{"id":15225,"date":"2020-10-23T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-23T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=15225"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:17:39","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:17:39","slug":"classic-corner-lets-scare-jessica-to-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/classic-corner-lets-scare-jessica-to-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Classic Corner: Let’s Scare Jessica to Death<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When we talk about the influence of Halloween<\/em>, it\u2019s important to understand exactly what that means. Even as something of a horror amateur (at least compared to the encyclopedic horror fans I\u2019m lucky enough to read, know, and even edit) I always parroted that conventional wisdom that John Carpenter\u2019s 1978 masterpiece \u2013 a film I genuinely consider one of my all-time favorites \u2013 had radically altered the horror landscape, its massive commercial success prompting a tidal wave of imitators. Those films, I understood, copied its elegantly simple premise (mysterious, masked killer, plucks off attractive young people one by one), stripped it of its craftsmanship, cranked up the gore, and \u2013 for a time, anyway \u2013 made a mint, because you could make those movies cheap, and their young target audience went to see them whether they were good or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As time has passed, I\u2019ve come to understand this as an oversimplification; some of the \u201880s slasher movies are quite well-crafted, and even many of those that aren\u2019t offer their own kind of sleazy pleasures. But what I never truly understood, as an A\/B\/C cause-and-effect situation, is what was lost<\/em> in horror cinema when the slasher took over. That loss has been clarified, for this viewer anyway, by the excellent \u201c\u201970s Horror\u201d program that The Criterion Channel has run this month \u2013 a selection filled with films where scares and even shocks are secondary to mood, tension, and emotional unease.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take, for example, John D. Hancock\u2019s 1971 psychological thriller \u201cLet\u2019s Scare Jessica to Death.\u201d This viewer had heard the title over the years, and had always assumed it to be some kind of slasher-adjacent something-or-other \u2013 something akin to all those \u201880s prank-gone-awry movies, perhaps. And its opening scene seems to confirm that suspicion \u2013 a solitary figure, alone in a boat on a lake, a tableau not unlike an early \u201cFriday the 13th\u201d movie. But the mood is immediately somber, mournful even, and the woman\u2019s voice-over is hesitant and frightened: \u201cI sit here and I can\u2019t believe that it happened, and yet I have to believe it. Dreams or nightmares. Madness or sanity. I don\u2019t know which is which.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Hancock will return to this moment at the end of the picture; for now, we get an old-school ripple effect, and he takes us back to what led the woman in the boat to that moment. This is Jessica (Zohra Lampert), and she\u2019s fresh out of the mental hospital, but feeling good about it: \u201cFor the first time in months I\u2019m free,\u201d she says. \u201cForget the doctors. Forget that place. I\u2019m okay now. I\u2019ll start over.\u201d But she sounds like she\u2019s talking herself into it, and it turns out she is; Jessica is haunted by nightmare visions and creepy whispers, as well as her own, self-flagellating internal monologues. She sees and hears these things, and reminds herself, \u201cDon\u2019t tell them. Act normal\u2026 They won\u2019t believe you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u201cthey\u201d in question are her husband Duncan (Barton Heyman) and their friend Woody (Kevin O\u2019Connor); we meet them en route to their new home out in nowheresville, Connecticut, which will theoretically provide a more calming environment for Jessica than their previous home of New York City. But when they arrive at \u201cthe old Bishop place,\u201d they find Emily (Mariclare Costello), a free-spirited young woman who has been helping herself to a bedroom. \u201cWe must have scared you as much as you scared us,\u201d chuckles Jessica, ever accommodating. This is where it\u2019s worth reiterating that Let\u2019s Scare Jessica to Death<\/em> was released in 1971, the post-Manson world, in which a hippie squatter in an Army jacket was as terrifying as a man in a hockey mask a decade later. But Jessica et. al. <\/em>apparently subscribe to a pre-Manson spirit, welcoming her to stay for dinner and then (even though she suggests a post-meal s\u00e9ance, an 86-able offense if there ever was one) to stay in the house for a while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unsurprisingly this doesn\u2019t turn out to be the greatest idea. Free Love-era sexual dynamics abound, as Emily makes like the girl in The Lickerish Quartet<\/em>, and Jessica starts eyeballing the pictures in the attic. She learns the story of Abigail Bishop, the young woman who once inhabited the house and drowned in the lake it faces; \u201cLegend is that she\u2019s still alive, is a vampire,\u201d explains the local antique shop owner. \u201cRoams the country!\u201d Is Jessica seeing her in the woods? Does she see her body in the bottom of the lake? Is that who\u2019s whispering \u201cCome to me\u201d into her ear?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

These supernatural overtones are what give the picture its genre bona fides, but the real subject of Let\u2019s Scare Jessica to Death<\/em> is the degree to which women are expected to go along with pretty much anything, to be polite. Jessica\u2019s husband and buddy infantilize her, they barely conceal their efforts to seduce this woman who\u2019s crashing her recovery, and all Jessica can do in response is smile painfully and take it. She\u2019s cheerful, trying so hard to be upbeat, but her running monologue betrays the trouble she\u2019s having, the degree to which she\u2019s trying to cope, trying to keep it together, and slowly losing her tenuous grip. The voices are relentless – \u201cYou want to die, go on, you want to die\u201d \u2013 and in that pushiness, and the degree to which Hancock puts you in her head to hear it, the film admirably nails a very specific kind of unrelenting mental illness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And thus much of the picture\u2019s effectiveness is due to the skill of Lampert\u2019s performance, which, in its own quiet way, deserves comparison with Gena Rowlands\u2019s work in A Woman Under the Influence<\/em>. In fact, the generally grounded and lived-in performances, coupled with the no-frills, naturalistic style, recall the general aesthetic and approach of Cassavetes\u2019s \u201870s films, and it works; they play it so straight that the horror, when it comes, is more harrowing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there are all kinds of \u201870s horror movies in the Criterion Channel\u2019s selections that work in similar ways \u2013 where the filmmakers aren\u2019t aiming for the momentary jolt of a \u201cscare,\u201d but a 90-minute experience of discomfort and terror. When a contemporary film (your Hereditary<\/em>s or The Witch<\/em>es) attempts something like this, it\u2019s hailed as a ground-breaking game-changer, which has less to do with the (typically) high quality of those films than the extent to which our understanding and definition of horror has been limited, if not broken entirely. But there are all kinds of horror to explore onscreen, and as Let\u2019s Scare Jessica to Death<\/em> exquisitely reminds us, not all of them are external in origin. \u00a0<\/em>\"\"\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John D. Hancock\u2019s 1971 film (now streaming on The Criterion Channel) sounds like a slasher movie, but plays like a psychological drama.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":15228,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1431,1422],"class_list":["post-15225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-classic-corner","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15225"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22686,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15225\/revisions\/22686"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}