“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” — Edgar Allan Poe

As quoted in W. Scott Poole professor of history at Charleston South Carolina University’s remarkable book Monsters In America he opens his chapter MONSTROUS BEGINNINGS with “There are terrible creatures, ghosts, in the very air of America.” -D.H. Lawrence

Taken from his chapter The Bloody Chords of Memory, which I think is very appropriate for this discussion, Poole states that, “it would be too simplistic to view monster tales as simple narratives in service of American violence. The monster is a many-headed creature, and narratives about it in America are highly complex. Richard Kearney describes the appearance of a monster in a narrative, in a dream, or in sensory experience ‘as a signal of borderline experiences and unattainable excess.’

In 1971 two films were released with a sort of queasy verisimilitude, using a monochromatic color scheme and protracted themes of insanity, fanaticism and self-annihilation. One drawing more of its flicker from the time of cult murders by religious fanatics, and an anti-establishment repudiation reflected in the cult fringe film. The Night God Screamed utilizes as its anti-hero the motorcycle gang who hates ‘citizenship’ and phony institutionalized prophets. These outliers are dirty, rebelliously dangerous hippies, who are hyped up and deluded into following a charismatic cult leader, a Neanderthal named Billy Joe Harlan performed with a Shakespearean griminess by Michael Sugich.

He’s quite a Mansonesque figure with his malefic unibrow. This offering aptly called The Night God Screamed, even boasts a scene where the cult actually crucifies the clean-cut minister Willis, a man of the tradition gospel played by Alex Nicol. They essentially nail him to his own pridefully giant wooden phallic cross. Leaving his wife Fanny (Jeanne Crain) to scramble in the darkened halls, conflicted as to whether to try and help her husband or save herself from the cult’s ferocious blood lust, driving her into a numb moral and cognitive stasis of unresponsiveness, reason, and human connection. I will talk about this film in Part II.

Let’s Scare Jessica To Death (1971) is a film that hints at a post-modern Americana Gothicism permeated by a rustic folksy style of vampirism, with its small town coteries, paranoia, and the archetypal hysterical woman in a sustained level of distress and adrift on a sea of inner monologues and miasma of fear. I’ll begin in Part I with my much-loved classic horror…

LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH 1971

“Leave your insanity at the door.”

Let’s Scare Jessica To Death 1971, is not only the far better film but probably unintentionally the more iconic 70s trope for what was so extraordinary about the special clutch of horror films that were birthed in the 70s epoch.

Directed by John D. Hancock (Bang The Drum Slowly 1973) and penned for the screen by Hancock, Lee Kalcheim and apparently using elements of Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla‘, although uncredited, the film has a very captivating soundtrack by Orville Stoeber accompanied by Walter E. Sear’s Electronic musical nuances that work as much to impact the atmosphere as Robert M. Baldwin’s (Basket Case 2, Frankenhooker 1990) cinematography.

Carmilla was first published in a magazine called The Dark Blue, later in a collection of short stories by Sheridan Le Fanu entitled In A Glass Darkly in 1872. Supposed as accounts of  “true” stories offered from the casebooks of a certain “metaphysical doctor.” by the name of Dr. Hesselius.

Let’s Scare Jessica To Death stars the perfect ensemble of ordinary players. By no means, do I imply bad actors, I simply mean authentically human subjects. Zohra Lampert is perfect as the paranoid and frightened Jessica (please no crack about her product endorsement ‘Goya, oh Boya’ commercial for canned beans. Not here, not now at least.)

Barton Heyman plays husband Duncan, an average-looking new yorker guy, I mean…he looks real. You might actually recognize him as Dr. Klein in Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Alan Manson plays Sam Dorker the nice antique dealer in town. The very wooly Kevin O’Connor (He was Stanley Gusciora in William Friedkin’s  The Brinks Job 1978 starring my beloved Peter Falk, a film which I adore by the way.) plays the friendly yet hairy Woody.

And Mariclare Costello is otherworldly as the red-headed wraith with the vitreous skin, the ghostly Emily or is she Abigail?

She performed in a few memorable made for tv chillers/dramas The Execution of Private Slovik (1974) starring Martin Sheen and a very interesting obscure horror thriller about a closed community hiding a terrible secret called Conspiracy of Terror (1975) directed by the great John Llewellyn Moxey.

I hesitate to overuse the word atmospheric too often, as I don’t want it to become a complacent adjective to describe every film that has a sense of its own presence. The pervasive theme, the repeated motif of the film’s narrative is the question of Jessica’s madness. Is it true… or are we misdirected by the very real manifestation of a collective malevolence, synthesized by the ghostly predatory Emily. You can imagine the story either way. A straight forward unsung modern adaptation of Le Fanu’s bloodletting femme fatale Carmilla, the piece can work as an exercise in paranoia and the isolation of insanity.

The 70s is occupied by a collective conveyance of social fears, confusion, and turmoil, that engendered a variety of sub-genres. Given the various categories that became cyclical such as the slasher film, the exploitation/cult or grindhouse, fear of devil worship/cult murderer film, the psycho-sexual trauma, the body horror film, science seeking hubris, nature takes revenge, and so on and so on.

The ones I find myself drawn to often remain obscure, with directors who seem to create just one piece that remains more entrenched in my consciousness as well as many other genre fan memories. And for reasons that might only be attributed to the beauty of an unselfconscious medium that lacks a healthy budget, box office notables, or a self-righteously possessed film maker trying too hard to make a statement, what happened at times, are these beautifully, ‘dreadful’ and I mean that in a very good way, nightmarish, allegorical, chaotic, yes I’ll say it again, atmospheric and unique little classic horror genre art house gems.

I think of Lemora: a child’s Tale of the Supernatural (1973) (and Carnival of Souls (1962) which was from the 60s, but relevant to the point I’m trying to make being Herk Harvey’s only film. Michael Winner’s The Sentinel,(1977) the claustrophobic and disturbing Silent Night Bloody Night (1972), Narciso Ibanez Serrador’s beautifully Gothic The House That Screamed (1969) with Lilli Palmer, Don’t Look in The Basement (1973), and a few more which I’ll write about very very soon, down the winding bloggy road.

The looming question is-Was Jessica delusional? Was the horror that was unfolding for her part of her elaborate hallucinations, cerebral phantasmagorias, and surreal nightmares, or was her rustic landscape truly haunted by rural vampiric phantoms?

Perhaps the film finds itself a bit on the art house shelf, fluttering in and out with the delicacy of butterfly wings, with a sort of post-modern, surreal narrative, for Jessica’s habitual torments are never quite cemented for us in the context of the film’s visual journey from any other point of view other than her own. From the outset, we are taking that journey with her. This is a subjective passage into a realm where it neither matters whether Jessica is a schizophrenic or the victim of a haunted nestle of rural chimeras. We’re inside a snow globe of horror floating around our heads.

What strikes me as an interesting trajectory within the inter-textuality of John Hancock’s film, is that it isn’t trying to revive the perspective of madness from the milieu of The Snake Pit 1948 or Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor 1963 the film is set in a picturesque 70s style of modernity, albeit rural. It doesn’t possess corporeal monsters that inhabit the world in a Gothic framework where you can attack these fiends back, there is nothing concrete to protect against. There are no boundaries you can see, feel or touch. The parameters are contextual only in the sense that the film manages to manifest a sense of dread, possible insanity or corporeal fiends that inhabit this little niche of the pastoral countryside, but they are as fleeting on the screen as rain drops on a windshield. It all trickles away without the ability to grab onto a solid cinematic fact.

The film renders you helpless, well, it definitely incapacitates Jessica, leaving her to float, to drift literally aimlessly on a seemingly tranquil lake. Alone, in a little boat. A refugee from a muddled ordeal that has taken away any sense of reality left in her life or in the minds of ‘us’, the spectator. Interesting that Sam the antique dealer, referred to Jessica and Duncan as refugees from the urban blight.

The storyline:

Jessica and her husband Duncan an upright Bassist with the Philharmonic Orchestra have decided to leave New York City life behind and move I believe it appears to be somewhere around upstate New York, where it’s more quaint and conducive for quiet living, antiquing, and Jessica getting some much-needed rest.

Once they arrive, the locals exude an odd impenetrable hostility. It makes me think of John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) Newcomers, outsiders, are often the enemy bringing with them ideas and attitudes that are not welcomed in the isolated cadence of an insulated community.

This particular little small town is even more eerie and foreboding than most. The inhabitants seem to be plagued by a strange type of malady, mental illness or curse themselves. A few baring the marks of a strange ritualistic scarring or wound on their bodies. A frightening touch that adds to the macabre sense of dismay signaled by the presence of the locals and the cryptic malevolence that seems to reveal itself as an unspoken malignancy in the town. Or is this part of Jessica’s delusion?

It’s the quietness, the involuntary externalized dissidence, the stillness of the underlying vexation and contagion ever that is, that creates the ghastly ambiance that is most horrifying, and particularly alarming within the augmentation of the scenery and its unfolding plot.

The couple has purchased a little slice of property, which is a potentially beautiful old farmhouse, that legend says, is haunted by the ghost of a girl, the oldest Bishop’s daughter who disappeared on her wedding day. They arrive at the house, to find a young hippie named Emily taking up residence there, squatting with her sleeping bag, hiding out in one of the upstairs rooms. At first, they startle each other as she tries to run for it, but then they invite her to stay as their guest. She might make a nice companion for their hairy beast of a friend Woody, who has accompanied them on the foray into solitude and pesticide spraying in the orchid.

Emily becomes an enticing creature for all three characters. Jessica, her husband, and their wooly friend, but her presence trigger anxiety and paranoia in Jessica, who struggles with a repressed psycho-sexual persecution complex. The film becomes a parallel journey as we gaze at the visual dream-like events that straddle the natural moments in time, with Jessica’s inner monologues. The voices that patronize her head are frail utterances that prey on and oppress her.

Emily acts like a succubus, a vampire, a phantasm, a monstrous feminine wraith who continues to slowly traumatize Jessica into a state of hysteria. Emily is also the very likeness of the Bishop’s daughter who vanished without a trace. Curiouser and curiouser still…

Jessica sees visions of a little mute girl played by the adorable Gretchen Corbett. She’s a somber, willowy young girl dressed in a bucolic white frock. Is she too a specter in Jessica’s nightmare world? and has she come to warn Jessica of impending doom, or is she part of the elaborate framework of fantasy that Jessica is being devoured little by little?

Re-Occurring Themes – A Tableau of Paranoia. – We’ve seen it in Henri-Georges Clouzot's ‘Diabolique’ (1955) Roman Polanski’s ‘Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and ‘The Tenant (1976). Curtis Harrington’s ‘What’s the Matter with Helen? (1971) and his taut thriller, ‘Games'(1967) Even the ultimate theatrics of paranoia played out to the max, in Aldrich’s two Grand Dame Guignol Masterpieces What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? and Hush Hush… Sweet Charlotte, both starring the queen of the ball, Bette Davis. 

Using the mechanism of voice-over, Jessica opens the film by narrating her story, until the inner monologues, visual cues, and nightmares become the diegesis. Her intonations lack buoyancy, she herself is trapped in a netherworld of reality, dream life, and inner machinations.

One of the motifs of the film I love is the usage of the gravestone etchings that Jessica uses like art therapy. She sits and engraves with charcoal creating paper rubbings, and tracing over the images, icons, and epitaphs on tombstones. It is the world of the dead that Jessica seems to be impelled toward.

The environment is so normal and every day, just as in Romero’s Night of The Living Dead (1968), where an ordinary farmhouse becomes an unsavory nightmarish killing field for zombies, phantasms, and the wretched oxygen of ruination, decay, and the self-destruction of the American Dream myth, Jessica’s house will soon become an ominous playground.

In Let’s Scare Jessica To Death, A large case for Duncan’s upright acoustic bass appears as if it were a mammoth coffin.

A seemingly serene lake like a quiet untasted drink, becomes the whispers of a depth, a frightening, foreboding abyss that holds the suggestion of a watery graveyard.

The cluttered sinister attic room, filled with memorabilia, the oval pitted, stained, and a fading portrait of The Bishop girl who bares a striking resemblance to Emily.

The small country house bedroom becomes a menacing place. The tombstone engravings seem to puffle by an unseen gust of air, moving in and out with a rhythm that modulates Jessica’s inner whispers and fragmentation.

The use of sound is key, it utilizes the natural environment surrounding the characters, and it is discordant and nuanced. The entire film is a beautifully painted nightmare.

The film opens with Jessica narrating her strange tale…

“I sit here and I can’t believe that it happened, and yet I have to believe it. Dreams"¦. or nightmares"¦. Madness or sanity? I don’t know which is which.”

The frame warbles into a flashback, and the diffuse sound of a gong echoes us backward. At first, two men are scraping heavy furniture along the floor, they are apparently moving.

Then single abstruse mid-range piano notes signal the next scene, a car, more explicitly a black hearse being used as a car traveling down a road.
As the hearse pulls up to a cemetery, female legs kick the back end of the hearse open, Jessica runs with rolled tracing paper in hand, yelling “don’t worry, I’ll be back in a minute.”

The two men Duncan and Woody, are leaning up against the car, their stance a little preoccupied perhaps, a hint of apprehension.

The hairy one says “Don’t worry the farm will be great for her”

The sound of an ominous wind brewing it’s force of air, starting to blow around us, circulating, birds chirping, leaves crunching all giving the atmosphere a naturalistic sense of place.

“The apartment was beginning to scare me too.” Woody chuckles to himself, Jessica’s husband Duncan says nothing yet.

Jessica’s inner monologue begins again, “For the first time in months I’m free. Forget the doctors. Forget that place. I’m okay now. We’ll start over.”

The resonance of wind soars through the nucleus of the opening scenes with as much significance as the soundtrack.
Jessica rubs her gravestone etchings, using her hands like she’s molding clay.

Suddenly Jessica looks up from her rubbings and sees the image of a blonde girl dressed in a breezy white frock. The sound becomes distorted as if a large amp is feeding back into a gurgle of noise. When Jessica turns back to look toward her traveling companions to show them the girl, she looks back again, the girl has disappeared into thin air.

Then the whispers begin, the inner confabulations, the voices taunting her, no fabricating her imaginary visions. A cluster of low incoherent conversations manifests as worry on Jessica’s face for the first time since the film opens.

Her husband Duncan calls to her “Hey Jess, Come on, we gotta get moving.”

The inner monologue continues, “Don’t tell them"¦ act normal.”

Jessica’s husband admires the grave etchings and asks “Find anything good?”

“Frail as the leaves that shiver on a spray, like them, we flourish like them decay” Jessica smiles at the notion of the eternal cycle of life and death as she recites the proverb.

‘See you’re less frightened already” Duncan rewards his wife with praise, then she kisses his hand.

The traveling scene in the car cuts away to simple guitar strokes as the hearse is now on the ferry taking the three across the river.

Orville Stoeber’s musical score works as a primer to the baleful, unwholesome solitude the three are about to embark on. An odd ferryman walks around the car looking inside, his gaze is on us. The quiet guitar notes keep pace with his elegiac, melancholia. He has a secret plaintive scowl as he surveys the inside of the hearse. He espies the great upright bass in the back end of the car. Studies it for a moment, then proceeds to ask Wooly Man what he’s got in the case.

” My mother-in-law,” He says humorously derogatory or denigrating, the air of subtle dismissive scorn toward this local man can not go unnoticed. He’s a damn city elitist. But the ferryman comes back at him, with a jeering grin ” I wished it was mine!” He chuckles with the face of an evil goblin then asks, “Where you folks goin’?”

Duncan says, “The other side of Brookfield it’s a farm on the old Cove Road called the Bishop place do you know it?”

“Yes, I do. Well, we’ll be on the other side very soon.”

Is this statement an augury? What is the other side? A new realm, the otherworld? Passing through life into a landscape of death and nonexistence?

Jessica smiles at the man. A blameless look. She is on a new journey. She does not pick up on the old man’s subtly sinister reply.

The camera carries the ferry across the water, the simple guitar notes sing out their quiet song. All is still serene for now.

The wooden paddles churn the water, the seagulls cry out. The guitar plays its soft poignant requiem for lost travelers. A distant sound almost like that of a scream enters the atmosphere as the ferry pulls into the dock. No, I believe it’s distinctly meant to appear as if a scream is rolling out the red carpet. The idea of a ferry is very referential in terms of the journey “The dead were required to pay a fare to Charon, the ferryman of Hades.”

The gentle guitar strumming from Orville Stoeber’s score interweaves its movement with the steam engine of the ferry boat. The sound distinguishes itself and segregates the moment between a framework of isolation and the journey.

Jessica smiles like a young child, on a road trip, looking out the pane of glass from the back of the hearse. She seems happy.

A dog barks and the hearse pulls into the frame close up. Duncan says “This is your new hometown, Jessica.”

The wooly Woody waltzes them around the stone-walled turnabout so Jessica can soak up her new town, and the landscape. Then the hearse pulls up to a quaint building with a porch occupied by old men dwellers. One in a rocker, one with a walker wearing an open shirt exposing his under whites, and one leaning up against a post holding a newspaper. There’s the sign for Main Street which crosses Maple Street. This is anywhere U.S.A. populated by ancient, ossified old men. “Look what they’re driving, damn hippies creeps!”

“Some Welcoming Committee” Duncan reacts.

“I think it’s our mode of transportation” Jessica laughs.

“Look at those bandages, I think some of these guys have been left over from the civil war.”

While Woody drives we see that written on the side of the hearse is the iconic 70s hippie axiom LOVE in red paint with a tiny peace symbol to the right.

He yells out to the old geezers “It’s cheaper than a station wagon.”

The hearse pulls away. The four old men remain leering at them as they drive off. The tone has been set as the cantankerous old foursome says “Good Riddance.”

Driving down the old road, the hauntingly poignant intonation of the piano and guitar moves the journey along a bit further still.

The slight moment of conflict between two worlds, generations have been left behind them on the dirt road, and we are back on the path toward Jessica’s sojourn with madness.

Pulling up to the Gothic farmhouse foggy, bluish-toned like that of an Andrew Wyeth painting, we arrive at the house, where Jessica will now live.

Poking through the musical atmosphere is almost the presence of a banjo, a warbling of a wild bird, and the hearse comes to a stop.

Jessica jumps out of the hearse, elated, and exuberant, she decries “Oh God, it’s fantastic” Duncan seems pleased that his wife is happy, she kisses him on the cheek. Jessica tells Woody where all the things are for bedding in the hearse, and runs off to explore her new domain.

As Jessica walks up a small set of steps, the soundtrack utilizes a distortion of wavelengths. Like wires being stretched over hot coals until they melt into a wavering din of metal noise, a dying tuba, or the pipe in some lower region of hell dwindling into an abrupt drone. Add the creaking of the rocking chair. The use of sound is penetrating.

A frightening sound accompanies the next frame. A door, a porch, and an obscuring camera angle hinder us from seeing the figure that is rocking back and forth. A creepy moment that sparks more creepy moments to come.

Jessica is back in the frame, she sees the person rocking on the porch. She looks over toward Duncan and Woody unloading the gear from the hearse. Then she looks back at the porch. No, there is no one in the rocker, and the door is set ajar. The rocking chair has been left to its own volition, vacated by the phantom who occupied that space moment before.

Now the inner spirits, the voices that haunt Jessica’s mind begin their diatribe. Jessica’s elation has been transmuted into fear, paranoia, and abjection. The lower male voice is more incoherent, but a more lucid female voice asks her “Jessica why have you come here?” Jessica holds her head as if to squeeze the thoughts out of there. The buzz saw the rapacious wires that drone as part of the soundtrack, and the underlying score to Jessica’s questionable madness culminate in a moment of a quiet frenzy.

And suddenly the moment breaks, we hear the natural sound of the birds, the whispers stop and Jessica lets go of her head. We hear the hooting of a dove or owl, as Jessica proceeds up the little stone steps that lead to the porch. The rocking chair is still moving back and forth, a wooden machine moved by an invisible wind. Jessica stops at the chair to study its emptiness.

The camera so effectively exchanges moments between Jessica’s reaction and the still shots of queer solitude and the sense that something eerie and uncanny has invaded this space.

Jessica slowly placing her hand on the old wooden door, begins to push it open. She does not leap into action, nor investigate with substantial force. It is as if she already knows that she must be cautious. Partly her paranoia, yet there is a sense that something arcane, and terrifying is awaiting her once she opens that door. The film moves specifically at a pace like a sluggish waltz, not a hurried exertion. It’s this sedate, and quietly alert sense of foreboding that creates the moodiness of the film. It’s why it’s left such an impression on me after all these years and still works as an authentic chiller.

As the door creeks, the sound of Duncan coming up the stairs with Woody bringing in supplies breaks the moment. He asks Jessica “Get it open?”

Then he asks if she’s okay. We hear her inner machinations, “Don’t tell them"¦ they won’t believe you.”

This theme is quite essential as to what makes this such a good horror film. Not to be believed. It’s a horrifying premise to be trapped with possibly a ‘truth’ that no one else can see. Think of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956). It wasn’t so much the pod replicas that were frightening as it was having the entire population slowly dwindle away, and no one left to believe your story.

This film while standing very much alone as a unique contribution to the canon of classical 70s horror, successfully overlays many themes used in the various iconic horror films I’ve cited in this post. Without pilfering anything it contributes to the established archetypal tropes and paradigms that made these other masterpieces work so well.

Jessica has already lost her identity, and what remains is as fragile and tenuous as a spider’s web. The frayed bits of her identity, the remnants are still sacrificed to be ‘qualified’. Is everything she sees or hears real? This is yet another frightening trope.

When you become mad, you are not only separated from yourself, but you become separated from the rest of the world. Beyond the possibility that there are in fact vampiric town folk with odd bandages and scowling looks, isn’t it as dangerous and unsettling when your own husband doesn’t believe you’re sane"¦?

Jessica feigns being comfortable at the moment, throws a smile at Duncan, and mouths the words,  “Yes” he says, “Well let’s go in.”

At first, the two emerge in total darkness, Duncan throws the lights on and asks Jessica if she likes it. If it wasn’t supposed to be a creepy environment in a horror movie, the house could be considered a charming fixer-upper. But that’s the point. This ordinary, homespun hearth can and will be transformed into a place of uncanny bane.

Jessica stands still. leaning up against the wonderful floral wallpaper. Duncan asks what’s wrong.
A giant distorted rumble as if coming from an old Marshall guitar tube amp, glimmers like bubbling thunder as Duncan and Jessica are fragmented by the silhouette of two shadowy legs upstairs.

As the legs run out of frame, the lasting sound is that of one single piano note held at the very bottom of the octave range. It’s sustained and ominous. Duncan says “It’s okay Jess, I saw it too.”

A look of relief washes over Jessica, perhaps she isn’t being revisited by the madness. Duncan, Woody, and Jessica head upstairs to investigate the intruder.

Woody’s response is no kidding that’s great. He’s an easygoing hairy dude after all. Peace, love, and squatters welcome.

An odd touch, the camera focuses on their ascent up the stairs by zeroing in on only the steps, the trio’s legs and shoes which signify the movement of the scene. It’s a choice that creates an off-kilter atmosphere, which is what we’ve been introduced to from the very beginning of the piece.

Duncan is framed in the entrance of a darkened room wielding a fireplace shovel, looking more like a fly swatter, but I doubt he could do any damage with that sort of lightweight sundry. He’s definitely ready to bash someone’s head in for trespassing. Duncan moves out of frame and tells Jessica to stay where she is with Woody. She is showing teeth, Is she smiling from excitement because this was not a hallucination?

Yes, she is pleased, ” I really did see something” she emphatically tells Woody. He tells her as if he needs to,  “I believe you.”

The girl who cried wolf really did see a wolf this time"¦ right. She giggles with cheerfulness.  She tries one of the doors, which is locked, and walks back toward the hallway. Off-screen we hear one of the men say, “We know you’re in here so come out”

Jessica is now beaming with ebullience as if she’s on a scavenger hunt. She begins to peer into the darkened room. Slowing advancing. Slowing, the pacing of this film is executed with a deft simplicity of motion and orientation. We hear a loud creak. A door being opened perhaps. Jessica turns around in shadow, then proceeds to move further into the dark room. We hear breathing, the night birds, and the footsteps on the old plank floorboards. The obfuscating shadows move like eerie molasses on the screen. Jessica is surrounded by shadow.

As in any good horror film, the environment becomes as monstrous as the monster itself. The camera carefully frames bits and pieces of the house. In Curse of The Cat People (1944), what was most frightening, wasn’t just the odd people who inhabited the old dark house, it was the shapeless, open-ended fear that lurked from the outer boundaries of the unknown, the non-spaces.

The shadows, that trigger what haunts our own childhood fears of the dark, Freud’s ‘uncanny.’ The camera places special attention on these ‘spaces’ These seemingly harmless, ordinary walls, radiators, (The wallpaper that embodies a matrix effect, like floral patterns becoming ominous faces leering back at us, in Robert Wise’s The Haunting 1963).

We are cast within a blanket of unknown shadows, which seem like sinister dimensions gaping open, watching us. Footsteps, Jessica’s footsteps move us forward toward a room with a door ajar. We hear labored breathing. We shift to another angle of the house. Another space open, using partial lighting, boxed in by total blackness. It is another staircase.

Close up on Jessica’s face, and then"¦ like a jack in the box popping out of its little macabre receptacle, the effect is similar once Emily, the mysterious vagrant jumps out of the room. Her movement is so fast that it’s like a flash of impish lightning.

She runs out into the hall, Duncan almost swings at her with his iron what’s it, and she turns around and runs into Woody’s arms, who holds her still, so she can’t escape. Duncan asks what she’s doing there and says to her, ‘Well, I’m sorry If we frightened you, but you just scared the hell out of us.”

“Oh that’s alright"¦I"¦who are you?” She takes a deep breath.

Duncan tells her, “The place belongs to me now"¦”

“Oh, I just found this place and I thought it was abandoned so I just sort of moved in"¦ then I saw this hearse coming up the drive.”

Jessica interrupts her, “We must have scared you, as much as you scared us.”

She laughs, then everyone begins to join in on the lightness of the moment. Emily tells them that she’ll get her things, implying that she’ll be leaving now. Duncan seems fine with that thought telling them that he’s going to put the rest of the stuff away, but Woody’s gaze lingers, staring after her like a carnivorous brute who has found his next meal. Jessica is still beaming an out-of-body twinkle, her face lit up, the pair of them look almost comical in their fixation on the girl.

This is where I am going to leave my overview of the film. I’ll present you with a few, well more than just a few visual cues, as a photo journal of the moodiness of the narrative. But trust me, I’m leaving out much of the continuity and eerie surprises, so I won’t fret that I’ll be ruining anything for you. I’d rather you either re-experience the film again having not seen it for a long time, or if you’ve never seen it, please take my recommendation and give it a chance. Make some popcorn, shut the lights off, and just sit with the film quietly. You might not derive the nostalgic Schadenfreude that I still get from this chillingly beautiful masterwork, but I hope you will at least watch it for yourselves and arrive at your own conclusions. And hey, drop me a note and let me know if you liked it…

MG

The Night God Screamed (1971) Leave Your Fear, Faith, and Sanity at the Water’s Edge Continued in Part II