LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH 1971
Beneath Still Waters: Dream Logic and Dread in Let’s Scare Jessica to Death:
Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, directed by John Hancock (who also directed the acclaimed baseball drama Bang the Drum Slowly 1973, which helped launch Robert De Niro’s career). In his remarkable debut, the film drifts between waking and nightmare, with its painterly images and whispered anxieties that linger. The narrative is elliptical, with threads left unresolved and characters’ motives remaining opaque, but this only deepens the film’s hypnotic power.
At its center is Zohra Lampert’s Jessica, a woman recently released from an institution, whose fragile hope for renewal is as delicate as the sunlight that dapples the Connecticut countryside where the film was shot. Jessica, her husband Duncan (Barton Heyman), and their friend Woody (Kevin O’Connor) arrive at a remote, timeworn farmhouse in a hearse marked with a peace symbol—an emblem of post-hippie dreams now faded and ghostly.
Duncan, keeps a large upright string instrument with him throughout the film—specifically, an upright bass (also known as a double bass or string bass). This instrument is so large that its case is often mistaken for a coffin, a visual motif that adds to the film’s atmosphere of unease and mortality. In fact, the group travels in a black hearse, partly because it’s the only vehicle big enough to transport Duncan’s bass, further blurring the line between the practical and the morbid.
Duncan is a professional musician who has left his position as an upright bassist with the New York Philharmonic in order to move to the countryside with Jessica in pursuit of her recovery. The bass’s presence in their farmhouse isn’t just a piece of his old life—it’s a subtle reminder of everything he’s left behind. The case itself, with its unmistakably striking visual throughout the film and its coffin shape, quietly hints at the weight of the past and ever-present specter of death that always seems to hang over the story. In one of the film’s most unsettling moments, the case is even used to conceal a corpse, cementing its eerie, morbid resonance within the narrative.
From the very beginning, the trio’s attempt at a fresh start is overshadowed by Jessica’s quiet inner monologue, which sets an uneasy tone. Delivered in a hushed, acutely intimate voiceover, it blurs the line between where her troubled thoughts end and the world around her begins.
The film’s sound design, punctuated by Orville Stoeber’s eerie score and the ambient noises of wind, water, and whispers, draws us into Jessica’s uncertain reality, where every creak and sigh might be a symptom or an actual haunting.
The story unfolds with a folkloric simplicity: Jessica, Duncan, and Woody discover a mysterious young woman, Emily (Mariclare Costello), squatting in their new home. Emily’s presence is both inviting and unsettling, welcoming and strangely off-putting, and her enigmatic charm quickly draws both men in. Jessica can’t shake the uneasy feeling that something isn’t quite right.
Later, while sorting through the dust-laden attic, Jessica uncovers an old, sepia photograph—a haunting image of the red-haired woman in a white wedding dress, whose features mirror Emily’s exactly, the past and present collapsing in a single, uncanny gaze that sets her on edge.
The nearby town is populated almost exclusively by hostile, bandaged old men, and the absence of women adds to the sense of something fundamentally wrong.
The film is filled with dreamlike, disorienting moments, and Jessica’s sense of reality is often hazy. The townspeople with scars are mostly seen in daylight, behaving coldly and suspiciously toward Jessica and her husband, along with Woody. It is implied that these locals are under the influence of vampirism. The scars Jessica notices as she interacts with them, and their strange presence, add to her growing paranoia and the film’s eerie atmosphere. Much of the horror and tension in the film comes from Jessica’s internal experience—her voiceovers, visions, and the way ordinary scenes take on a nightmarish quality.
As Jessica tries to settle in—making tombstone rubbings, exploring their orchard, and seeking solace in the landscape—she is haunted by visions of a spectral girl in white (Gretchen Corbett) and the persistent feeling that she is being watched and threatened. The farmhouse itself, with its peeling wallpaper and sunlit decay, becomes a character in its own right. Every shadow and reflection only amplifies Jessica’s sense of dread.
Hancock’s direction, along with Robert M. Baldwin’s cinematography, gives the film a dreamy, painterly, almost impressionistic quality. The way the camera hangs on shots of water, trees, or faces—especially when Jessica’s alone—often frames her isolation, her vulnerability, making the beautiful world around her both gorgeous and yet indifferent.
The film’s palette is soft and naturalistic, but the mood does not evoke comfort. Everything plays out with this strange, dreamlike logic—Jessica glimpses figures under the water, hears voices that may or may not be real. Are they just in her head? And she shrinks in fear from the locals’ cryptic warnings. The ambiguity is deliberate — Hancock, clearly inspired by stories like Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, creates a world where the supernatural is never fully confirmed, leaving us to question whether Jessica’s fears are rooted in reality or her own unraveling mind.
Jessica’s unease sharpens into disorienting panic as she moves through the small, insular town, gradually noticing the unsettling similarity etched onto every man’s face and neck—a strange, livid scar that seems to mark them all. The realization of this shared sigil, this brotherhood of scars, creeps over Jessica in slow, chilling waves; each encounter with one of the townsfolk brings another glimpse of that same jagged line, puckered and pale against their skin, as if they all share in some secret wound. What is its origin? We are left to wonder. The men’s wary stares and guarded silences only deepen the sense of isolation closing in around her, leaving Jessica with the inescapable feeling that she has stumbled into a place marked by a silent, collective curse.
As Jessica lies in bed, paralyzed by fear and the oppressive silence of the old house, the grave rubbings she has pinned to the walls begin to stir. One by one, the delicate sheets flutter and lift, as if caught by an invisible breeze or the exhalation of some unseen presence. The papers billow outward, filling the dim room with a soft, unsettling rustle, while Jessica, wide-eyed and trembling, senses the weight of the house’s secrets pressing in from every shadow.
There are key scenes that linger in my memory: Jessica’s first sight of the ethereal girl in white beckoning her by the lake, the group’s awkward dinner with Emily, the whispered warnings and sudden violence that erupt as the story spirals toward its conclusion and the film’s climax set against the backdrop of the misty lake and the encroaching darkness, is both terrifying and tragic, as Jessica’s grip on sanity slips away and the boundaries between folklore and psychosis dissolve entirely.
One of the film’s most mesmerizing moments—and perhaps its most arresting—unfolds when, in the pale hush of a quiet afternoon, Jessica and the red-haired Emily, who is like a ghostly mermaid, drift together in the still, glassy water. Everything feels calm, almost suspended, until suddenly the world seems to hold its breath as a spectral figure, chalk- white in the tattered remnants of a wedding dress, emerges silently from the depths. There’s something haunting about her face – a mix of longing, sorrow, and menace – as she glides toward Jessica with her arms reaching out, desperate for an embrace. Water beads up on her translucent skin as she floats toward Jessica, the fabric of her gown billows around her like ectoplasm. In a heartbeat, the scene turns nightmarish—the apparition seizes Jessica, dragging her beneath the surface, cold hands closing around her in a suffocating grip. The lake, moments before a place of fragile peace, becomes eerily silent like one of the weathered headstones Jessica traces with her paper and charcoal. There, the lake seems to have swallowed up old tragedies; the town seems to keep guarded. Gasping for breath and trembling with terror, Jessica breaks free from the phantom Emily’s grip beneath the water and scrambles to the shore, stumbling away from the lake’s haunted embrace.
Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is less a conventional horror film than a psychological folk tale, steeped in the anxieties of its era but timeless in its evocation of fear and isolation. Its moodiness is palpable—every frame seems to tremble with uncertainty, every face hides secrets, and every sound carries the possibility of menace. Lampert’s performance is the film’s fragile heart, her vulnerability and yearning drawing us into Jessica’s world until we, too, are unsure what is real. The film’s haunting visuals and surreal soundscape, and ambiguous narrative make it a singular work—a ghost story, a vampire tale, and a meditation on madness, all woven together intricately bound and as delicate and unsettling as Jessica herself.
