Let's Scare Jessica to Death

Hippies, Ghouls, Poison, and Apples

By: Zach Castedo

Rich with gothic atmosphere and ambiguity, 1971’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is essential viewing for fans of eerie slow-burn horror. The film is a dread-soaked study of subjective reality through the eyes of an emotionally damaged woman. We are introduced to Jessica (Zohra Lampert) who has just finished a six-month stay at a psychiatric hospital.  Lampert creates one of the most sympathetic and fragile protagonists in horror cinema. Haunted, hunched, and barely clinging to her sanity, Jessica hopes to find peace and healing at her new home in the countryside. 

 

Jessica, her husband Duncan and their mellow pal Woody arrive at their own private Eden: a lush apple orchard surrounding a gothic farmhouse shrouded in fog.  From the opening scenes director John D. Hancock populates the film with powerful symbols of death: the black hearse the trio cruise into town in, Jessica’s morbid gravestone rubbings, and Duncan’s giant coffin-like black case. The film ties together the inevitability of death and the seeming inevitability of Jessica’s return to madness. 

Lampert plays Jessica with such hopeful, but vulnerable optimism. She is child-like and is often wearing a desperate smile as she struggles to maintain a persona of normalcy. The first fissure in her idyllic new life arrives in the form of the wandering hippie girl Emily. With her cold pale skin, eerie eyes, and red hair, Emily becomes a sort of unearthly shadow version of Jessica. She is easy going, confident, and seductive while Jessica feels inferior and is plagued with self-doubt. Emily is the lovely snake that infects their newfound paradise with poison. 

 As the film unfolds we are given strange threads of story that combine with Jessica’s increased paranoia and hallucinatory state of mind. Is their old farmhouse home to dark spirits? Is their guest Emily some kind of sinister undead being? The nearby town appears to be populated solely by ghoulish, leering old men with weird wounds on their flesh.  Are they simply small town folk who like to give hippies a hard time, or are they a horde of soul-hungry ghouls--possibly slaves to the queen demon Emily? As an audience, we know that Jessica has already suffered a horrific mental breakdown in the recent past, which adds an intriguing layer of ambiguity and doubt to all that she experiences. The ensuing ghostly events may be the beginnings of another spiral downward into psychosis.

This is a film of rich visuals with vibrant costume colors contrasting against the aging neutrals of the interiors and the lush greens of the countryside. The actors look like real people: natural, imperfect, human--often with a sheen of sweat on their faces.  Many striking compositions punctuate the film, such as the opening shot of a silhouetted Jessica adrift in the rowboat in a pond of blazing orange and pink, or the carefully framed slow zoom shot of Mr. Dorker as he fishes. Jessica wears, and is often surrounded by, cool colors of purple and blue: her shirt, skirt, robe, and the memorable patterns of her bedroom pillows. Emily wears a bright red shirt throughout the film creating a visual link between her, the red apples, and the bright red tractor, which spreads poison around the farm. Emily, the seducing serpent, bewitches both Duncan and Woody while also creating scenes of sexual tension between her and Jessica. 

Much of the film is about desperate and failed attempts at human connection. It’s painful to watch Jessica’s relationship with Duncan become further strained as the movie progresses. Woody is left cold by his initial attempts at wooing Emily. Lampert is raw and deeply human in a scene where Jessica and Duncan lie in bed, their efforts to connect disintegrate horribly, leaving Jessica wailing in anguish. Brief moments of happiness seem denied to Jessica: she tries to eat an apple from one of her trees, but Duncan yells and stops her: “What are you doing? That’s poison!” At one point Emily seduces Woody when he comes back from a pesticide run. “I really should wash this stuff off” he says. Emily takes his hand and seems to suck the poison off of his skin, savoring it, before burying her teeth into his neck. 

Further crafting the unique texture of the film is the masterful use of sound. The music alternates between gentle, wandering guitar riffs and the pulsing menace of monstrous synths. Jessica seems to be followed by a bleak howl of wind whenever she wanders alone. Perhaps more than any film I have experienced, the use of voice over is a key part of the uncanny spell this film casts. Flashes of Jessica’s internal monologue become the strange poetry of her descent into self-doubt, suspicion, and terror. An otherworldly female voice invades her mind, ensuring her that there is no escape. Jessica holds a plate of meat oozing with red juices and the voice flashes through her mind: “It’s blood Jessica…”

The film is peppered with strange and memorable moments, which you won’t typically see in 21^st century horror. The foursome bathe in the lake, soaping and massaging each other, seeming to be free and happy, but darkness and tension looms beneath the surface. Emily tells a tale about a giant, monstrous cake that oozes into people’s windows and devours them like The Blob. Jessica spends a lingering moment gazing at a colorful antique lamp which the shop owner informs her is called ‘Flowers of Evil’. “How can something so beautiful be evil?” Jessica asks. This same question could refer to Emily, or her new home. The unearthly voice torments her: “I won’t go away Jessica…I’m in your blood”.

This is an abstract film of hazy, poetic logic. Nothing is spelled out, only suggested. How does Jessica—or, we, the audience--separate the supernatural from the machinations of the human mind? The film shows us that our minds are the source of all the phenomena we experience. Jessica’s unraveling psyche could make any evil possible. She ends the film broken, hopeless…adrift in a small rowboat…adrift in her mind. Maybe she is going insane; maybe she is the victim of dark supernatural forces. 

Is there any difference?