Let's Scare Jessica to Death

 

There is just some sort of ethereal power to Let’s Scare Jessica to Death that captures me. The independent filmmaking of the 70s (and the 60s prior to it) just had some advantages that seem to have been lost in the modern era of today’s digital, rapid-cut editing filmmaking. Long, extended takes, dependence on piano and guitar as background music, and the long-lost look of action and characterization on film; so much is now missing that is heavily visible on Let’s Scare Jessica to Death. I agree with Quentin Tarantino that the loss of film and total reliance on digital has removed a distinct look and feel no longer present today.

Along with those established aspects, also present in this film is its emphasis on the dilemma of a schizophrenic woman, who had been “put away” due to her seeing people that weren’t there. Her credibility is in question. There’s just something about the way this opens and by film’s end, you think (and hope) that what Zohra Lampert (as Jessica) has been through is legitimate. We have to remember, though, that what we are seeing is told to us through Jessica’s experience. Is she a reliable character? Can we ultimately believe that she didn’t just imagine everything we see in the film? There’s no guarantee, is there? Right from the get-go, we know that Jessica has been released from a mental hospital for a period of six months. In a cemetery, while sketching a gravestone, Jessica sees a figure of a young woman…one moment she’s there, the next she isn’t. So immediately we are left to wonder if anything she sees from that point forward is real or not.

The power (or dynamic maybe is better) of the film is how Mariclare Costello’s Emily pervasively terrorizes Jessica

·         whispers to her

·         appears to her in the lake

·          openly establishes her overpowering of men, including Jessica’s husband and her best friend

Her dominant presence in the film as the vampire/spectre (however you wish to acknowledge her) underwater—this has always been really damn eerie to me, and I think this is superb work by the filmmakers to use her young demise in the water via drowning as a means to introduce her right before she aims to add victims to her “collection” (the local male weirdoes in town wear bandages and scarves to cover up their bites)—leads to some genuine chills because although Jessica seems accurate that there’s a threat on the loose (although her fragile mental/emotional state does have her asking her husband whether or not it is happening again.) proving it becomes difficult, and soon she loses her loved ones to Emily.

When she’s all alone and there’s no protection (her husband (Barton Heyman) is seduced—and soon bitten—by Emily one night) available to her, I am the first to admit that my insides were twisted for Jessica. You could go Freudian, I guess, and look at the film from the perspective that perhaps all of this is in Jessica’s tortured mind; she’s afraid to lose her husband while put away in some cell and Emily is this figment representing her condition. I know, a leap, but just something that popped in my mind.

The film does a good job of stacking the deck against Jessica by removing all the protections that kept her even remotely roped in from possible psychological slippage into madness. I think Lampert, in her performance, affectively establishes that barely contained control, with that fragility always present; I like how she even smiles while in the presence of her husband (her thoughts about worrying whether or not they think she’s slipping again are spoken in narrative form to us) but it barely conceals sheer terror that her mind could be going.

When it becomes clear that her husband is growing tired of her, becoming gradually attracted to Emily, and tells her in bed that perhaps Jessica should “return to New York for awhile”, maybe to see her doctor, and a tear arises; it is just heartbreaking. He’s lost a musical career, has little money (the property purchased cost him his entire savings), and tolerated Jessica’s bouts with schizophrenia; so her claim that an antique salesman lay bloody and dead in the lake near their farm could very well be the final straw. Maybe the relationship was on its last legs and the husband was humoring Jessica one last time?

I actually take the film at face value, though. I like to take the side that what Jessica is experiencing is real. That, despite her mental history, Jessica is besieged by evil and will be doomed if she doesn’t escape. Emily knows this and so she attempts to destroy her mind, body, and soul. At the hour point, the film really starts to deliver the goods. Emily has control of Jessica’s husband now, and she will attempt to seduce and bite Jessica. Her voice echoes in Jessica’s mind, and eventually Emily arises from the lake as she really is in a moment that chills the bones. Emily had attempted to drown her and when that didn’t work she tried to drain her. Emily was no longer hiding behind a façade of good will; now she was her true self with Jessica seeing her as she really is. Fleeing to her room, Jessica hides away for a while, but Emily’s presence haunts her mind, always speaking, causing her to try to escape to town.

The finale of the film turns into a chase film. You could say that Jessica is running from Emily now that her husband and their best friend have been taken by the vampire, or Jessica is on the run from her madness. I side with the former but even at the very end, Jessica isn’t quite sure she can believe what has just happened to her. The score offers a certain melancholy after building quite a lot of suspense as Jessica flees the Connecticut town by a little fishing boat, as Emily and her minions look on from the other side of the lake. What will happen to Jessica now?