Retro Review: Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

The way I see it, one of the great things about being a horror film buff is the joy of discovering older films that never caught on with larger audiences but still serve as impressive examples of horror cinema. My latest discovery is Let's Scare Jessica to Death, a 1971 creeper that was directed by John D. Hancock.

I first noticed this film when I saw it on the shelf at our local video store back in the '80s, but I didn't pay much attention to it because I never heard of it before. Yet as the years went by, I noticed how this title kept popping up in many horror film reviews, books, articles and Web sites, so I finally got around to watching it the other week. Fun trivia fact: Let's Scare Jessica to Death is the film that landed Hancock the job of directing Jaws 2, but he was fired from that sequel due to a disagreement he had with a Universal executive. Stephen King has also mentioned in interviews that this movie is one of his favorite horror films, and you can see its influence in one of his novels from the mid-70s.

Let's Scare Jessica to Death begins with the titular character Jessica (Zohra Lampert) traveling with her husband Duncan (Barton Heyman) and their friend Woody (Kevin O'Connor) to a small town in rural New England. Jessica was recently released from a psychiatric facility, and Duncan purchased an abandoned farm outside of the town as a place for his wife to heal and resume her life. Soon after arriving at her new home, Jessica begins to see and hear strange things around the farm that may be linked to its legendary past. Is Jessica relapsing into insanity, or is someone trying to scare her to death?

To say much more about Let's Scare Jessica to Death is to give away too much. What I can say is that it is very similar to films such as Mario Bava's Lisa and the Devil (1973) and Francesco Barilli's The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974) in that it is a moody, dreamlike story about an emotionally fragile woman who is in the thrall of an unknown force that slowly unravels the fabric of her sanity. Like other films of its kind, Let's Scare Jessica to Death takes its time to set up many different details within the narrative--details that don't make much sense at first--all for the purpose of delivering a relentless ending that ties it all together in a matter of minutes and leaves you reeling over what you just saw. The revelation of who the 'us' is that's suggested in the title (i.e., Let's is a contraction for 'let us') was something that I didn't see coming at all as the film reached its concluding scenes.

If you prefer horror films that have oodles of violence, jump scares and gore, Let's Scare Jessica to Death won't hold your interest at all. Yet if you're interested in older horror films that crawl under your skin through ghostly imagery, strange landscapes, disorienting narratives and pervasive dread, you should give this one a try.

Classic Italian Horror Cinema Lives on in Insidious (2011)

One of the great things about being a long-term horror fan who watches both American films and films from other countries is noticing how older horror films impact newer horror films in different cultures. No, I'm not talking about Hollywood's current infatuation with remaking horror movies, both domestic and foreign; I'm talking about how filmmakers from one country adopt the look and feel of horror that is often associated with filmmakers from another country--while at the same time remaining faithful to their own cultural roots. Such mixture of styles result in horror movies that are much more engaging than those that are content to merely imitate the cinematic approach used by the most well-known horror movies.

Take Insidious, for example. When it was released in 2011, the ad campaigns promoted the fact that it produced by people from the Saw and Paranormal Activity franchises--namely James Wan, Leigh Whannell, Jason Blum, Jeanette Brill, Oren Peli and Steven Schneider. Wan directed Insidious, while Whannell wrote its screenplay and Blum, Brill, Peli and Schneider assumed producer duties. Such advertising was done to capitalize on popular American horror franchises, and the plot of Insidious does bear some plot similarities to Paranormal Activity (2007) and other popular American horror movies such as The Exorcist (1973) and Poltergeist (1982). Yet what I did not expect when watching Insidious was just how much it was influenced by classic Italian horror directors such as Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento. In other words, as American horror movies go, Insidious is the most Italian movie I've seen that wasn't made by anyone from Italy.

Insidious tells the story of Josh and Renai Lambert (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne) who have just moved into a new home with their three children. After one of their children Dalton (Ty Simpkins) slips into an inexplicable coma, strange occurrences begin to plague the Lambert family. The Lamberts move to a new address to escape what they believe to be a haunted house, but the haunting continues in its frequency and intensity. Josh and Renai soon learn that the key to ending the haunting lies with saving their comatose son, a task that requires the Lamberts to look to the past for answers.

I don't want to say too much more about Insidious because it will give too much away. What I can say is that I think it is a movie that delivers an ample supply of scares, largely through Wan's careful attention to detail: the film features many visual and spoken clues that pay off greatly during the film's final act. I also encourage horror fans who love films by Italian directors such as Bava, Fulci and Argento to see Insidious because they will find much to appreciate in this movie. As the film progressed, it reminded me of classic Italian thrillers such as Shock (1977), Suspiria (1977) and The Beyond (1981).

I think that Wan's homage to Italian horror was intentional: If you look closely in Dalton's bedroom in the second house, you'll briefly see a page from a Diabolik comic book displayed in a picture frame. The character Diabolik made his first appearance on the big screen in 1968's Danger: Diabolik, a film that was directed by horror maestro Bava. That said, I'd also advise that fans who don't care for Italian horror, which is known for balancing surreal creepiness with low-budget camp, might want to avoid Insidious for the same reason why I appreciated it. If spaghetti horror isn't your thing, Insidious probably won't be either.

Insidious is a welcome addition to the haunted house subgenre of horror, but fans who know their foreign films will also be thrilled by the movie's frequent nods to the classic Italian approach to fright flicks.

Great Moments in Slasher Film History: Bay of Blood (1971)

As horror films go, giallo movies are among my favorites. I enjoy the subgenre's weaving of pulp mystery characterizations and plot devices into its tales of blood-soaked terror, an attribute that sets it apart from its American counterpart, the slasher subgenre. Despite their differences, the Italian giallo did inspire the American slasher, particularly in the case of Mario Bava's 1971 movie Bay of Blood (a.k.a. Twitch of the Death Nerve, a.k.a. Reazione a Catena). Critics have credited Bay of Blood as being the giallo movie that most obviously influenced the slasher film craze in the U.S. during the 80s--particularly Friday the 13th Part 2, which copied a few of Bay of Blood's death scenes almost shot for shot.

I just saw Bay of Blood for the first time the other week, and here are some thoughts about this gory gem and unique relationship to slasher films and the giallo subgenre itself. Read on....

The plot of Bay of Blood is simple. An elderly heiress dies under mysterious circumstances within the first few minutes of the film, and the unclaimed inheritance of her valuable bayside forest estate sets off a murder spree among rival family members that comes to a bizarre and unexpected conclusion within the film's final frames.

Bay of Blood may not be one of Bava's best giallo films, but that's largely because it's not meant to be. For as much as it shocked audiences during its initial release, Bava shot this film as a wickedly dark parody of the giallo subgenre itself. Most giallo films depict a single killer (or two) and a main character that spends the duration of the movie deciphering the killer's motive and identity--no matter how convoluted or improbable they might be. In contrast, almost every character in Bava's movie is both a killer and a victim, and the motive is all too clear: greed.

According to one interview in the documentary that was included on the Bay of Blood DVD, Bava made this movie as a frustrated response to fans who kept asking him why he didn't make his horror films as gory as those made by Dario Argento; if this claim is true, it would certainly explain Bava's mix of nihilism and gallows humor in the film's plot and visual tone.

With such an aim to depart from and satirize giallo narrative conventions, it's peculiar that Bay of Blood would earn its place in horror film history as the creative connective tissue between giallo and slasher films. Only a handful of scenes within the movie are directly credited with influencing the slasher subgenre--namely, the scenes where four young adults trespass into the bayside estate to party and have sex, only to be murdered in creatively gruesome ways. Within the plot of the movie, these characters have no direct relation to the feuding family members and are murdered simply because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet the gory killings, creepy woodland settings and full-frontal nudity in these scenes would go on to inspire The Burning, Just Before Dawn, Madman, Sleepaway Camp and countless other slasher movies.

Two victims united in death in Bay of Blood.

Another oddity that stems from Bay of Blood and its influence is that American slasher films that center on teenagers often feature a somewhat puritanical sense of morality. In these films, the teenage characters who partake in alcohol, drugs and sex will die horribly while the innocent and virginal teenage characters will most likely survive. In contrast, no one is completely innocent in Bay of Blood, and almost everyone is killed regardless of who they are or what they've done. When you consider the identities, motives and reactions of the perpetrators behind the last act of murder in the movie--a punch line of sorts to Bava's feature-length morbid joke--it almost feels like a refutation of the simplistic morality that would populate the slasher subgenre that had yet to exist. (Depending on how you look at it, the only real survivor in Bay of Blood is the titular bay estate itself, an outcome you'll never find in an American slasher movie.)

Bava was a talented filmmaker and the fact that he could make a low-budget film such as Bay of Blood look so impressive is a testament to his skill with the movie camera; thus, it only stands to reason that many of his imitators would lack his finesse and wit. Nevertheless, rarely have I seen such a contrast in themes between a groundbreaking film and the later films it influenced.

Before closing this post, I also want to mention another giallo film that's fit for a comparison to American slasher movies: Andrea Bianchi's Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975). This film is an average entry in the giallo subgenre, but it has all of the earmarks that would be associated with American slasher films: a masked killer, a high body count and--as the title explicitly indicates--ample amounts of nudity. In fact, the movie is structured almost precisely so that the sex and murder happen like clockwork intervals, with a murder followed by a nude scene, followed by another murder and another nude scene, and so on. I would even go so far as to say that Bianchi put more effort into balancing the portions of sex and violence in his movie than into making the killer a frightening presence.

While an American slasher movie would try to infuse the situation depicted in Strip Nude for Your Killer with the aforementioned moral structure, all of the characters in Bianchi's movie are far from innocent. True to giallo's roots in pulp mystery fiction, each character in the film in involved in some kind of vice--be it blackmail, physical abuse or sexual promiscuity. Even the characters that survive the bloodshed and unmask the killer's identity are somewhat sleazy. True, the characters in Strip Nude for Your Killer are all adults while the characters in American slasher movies are frequently teenagers, but the discrepancy between the portrayal of characters based on age between the giallo and slasher subgenres raises an important question: Does this discrepancy mean that 80s-era slashers were made for largely teenagers and if so, does that mean that American filmmakers of that time (both big-budget and low-budget) felt that there wasn't an adult audience for serial murder thrillers in the U.S.? If that is so, does that attitude still apply today, especially in light of recent slasher film remakes?