 Hello and welcome to today's edition of Frightfully Forgotten Horror Movies. But before we get started, what are we drinking? We are drinking the Demeter's Fate, a Russian Imperial Stout. Today we're going to be covering 1971's Let's Scare Jessica to Death, written and directed by John D. Hancock. He hasn't directed tons of things, but within the same vein as this movie would be, I guess, the 1980's Twilight Zone TV show. He did a couple of episodes for that. Zora Lambert is in this, and she was in the Exorcist 3, which we covered, you can click the link above. She was also in a lot of TV, including Quincy. Queasy! Barton Heyman is in this, and he was in the Exorcist, the first one. Mary Claire Costello is in this, and she was in one of the episodes in the anthology series Nightmares. Let's Scare Jessica to Death starts off with three people driving this old hearse, which looks a lot like the old Ecto-1 from Ghostbusters, when Ray first brings it, you know, I found the car. Jessica and her husband Duncan and their friend Woody. Jessica has just been released from the hospital, and Duncan has lost his job. They're kind of starting fresh, and they bought this big old farmhouse out in the Orchard. They hear her thoughts, which is very cool. You know that she's just come back from the hospital and she's kind of still healing, right? They drive through the local town, and there's all these weird old people, kind of typical small town, staring and a bunch of damn hippies coming in here. They get to their new house. Here's something, upstairs, this girl who's been squatting there. We find her, her name is Emily, and they actually feel kind of bad for her. Jessica asks her to stay. You can just stay the night, and that's fine. She pulls out her lute, this fucking lute, and then he goes and gets his stand up base out of this big huge case. Yeah, it looks enormous. It looks like a cat's kick. It just has this jam session, and kind of reminding you of that jam session from Star Trek where Spock pulls out that guy with those cauliflower ears, those pierogies. Anyways, we digress. Jessica kind of notices, like, oh, you hear her thinking, I think Duncan is attracted to her. I think he likes her. The next day, Emily's all packed up, she's ready to go, but they have a little surprise for her. Guess what? You can stay with us for now. Yeah, like, what the fuck? Good deal for her. She had to hope she'd better be paying rent. And they're all poor too. Yeah. Suddenly, they're all bathing together in the river and they're all washing each other's backs and everything, and you can see Duncan is like washing up Emily and stuff like that. Massaging. Yeah, and you can hear Jessica thinking, ooh. And then suddenly, Jessica sees this kind of pale figure underneath the water. She gets grabbed, and she freaks out, and oh, something's down there, something grabbed me, and they don't believe her, but they kind of pretend to. So they need to sell a bunch of stuff, because they're fucking broke. As they say, we need money to eat. Why you bought a giant farmhouse and you got no money? Exactly. Go through the house to find stuff to sell, and Jessica goes up to the attic, and she sees kind of some neat stuff, but one of them is this old wedding dress that she puts on. She also sees an old picture of three people, which looks like a father and maybe two daughters. And one of them looks a lot like Emily. They go to town. He's asking around, and he's like, do you know where I can sell some of these things? Well, even if I knew, I wouldn't tell you. Like, what a bunch of fucking breaks. Come across this antique store, he notices, he's like, oh, this looks a lot like the bishop family. Well, the story goes is that the daughter drowned in the lake with her wedding dress on on the day of her wedding. And apparently she roams the town and the countryside as a vampire. Jessica goes back to the cemetery to start doing more tracing for like her art, and she sees this figure in the distance leads her to the like this kind of waterfall area. She sees the body of that antique dealer that they just dealt with. He's so dead. Yeah. And she goes back to go get Duncan and Woody, but the body's gone. Hmm. What are they going to think? Right. And she's like, I swear, there was something here. I swear, please believe me, I'm not lying. Duncan is kind of sort of at his wits end already already. Yeah. Already. And he's like, I think that you should go back to New York. I think you should start seeing your doctor again. And she's like, well, why don't you just leave me then? So he goes downstairs, goes to sleep in a chair. Emily comes by in a nice dress and everything and starts seducing him. The next day he's in the car and he's ready to go to town. And she sees Emily looks like she's kissing him goodbye. I think it kind of gets a little fed up by all this. And she actually hitchhikes to town to go find Duncan, probably to give him shit, I guess. In front of everybody. Fuck you, Duncan! Smash the car all up. Go to some big scene. Woody after a long day's work, driving around that poisonous fucking truck, they're all getting him to do all the hard, dangerous work. He comes in from a long day's work and he goes upstairs and Emily's there. And she's all of a sudden she's kind of into him, right? She starts to kiss him and we see her bite his neck and we're going to end it there. So if you want to see what's going to happen with our three characters, keep watching. Which is a great segue into one of the best things about this movie is the characters and the character development I think in this movie is fantastic. They get a real sense of what these people feel, the emotions and what they're going through and actually from a pretty quick point in the movie too. Woody starts off like, he seems kind of cheesy, a bit of a flake, he's kind of coming on Emily super quick. Emily finally seduces him back, he's like, now guess what, fuck you because I can see that you're playing a fast one with my friends, right? So I like that development of Woody. Exactly. In terms of being an ass, he's opposite of Woody, he's the asshole, right? Because the whole idea of them coming up to the country is to get Jessica away from all this bullshit and it was mostly his idea to help. When things start to happen with Jessica, he's sick of it. He's had enough already, he doesn't want to deal with it anymore, so he's like sends her away. The stark differences between all the characters are great and you love and hate each one. Exactly, yeah. The atmosphere of this movie is really good, I love the setting, that old farmhouse out in the country, in a small town nearby with all these weird people and all the fog. It plays out like an old Gothic horror novel. Exactly. But modern day, which is neat. A lot of really good shots, you see Emily come out of the water and she's all pale and she's wearing the wedding dress. I love how you hear what Jessica thinks too. I think that's a really cool aspect of this movie because she's supposed to be kind of not well, right? But everything she says in her head that you hear isn't all that crazy, it kind of makes sense. She's just trying to rationalize what she sees or is it in her head? You don't really know. That's one of the main aspects of the movie is that. The whole theme of this movie, like with the whole sort of mental illness aspect of it, right? To go either way. Is she really seeing all this? Duncan bring her out here knowing Emily was there because he's already with Emily to make Jessica say, fuck you, I don't want anything to do with you anymore. So then she can willingly leave and he can be with Emily. Like I don't... They could go there. I don't know. Right? Zora Lambert who plays Jessica. When I first started watching the movie I thought, I don't think she's that good. But no, it's not that. She plays it like someone who's a little off and she's always second guessing everything she does. Hesitant to say anything or do anything because they're going to think she's nuts, right? So she plays it great that way. The ending for this movie is great because it's very enigmatic. Open-ended. Yeah, because it can go either way and it's kind of like the whole movie. I don't know what is going on exactly. Is she imagining it all or is Emily really a vampire? You pretty much have to make it up for yourself. You have to decide at the end, this is the way it went. Exactly, because they don't spell it out for you at all. No, not at all. I like that. But they have to do it right. And this movie does it right where it's not so open-ended where it's like, well fuck, give me something. Exactly. This movie gives you enough where it's like, okay, I can take that and make my own. If you're a fan of good old 70s psychological slow burn thrillers, definitely check out Let's Scare Jessica to Death. That's right. And until next time, you make sure to keep drinking.