Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

This is, without question, the most frightening film I have ever seen. I long for the days when Hollywood could make a truly scary film on a cerebral level, without resorting to buckets of fake blood and wanton slashing. The scariest thing about scary movies is what you DON'T see. This one pushed all of my fear buttons, i.e. fear of the unknown, fear of inescapable doom, fear of the dark, fear of the mysterious "other." Don't take my word for it. See this film sometime for yourself and then just try to sleep with the closet door open.

Fmovies: Jessica(Zohra Lampert),her husband and their friend start a new life in the country,but Jessica,who has a history off mental illness,starts to believe the area is haunted and grows suspicious of the young woman who has joined them at their house..."Let's Scare Jessica to Death" is an excellent low-budget horror film loaded with eerie atmosphere of rising paranoia.Zohra Lampert does a terrific job showing us Jessica's growing desperation and there are some fairly gruesome gore effects at the end.The photography is gritty and the climax is extremely haunting.The viewer is never sure whether Jessica is really onto something sinister,or whether she's just going insane.There are some subtle touches of eeriness:Jessica's husband drives a hearse,and she decorates their new home with tracings she made from a local cemetery.So if you are a fan of old-fashioned spooky horror films give this overlooked gem a look.9 out of 10.

I wouldn't expect such a luridly titled horror film to be as multi-layered as LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH is. JESSICA is first and foremost a psychological drama of rural paranoia but the marginal use of the living dead in the final act (or at least a vague version of them left unexplained by the film) is worth noting for one reason: the 'living dead' films (and I use the term very loosely here) that followed in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD's wake in the early 70's were a lot more interesting and innovative (even if the executions often left a lot to be desired) than the typical "zombie" flicks that followed DAWN OF THE DEAD and more or less solidified what a 'zombie flick' is supposed to be.

What distinguishes the two eras is the bitter aftertaste of the hippie dream gone bad, the chemical hangover of the age of Aquarius crushed under the weight of its own hopes, one tab of LSD at a time. The titular heroine in JESSICA is taken to a remote countryhouse by her musician husband and his friend, to recover from a psychotic episode she suffered six months ago in New York. On arriving in the small village, they are greeted with hostility by the creepy old men that inhabit it ("damned hippies!"), and discover a young girl living in the house. They invite her to stay with them for a while but she quickly becomes romantically entangled with both men, while Jessica spends her time trying to hold onto her sanity which is not helped by apparitions of a girl in a white gown.

JESSICA at its heart is a moving psychodrama about a woman trying to hold onto her sanity as the world around her bears her false witness. When Jessica discovers the young girl living in the house but still needs her husband's confirmation that the girl is real and not a figment of her imagination ("it's okay, I saw it too Jess") we realize she's "broken before a frozen god" (to use Cormac McCarthy's words).

But even in 90 minutes running time, relatively unknown director John Hancock finds place in his movie for commentaries on small-town hostility, extra-marital drama, post-hippy broken dreams (the two men and Jessica arrive in the small time driving a hearse with the peace symbol stenciled on the side) and an intriguing mix of ambiguous supernatural horror and psychological drama that recalls some of the best moments of the genre, from THE HAUNTING to the works of Jacques Tourneur in the 40's. As Jessica mutters to herself in one of the many monologues delivered with a close-miked intimacy that almost makes us voyers of her psyche: "Madness and sanity, dreams and reality. I don't know which is which." If there are plot inconsistencies and threads unresolved (not least of all the white-gowned girl - which was added on the script on demand by the producers), they are overshadowed by the mesmerizing effect of the entire movie. Pivotal in the film is Zohra Lampert's stunning performance as Jessica, carrying with her the fragile air of a person who is trying to pass for normal but also a genuine love for life. As with Robert Altman's heroines in his psychodrama 3 WOMEN, Hancock has only sympathy for Jessica's drama. To quote Stephen Thrower, "Jessica walks with the gauche fragility of a doll hoping to pass for human; her movements are cautious re-enactments of grace, an approach well suited to the role of an intelligent, sensitive woman recovering from a nervous breakdown". It is truly an Oscar-worthy tour-de-force and definitel

Let's Scare Jessica to Death fmovies. I vaguely remembered this flick from when I was a young girl watching late night UHF TV and getting the monster theater signal out of Scranton/Wilkes Barre. It's original release predated me. What struck me was that everybody seemed to want to scare the Goya lady to death! All I knew of Zohra Lampert at that time was that she was the woman on TV who always said, "Goya, Oh boy-a!" To suddenly discover that the undead wanted to do her harm was very unsettling. I had some long nights filled with bad dreams after seeing this for the first time when I was only about 12 years old.

Fast forward many years later and I find a copy of LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH on a badly panned and scanned VHS print and rediscover those unsettling feelings all over again. Sure, it's not as slick and state of the art as I might have remembered it to be, but the performances are all pretty good and the story about Jessica and her husband moving into an old house and finding a transient vampire is pretty original. Certainly it's not a story that I've seen copied ever since and it simply celebrates the originality that inspired the horror genre in the early 1970s.

When, oh, when will this be released on DVD?

Saw LSJTD when I was an impressionistic teenager and have never been able to forget this movie. I have been a horror fan all my life and judge my reviews based on the time tested theory. Even twenty years later, whenever I watch this film, I am left with a deep sense of unease and a nostalgic chill that seeps deep into my bones. The acting is completely natural and unaffected, as if this film were shot without a script. The music is perfectly attuned to the bizarre climate of this isolated hell, as simple and sharp as the old fashioned carving knife used in one of the film's most horrific moments. Zohra Lampert should have received an Oscar nod for her brilliantly subtle portrayal of paranoia and terror. This film set the bar for the psychological horror film, and I have yet to be as affected by another.

If you can ignore the basic and sometimes crappy production values, you can expect a surprising good movie. This is a B movie after it shows in some of the dialogue. Don't let that distract you.

At times very slow moving and some would say quite boring to the point where a lot of people would turn it off.......DON'T. The last 30 minutes of so makes up for the whole movie and for me made it worth watching to the end.

Really good performances from Zohra Lampert and Mariclare Costello, neither of whom I had never heard of until I watched this. The rest of the actors are a bit wooden, but that could easily be blamed on the script and dialogue.

The really great thing about this movie is that the ending is completely open to interpretation. Did it all happen or was it all the imagination of a really messed up mind?

If you don't mind old movies with low production values this is one worth watching.

An easy 7/10 for me, well worth the 90 minutes.