page_title: Let's Scare Jessica to Death
section_title: Analysis
hierarchical_section_title: Let's Scare Jessica to Death / Analysis
caption_attribution_description: Illustration in Carmilla, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's vampire story.
context_page_description: Let's Scare Jessica to Death is a 1971 American horror film co-written and directed by John Hancock in his directorial debut, and starring Zohra Lampert, Barton Heyman, Gretchen Corbett, and Mariclare Costello. The film depicts the nightmarish experiences of a psychologically fragile woman who comes to believe that another strange, mysterious young woman she has let into her home may actually be a vampire.
  Initially conceived by writer Lee Kalcheim as a satirical horror film about a group of hippies preyed upon by a monster in a lake, the screenplay was significantly reworked after director Hancock signed on to the project. Hancock took certain elements from Kalcheim's script, but opted to write a straightforward horror film set at a remote farmhouse. Inspired by the psychological implications of Henry James' novella The Turn of the Screw and Robert Wise's film The Haunting, Hancock wanted to center the screenplay on a protagonist whose credibility interpreting events could be questioned by the audience so they could use their imagination. Filming of Let's Scare Jessica to Death took place in various towns and villages in Connecticut, largely in Middlesex County.
context_section_description: Some literature and film scholars have drawn comparisons between Let's Scare Jessica to Death and Irish novelist Sheridan Le Fanu's novel Carmilla (1871), which tells the story of a vampiress. Scholar Nancy West cites the film as one of several examples of horror films of the 1970s that directly lift the premise of the novel and place it in other historical or cultural contexts: "This languid movie reimagines Le Fanu's Laura as Jessica...like Carmilla, Emily is a horror of a houseguest, and after both men have been bitten by her, it becomes apparent that Emily is none other than the one-hundred-year-old vampire who in the course of time has attacked all the men in the nearby town...Is Emily an imaginative projection of Jessica's murderous feelings toward her husband? Of Jessica's frustration with a mental condition that has rendered her sadly dependent on men? The film never makes clear."
  The decline of 1960s counterculture has been cited as a theme by critics and observers. The hearse that Duncan and Jessica drive, which has with the word "love" spray-painted on it, has been noted as a blatant reference to the death of 
  "hippie values." Critic and biographer Michael Doyle describes the film as a "haunting elegy" for the failures of the hippie movement. Doyle elaborates that the film "isolates and illuminates the death and corruption of counterculture values" from the era, and anticipates the "festering paranoia" that occurred throughout the 1970s, with the Watergate scandal, the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, and the Jonestown massacre. Director John Hancock, though ambivalent about whether it was consciously or subconsciously integrated into the screenplay, has conceded this interpretation, commenting: "You could already feel that negativity brewing when we were making Jessica; that things weren't working out the way some of us had hoped and dreamed they would."
caption: The film has been compared by several literature and film scholars to the novella Carmilla (1872)
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