Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

Let's Scare Jessica to Death, despite its title, vintage, and poster, is not a teen horror film full of sex and violence. Rather, it's a slow, meditative horror film about a married woman who has a psychotic break and is moved into the rural countryside by her husband to get some fresh air and rest. Furthermore, it's a subtle wake for the hippie movement that heralds the arrival of the bleak seventies. You see, when director John Hancock was handed the original script, which was a shlocky "B" horror film about a monster slaughtering no-good hippies, designed from the ground-up play to an audience of distracted, horny teenagers at drive-ins, he accepted the job on the condition he could rewrite the whole screenplay from scratch, and apparently, he was given the greenlight. Hancock would go on to drastically rearrange and reimagine the story to bring it in line with, of all things, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and its beloved '61 film adaptation The Innocents, meaning that instead of a mindless slasher flick, we get a slow-burning character study that is so dedicated to building an atmosphere of mystery and total narrative ambiguity that it could turn off a great many viewers looking for a cheap thrill. I, for one, find its literary ambitions to be quite charming if not always exactly riveting.

Its rustic setting is great, and it makes fairly effective use of it, especially the feeling of isolation it can bring about. Maybe being stuck in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere wasn't the best thing for Jessica's health after all, and her overactive imagination and nervous disposition certainly can't be helped by the locals, who act suspiciously and talk under their breaths whenever her or her husband go into town. It never quite crosses over fully into folk horror, especially given its refusal to confirm or deny the presence of the supernatural, but it's close enough to check a fair few of those boxes all the same. The atmosphere is also a clear winner: some will consider it far too languid, but I found it more unconventional and "deliberately paced," I'll say. Jessica's voice-over narration is a big help to create that literary feel of being trapped in a single character's POV, and unlike virtually every film that uses it, it never becomes a mechanism for easily unloading exposition on the audience. The patient ebb and flow of the film also helps set up and deliver some of the more genuinely startling jump scares I've seen in a while.

I like the characters a lot, especially the titular Jessica and her newest acquaintance, a squatter who she discovers living in their new country home. The things they do with her are quite unique and down-to-earth by horror movie standards, and very obviously influenced by classic horror literature, but to get too much into it would be a massive spoiler. The only character I didn't like much was the husband's tagalong friend who helps mow the lawn and whatnot, but who takes up lots of screentime putting the moves on the mysterious squatter who is so clearly not interested in him. I guess I can see the point of these scenes, but they do feel kind of like padding. The relationship between Jessica and her husband, meanwhile, feels authentic and quite mature for a film that looks so much like drive-in fodder. A lot of that is down to the believable performances, especially the off-kilter and memorable performance by Jessica's actress, Zohra Lampert, which may be the highlight of the whole film, though some bit performances by what must be real locals are quite seriously godawful, and do a lot to take one out of the film. Luckily, they get very little screentime.

It's all tied up with an ending that brings everything full circle, and that I found satisfying. True, the third act leading up to it was chaotic and not a little amateurish in a way that often made it comical, but at least it's not routine and unengaging the way critics then and now are fond of describing it. Even the parts of the film that I didn't quite love, and the extremely slow pacing and refusal to blow its cover come off as not so much pretentious as just adorably earnest. Because of this, it's hard not to respect its efforts to be a 'proper' horror film and give it the benefit of the doubt, even when it does get kind of boring.

The look of the film hides nothing about its lineage: this is a seventies film, and one with little money to throw around. Few characters, few locations, and an often amateurish vibe are offset by creativity in the framing of its shots, though, and great use of a great setting. You gotta love a good snap zoom, or three. Kids today, I tell you: it's always 'pan' this and 'dolly' that. Whatever happened to good ole' fashioned snap zooms? Sure, it's rough as hell around its edges, but I'll take that over polished to death any day, though that's certainly no excuse for some of it the rougher parts. Lastly, its folk soundtrack was wonderful and a perfect complement to the homespun visuals, though it often slips into traditional unadorned solo synth scoring that was de rigueur for the era. Long story short: Let's Scare Jessica to Death isn't a perfect film, and at times, I don't even know if it was all that good or not, but damn if it didn't kind of win me over, one way or another.