the belated, truncated halloweenfest: let's scare jessica to death

(1971. dir: John D. Hancock) The turning of the sixties into the seventies gave us a fascinating moment in horror cinema: Woman v. The World. Highlighted by Rosemary's Baby and the Stepford Wives, Let's Scare Jessica to Death is another in a series in which an ordinary woman finds her everyday world transformed in eerie, almost imperceptible increments, until it seems like a malevolent conspiracy and she cannot tell whom she can trust. In fact, in these films, she can trust no one. Even those who sincerely want to help her are powerless to do it, and the husband who seems at first benign and well-meaning always fails her colossally before the end. The question at the heart of the mounting tension is always this: am I crazy, or is the world conspiring against me?

Let's Scare Jessica to Death is a significant entry in the category for a few reasons. First, maternity is never mentioned. Even in the Stepford Wives, mostly concerned with connubial matters, there is a sense that our heroine might escape but is held back by thought of her children. A movie like this one about a couple trying to piece their marriage back together after a crisis in which children or the prospect of parenthood never comes up is a treasurable oddity. The other lovely factor is Zohra Lampert in the lead. Her performance, which we view largely in close-up, is mesmerizing. The director wants us inside her head, keeps us there throughout, where we hear audible voices, voices which only she and we hear, and which may or may not be her hallucinations.

And,in fact, we are left in the end with an uncertainty. Those other two classic movies leave us in no doubt as to the breadth of the evil mesh closing around our heroine, but this one is different. From the title, we go in with the assumption that we know something: someone is trying to drive the woman back into the madhouse. By the closing credits, we're not so sure. Which things we've seen are real, and which are hallucinations? Is there a conspiracy? The scars on all the locals are an eerie touch. Why are they all bandaged and wounded? ARE there vampires?

You could call it a lost classic, rounding out a trilogy with those other, unforgettable two. It was a movement rising directly up out of the feminist uprising, giving expression to the new uncertainty and angst in the feminine subconscious as we relinquished our "safer" roles and moved out into the places of greater potential power in the world. It may, in fact, be time for a new wave of such films, as American women woke on November 9th to find our country had banded together overnight to declare us second-class citizens, not only unworthy to make our own reproductive decisions, but unworthy even of basic human respect, as amply demonstrated by our sociopath-elect and his contempt for our gender. Our government, for the next four years, will be defining "human" as white, heterosexual males with, preferably, at least one million dollars in the bank and a cupboard full of guns. Because horror is always the bellwether, the genre in which the black bile and dread spew first from the collective underconscious, this might be a useful path. Although we often see women as the brutalized protagonists in modern horror, we tend today towards the physically tough, ridiculously resilient and resourceful grlz, leaving those of us who are normal women, with no super-strengths and no instinct for fighting or gun-play, without proper mirrors.