Let’s Scare Jessica to Death

John D. Hancock · 1971 · 89 minutes

A recently institutionalized woman has bizarre experiences after moving into a supposedly haunted country farmhouse and fears she may be losing her sanity once again.

Programmer’s Note

A short list of the all-time greatest works of American regional cinema would include at least four horror masterpieces: Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (Utah and Kansas, 1962), George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (Pennsylvania, 1968), Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Texas, 1974), and John D. Hancock’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death.

Shot in and around small, wooded towns in southern Connecticut, just north of the Long Island Sound, the film stars Zohra Lampert as Jessica, a young woman who has recently completed a six-month stay in a treatment facility. Intent on supporting her recovery, Jessica’s husband Duncan (Barton Heyman) leaves his position with the New York Philharmonic and flees the city with her for a new, quiet life of apple farming. But before they even finish crossing the Sound, there are hints that the home they’ve purchased has a notorious past, and soon Jessica is hearing voices and seeing visions that might or might not be figments of her troubled imagination.

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is built from well-worn Gothic horror tropes — an isolated home, zombie-like townspeople, mysterious strangers, and an unreliable neighbor — but Hancock’s style and Lampert’s disarmingly unnerved performance invest the story with rich complexity. Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is a still-relevant film of its early-1970s moment, with a deep interest in the emotional lives of women. A kind of adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 feminist story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Jessica owes as much to Alfred Hitchcock’s late work and Ingmar Bergman’s existential horror stories as it does to B-movie horror.