It’s All in Your Mind: “Let’s Scare Jessica to Death” (1971)

This is one of the movies that I fondly remember from my childhood, so it must’ve shown up on the weekend CBS Late Movie or some such program during the late 1970’s or early 1980’s, and the title isn’t really appropriate, and makes the picture seem like it’ll be about something that it’s definitely not. Memories of the film have remained with me all these years as a near perfect example of how atmosphere and mood can elevate a rather mediocre film into something special. Certain images from this film remained seared into my head even though there was probably a twenty year or more lapse between viewings, and, happily, it still has the power to unnerve and unsettle me. It’s one of the lesser known scary pictures of the era, even though horror master Stephen King paid homage to it in his scholarly study of the genre, “Danse Macabre”.

Jessica (Zohra Lampert) has just been released from an institution following a breakdown (the details of which are never fully explained, which adds to the mystery of the film). She is an attractive young brunette, probably in her mid to late 20’s, who’s moving with her husband Duncan and good friend Woody out of the stressful city into an old house in the country (just the perfect place to recover from mental problems, right?). The trio are looked on as weirdos by the equally weird locals, because they drive around in an old hearse, and Jessica has the peculiar hobby of making rubbings of old tombstones. While doing this early in the film, she appears to see a young girl standing in the cemetery, but due to her recent state, she questions whether the girl is real or not.

A great deal of Jessica’s dialogue are voice-over narration in the film, and combined with the slightly off-balance way Lampert plays the role, we are never quite sure if Jessica has truly recovered from her breakdown, or if she is really the victim of a supernatural occurrence. Arriving at the house, the group discover a bewitching young redhead named Emily, played by Mariclare Costello. Costello later played the recurring role of Rosemary Hunter, the schoolteacher in the early seasons of “The Waltons”, but due to her strong presence here, I never completely believed her as the kindly teacher. Emily intrigues the others so much they invite the squatter to remain with them in the house. There is the inevitable séance, where Jessica calls upon all the souls of all the people who have lived in the house, and an aged photo in the attic shows a young girl in a white dress who is a dead ringer (pun intended) for Emily.

The only townsperson who is even remotely friendly to the newcomers runs an antique shop, and the mystery girl from the cemetery does turn out to be real, but unfortunately neither of them comes to a very successful end. Emily’s influence seems to extend beyond the friends and into the entire community, which sets up some intensely creepy sequences later on in the film. None is more disturbing than when Jessica sees (or imagines) her rising out of a lake in the antique white dress (an image that stayed with me since childhood), but the final sequence, with Jessica alone in a rowboat at dawn, with people standing on the shore watching her comes close. It’s not so much horror as it is a feeling of unease; that creepy feeling that you saw something move just out of the corner of your eye or heard your name called in an empty room. That final sequence always leaves me tense and uneasy, and I come away from this picture exactly as Jessica does, wondering about the fine lines between imagination and reality; sanity and insanity.