s a master manipulator — of Jessica’s mind, of Woody’s feelings, and of Duncan’s desire. She plays on each person’s wants, or, maybe more accurately, the things they don’t: the free-spirited Woody can’t be with her; the married Duncan can. All the while, Emily infiltrates Jessica’s mind to tell her that Duncan doesn’t love her anymore, that “he’s mine now,” and makes physical advances within Jessica’s line of sight.

The soundtrack and the voices Jessica hears in her head serve a similar purpose. For Jessica, the whispers are a tormenting reminder that no matter the progress she’s made, distortions of perception will almost always draw the worst assumptions from even her closest companions. It’s easier to stay quiet than be honest about what she hears. For viewers, the soundtrack is a direct line to the film’s particular style of horror. At times it sounds like an electrified breeze sagging under the weight of heavy echo. Composer Orville Stoeber watched the film and played along in real time and hoped to give the film an edge. He began with acoustic sounds then moved to a synth-heavy score, an early usage in horror. The score adds a heft, a chilling gust that seeps in with a touch of the unnatural, an impossible-feeling communication passing through your head.

One night Emily escalates her actions. She makes quick work of Jessica’s pet mole with a knife and then sleeps with Duncan. In the morning everyone looks to Jessica when they find the bloody mole in its bowl. Duncan appears upset with Jessica; Woody appears upset that Jessica might not be doing well. The women go for a swim and Emily applies sunscreen to Jessica’s back and seductively lowers her swimsuit straps. Uncomfortable with the advance, Jessica tries to swim away. Emily’s apology is to dunk her underwater. When Jessica surfaces she’s alone, the words “nobody’s here” ringing out. She turns to see Emily, now in the white dress, walking out of the water. She has taken her form as Abigail Bishop and approaches Jessica with arms out, dripping wet, but moving slow enough to disarm Jessica’s instincts to run. Almost as if lulled by the impossibility of what she’s seeing, Jessica freezes in place. The horror in this instance is trust-based as Emily stops short of Jessica and just stands in front of her. Only once the apparent threat has faded does she lunge for Jessica’s exposed neck. As the lifeless town is enlivened by the prospect of blood, the house stands no chance against the siege. Jessica locks herself in her bedroom and covers her head with a tombstone sketch. She has nowhere to turn where death hasn’t seeped in. Emily’s telepathic taunts grow more menacing: “I’m still here. You’ll never get better. I’m in your blood.”

The terms “hallucinatory” and “atmospheric” are commonly tossed about in regards to Jessica. While there is truth to those descriptors — I used one in the establishing paragraph earlier — it took a long time for them to be used in a complimentary manner. The film didn’t receive the warmest reception upon its premiere. In his 1971 New York Times review, Roger Greenspun largely sums up the critical consensus of the time when he says the film ceases to make sense about 30 minutes in. But given that this is a film that posits itself as existing between sense and insanity, this should be taken mostly as proof of a well-executed concept. Allowing the action to exist in a space where not everything makes perfect sense only enhances the atmosphere and makes Jessica’s plight more compelling. Horror in 1971 was in a transitionary period — after Night of the Living Dead but before independent horror fully blossomed in America — and Let’s Scare Jessica To Death manages to walk the line its predecessors drew while also veering off into stylistic territory that had yet to be fully explored. In the book Nightmare USA, author Stephen Thrower routinely references Jessica alongside Messiah of Evil (1973) as films that were misunderstood for putting atmosphere first. He also calls Jessica “one of the most unfairly neglected horror films of the 1970s.” So in that sense it’s understandable if this felt at the time like an outlier. But Greenspun closes the review by saying Lampert is the only actor whose character “develops” in the film, which he phrases as a critique — not of the film, but of Lampert. He then talks about how Lampert’s beauty affects the film: “And although she is beautiful and, as always, breathlessly appealing, she projects a personality too forcefully complex for a role that requires only sympathetic passivity in the face of persecution.” Now… Reimagine this film if Lampert played it as a doting simpleton whose arc begins as confused and ends with empty screaming and a bloody death. Sure, that may make more archetypical sense, but when has sense ever done any good in horror? The film would lose its mystique and power. Lampert understood the film and brought the proper balance of strength and vulnerability to her performance. Horror is often a reliable cultural barometer and this is a prime example of a forward-thinking piece that was overlooked in its time. It makes me squirm to think that Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is a perfect candidate for a 2020s remake — this is the sophisticated type of horror film studios like A24 probably think they are making.

The title is a brilliant red herring. It creates the impression that everything is a game and that the end result may well be Jessica’s death. She presumably should have been the easiest target for Emily, but the vampire underestimated Jessica in her plan to scare her to death. Jessica will forever be the one who escaped. As she drifts alone on a paddle boat, Jessica looks back to shore and sees Emily and her victims watching her float just out of their reach. Their icy staredown is the real power struggle in the film. The undead creature was bested by a woman that everyone feared may suffer a mental collapse at any point and turned out to be the only one strong enough to withstand the presence of evil. And though she escaped, Jessica is doomed to a fate on par with death, an interminable Catch-22. If she tells the truth of what happened she’ll be thrown back into a mental hospital without so much as a chance to prove her story; If she stays quiet, the tale will drive her mad. The wraparound narrative creates the impression that she will forever have to navigate between those dreams and nightmares, sanity and madness. And while sitting on that boat, she has no options for help. She’s broke, has nowhere to go, and ends where she began. As the introductory monologue replays, this time we know she just narrowly escaped evil, that she’s seen the impossible collide with reality. She’s triumphant, but, like Emily/Abigail, Jessica is now doomed to wander alone. She hasn’t been scared to death, per se, but what remains after a vampire has sucked so much of her life away?

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