halloweenfest evening seven: jessabelle and hands of the ripper

*SPOILER ALERT*

Jessabelle: (2014. dir: Kevin Greutert) Seeking to employ a creeping tension rather than out-and-out scares (and, honestly, the tension never stretches all the way taut), Jessabelle works best in its atmosphere (hoodoo-infused Louisiana bayous) and effective story-telling.

After her life is derailed by an accident, Jessie (Sarah Snook from Predestination) is forced back to her hometown and into her estranged father's crumbling old Southern Gothic house. Immediately haunted by nightmares and spooked by old tarot-reading videotapes left by her dead mother (Joelle Carter, Ava Crowder from Justified, wonderful), she begins, wheelchair-bound but helped along by a childhood sweetheart (Mark Webber), to try and unravel the decaying family secrets.

It's got plot-holes, but they're not fatal: she claims she hasn't seen her father since she was a baby, but when he brings her back to his old family home, he is still living in the tiny backwater where she was raised by her aunt; also, a sudden, unplanned, "secret" adoption staying secret in so small a bayou community is tough to swallow. The visual tropes the haint employs are satisfyingly organic to its plight: the recurring creep of black sludge mirrors the emptying of the underwater coffin, for instance. It's got echoes of that other voodoo-bayou classic, the Skeleton Key, but allows for at least a little feeling of redemption in the end. Although it feels shockingly anathema to our modern sense of fair play, the sins of the father visited upon the child, this kind of vengeance enjoys a long and ongoing tradition in certain circles, and the racial hatred at the heart of the original crime lends an air of the righteous to the avenging furies.

Hands of the Ripper: (1971. dir: Peter Sasdy) Don't be fooled by the poster. This Hammer film, although not without its merit, is far too prim to be emblematized by such Italianate spudoratezza.

A little girl watches Jack the Ripper (who is her father) murder her mother, then he kisses his daughter before he vanishes. Fast forward several years. The orphaned teenager, Anna (Angharad Rees) is being raised (badly) by a fake medium, who uses her to falsify the voices of dead children during her seances. Murderous impulses can apparently be passed down through the DNA, though, because once puberty kicks in, she finds herself falling into deadly fugue states triggered by a combination of flickering lights and kisses.

A well-meaning Freudian (Eric Porter) takes her into his home to try and understand the mechanisms of the homocidal mind. Incredibly, he sticks by her although she commits five or six murders, some in his very house, within the course of two or three days. (It's an interesting Freudian side-issue that so many Victorians of either gender feel compelled to kiss her on so short an acquaintance.)

There's not much more to it than that. There are some nice visuals, as in the climactic scene in St. Paul's, and Jane Merrow brings the needed innocence and light as the sweet, blind fiancee of the doctor's son.