Let's Scare Jessica to Death Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.5
Overall		3.0

Let's Scare Jessica to Death Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson December 19, 2020

After beginning his career as a theater director, John D. Hancock directed the fifteen-minute film, Sticky My Fingers... Fleet My Feet (1970), which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Short Subject, Live Action Subjects. (It features Charles Durning in a bit part.) Apparently, this caught the attention of Paramount, who hired him to direct Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971) as his feature debut. The movie opens with a picturesque scene at sunset with a woman in a canoe. A voice-over introduces us to Jessica (Zohra Lampert), who recently spent six months in a sanitarium recovering from a nervous breakdown. Jessica, her husband Duncan (Barton Heyman), and close friend Woody (Kevin O'Connor) have moved from New York to the countryside in an old farmhouse just outside a quaint town in New England. In the front porch, Jessica notices a young lady with long red-hair lounging in a chair. She goes inside along with her two travel companions and upstairs they find Emily (Mariclare Costello), who explains that the house was abandoned and she just wanted a place to rest. Jessica asks Emily to stay the night. Emily charms the trio with her lilt singing voice and guitar playing. The next morning, Jessica again requests that Emily stay with them. Emily explains that she doesn't really have anything to do. She never finished college and is still looking for a job.

Jessica hears voices in her head continuously and feels haunted by something. She visits a cemetery and sees a teenage girl (Gretchen Corbett) clad in white standing on a ledge. Jessica sees this mysterious figure often and it seems she wants to tell her something but can't quite. When Jessica and Duncan go into town, most of the folks aren't very nice and act odd around them. When Jessica goes to the attic, she sees an old photograph which shows a young lady named Abigail who drowned in 1880 at age 20 around the time of her wedding. Jessica believes she closely resembles Emily, who doesn't see a likeness between Abigail and her. Has Abigail returned somehow as a vampire?

As I watched the first reel of Let's Scare Jessica to Death, I thought about Peter Medak's terrific horror mystery The Changeling (1980) where John Russell (George C. Scott), a piano player mourning the death of his wife and daughter, moves into a creaky old house. It seems that Jessica is also mourning the death of a loved one (the circumstances aren't exactly known) and the farmhouse may also be haunted. The Changeling featured a most remarkable scene showing a séance which tries to resuscitate the spirit of a boy who once lived in the house. Emily also leads a séance but the main difference between The Changeling and LSJtD is that the former is more creepy and scary.

The larger problem that Hancock's film faces is that the audience is always one step ahead of Jessica and the action. I could foresee what was going to happen from one scene to the next. In addition, LSJtD has difficulty deciding what it wants to be about. Is it a vampire film, a ghost story, or a blending of the two genres? If it aimed to be a hybrid, the results aren't as successful as they could.

At the time of the movie's release, Zohra Lampert was best known for portraying Angelina in Kazan's Splendor in the Grass (1961) and playing Eve in the Garden of Eden in a TV commercial for a blended fruit juice, according to newspaper accounts. While Lampert gives a naturalistic performance, I never felt she was quite right for Jessica. Part of the blame lies not in Hancock's direction of her but the script that he and Lee Kalcheim wrote. It's not so much that LSJtD is a slow burn (which it is) but that it delivers too a bit too much hackneyed material that was done better before it.

Note: The Texas-based morning paper Austin American picked up a report from Hollywood that the old farmhouse in Connecticut used in the film was built in 1913 by the Dickinson family, who were notorious for witch hazel. When Hancock and his crew filmed threw, it contained an antique stove and icebox dating back to 1850. Some of the fourteen bedrooms and eleven bathrooms, which had marble fixtures, were used as dressing rooms and headquarters for the movie company.

Let's Scare Jessica to Death Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Let's Scare Jessica to Death appears in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1 on this MPEG-4 AVC-encoded BD-50. In 2006 Paramount issued it on a bare-bones DVD and the similar no-frills Warner Archive Collection SD edition, which came out in 2013. Shout! Factory have added several recent extras that are detailed below. Shout!'s restored transfer looks clean without egregious DNR applied. Black levels look deep and solid with no crush evident. One can tell from these screenshots how rich and saturated the colors look. There's no color bleeding although I did spot some colors drain as the characters went for a brief swim that preceded a reel change. I also noticed one instance where a zigzag pattern of mosquito noise came across the frame. But all in all, the grain structure is well-balanced. Blood was also bright red, a hue that The Miami News' Hubert Norton commented in his review of the film. Shout! has encoded the feature at an average video bitrate of 37000 kbps.

The 89-minute film receives the usual twelve chapters from the studio.

Let's Scare Jessica to Death Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Shout! has supplied the movie's original monaural mix, which is rendered here as a DTS-HD Master Audio Dual Mono (1754 kbps, 24-bit). The lossless track is free of any nagging hiss, scratches, or audible dropouts. Dialogue is clear and distinct. The sound design is one of the most original facets of the film. Orville Stoeber composed an electronic score that coincides during a burgeoning era of experiments with synths and unusual instrumental sounds. Scores for two films involving Michael Crichton come to mind: Gil Mellé's avant-garde music for The Andromeda Strain (1971) and Jerry Goldsmith's suspenseful score for Coma (1978). Jack Zink, the then-entertainment editor for the Fort Lauderdale (FL) News and one of the few critics who loved LSJtD spent a full paragraph discussing the sound track in his review: "Sound is by Joe Ryan with electronic music by Walter Sear. Sear's music, with an abundance of super bass re­verberations and the like, can probably be credited with creating most of the atmo­sphere and for hiding a num­ber of glaring holes in the story itself." Zink also mentions the MOOG synthesizer. The aforesaid Norton praised "the heavy bass throbbing music" for delivering chills to the audience.

Shout! provides optional English subtitles.

Note: the Windsor Star's reviewer Jack Meredith noted that subtitles were on the print screened for the French-Canadian audience in Ontario. One subtitle displayed this line: "Was it reality or had she [Jessica] imagined everything?"

Let's Scare Jessica to Death Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• NEW Audio Commentary with Director John Hancock and Line Producer Bill Badalato - Hancock and Badalato were recorded last year for this feature-length track. While they spend part of the time refreshing each other's memory of this nearly fifty-year-old film, they share some wonderful anecdotes and production stories about the cast. Both mutually agree that Kevin O'Connor was miscast as Woody. In English, not subtitled.

• NEW Art Saved My Life An Interview with Composer Orville Stoeber (16:25, 1080p) - Stoeber looks back at family musicians and familial singalongs, life as an army brat, theater productions in New York, meeting and working with frequent collaborator John D. Hancock, his composing process for Let's Scare Jessica to Death, writing a song for the film, his experiments with analog synths, his fuzzy memories when the film was released, and the sociocultural legacy of the film. In English, not subtitled.

• NEW Scare Tactics: Reflections on a Seventies Horror Classic – An Interview with Author/Film Historian Kim Newman (23:44, 1080p) - in this must-see interview, the Brit boasts about his favorite horror film, which he regards as a "really, really good movie." He recounts seeing it with friends as an adolescent. Newman covers a lot of ground in under a half hour, including LSJtD's connections to Hammer Horror, vampire movies in the Seventies (which is a genre he claims experienced an "enormous boom" during that era), and much more. In English, not subtitled.

• NEW She Walks These Hills – The Film's Locations Then and Now (6:49, 1080i) - Justin Beahm produced and edited this new piece about all the movie's principal Connecticut locations. Beahm shows a clip of the film from each location and then displays what each one looks like today. The newer footage was shot in 2019.

• Theatrical Trailer (2:58, 1080p) - an unrestored trailer for LSJtD that's rife with artifacts, cross-coloration, and scratches. It's been optimized for 16X9 playback. Warning: Don't watch the trailer if you've never seen the movie before. It pretty much gives every story event away!

• TV Spot (0:55, 1080i) - While colors have noticeably faded in this archival spot, it's in much better condition than the vintage trailer and doesn't have print marks. But again, it drops in several spoilers so don't look at it prior to seeing the film.

• Radio Spot (1:02, 1080p) - a one-minute radio spot Paramount aired in the late summer of 1971. It sounds as if it were taken from a record but is audible enough.

• Still Gallery (4:39, 1080p) - this slide show depicts forty-one publicity snapshots of the cast posing and filming scenes. These are culled from Paramount's vault. The final seven stills are poster sheets, lobby cards, and a few pages from the film's press book.

Let's Scare Jessica to Death Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I wonder who the original target demographic was for Let's Scare Jessica to Death aside from general horror fans? The Courier (KY) Journal's Jean Dietrich had this to say at the time of the film's release: "Teens are about the only audience I can imagine putting up with the sense­lessness of it all just to have their hair stand on end." It didn't fare much better when Ray Finocchiaro of The News (DE) Journal watched it with an audience in Wilmington. Apparently, the crowd laughed at all the "scary parts." Time has been kinder to John D. Hancock's directorial debut and I acknowledge that the picture was influential. My quibble is that the way scenes are constructed makes it too predictable. Shout! Factory has produced by far the best package on home video for the film. The image looks outstanding and the uncompressed mono mix doesn't have any audible defects. I learned quite a few new facts about the movie from the commentary track that I didn't find in my research but there are fairly frequent gaps throughout the track. Kim Newman, who I respect greatly, gives a wonderful interview full of compendious nuggets about LSJtD and horror cinema during the early 1970s and the decade before. The disc earns a RECOMMENDATION.