“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” — Edgar Allan Poe
“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, Scott Poole from Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting 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 hate ‘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 traditional 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 a far superior film, but it also—perhaps unintentionally—embodies the most iconic 1970s tropes, capturing what made that remarkable wave of horror films from the era so extraordinary.