LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH 1971

I remember having had a dismissive reaction to Let’s Scare Jessica to Death when ads for the low-budget feature began appearing in the newspaper during the summer of 1971. I was never much into horror in those days, my tendency to take them too seriously spoiling all the intended fun of being scared, so the somewhat jocular tone of the title only cemented my resolve to leave the film alone. 

My older sister, a horror enthusiast and the only one of us kids to make it through the broadcast TV premiere of Psycho in 1967, went to see “Jessica” and had raved about it, but I couldn’t be swayed. Jump ahead to the late-‘70s.
Films like Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976) and John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) had turned me into, if not exactly a bonafide horror hound, then certainly an individual more appreciative of the genre and its power to do more than simply offer up the odd shiver and gasp. By this time I'd also come to be aware of actress Zohra Lampert via her appealing but brief appearance as Warren Beatty's make-do wife in Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass. A unique and talented two-time Tony Award nominee with an Actor’s Studio pedigree, Lampert was so unlike the type of actress one usually finds in horror movies, I was intrigued.
Happily, by this time Let’s Scare Jessica to Death had become something of a staple on late-night TV and local Creature Features-style programs.

Let's Scare Jessica to Death's eventual status as a cult film grew out of these wee-small-hours-of-the-morning broadcasts, but as far as I was concerned, if there was ever a film one should not be introduced to via the accompaniment of frequent commercial interruptions; intrusive, mood-killing host segments; and the murky dimness of pre-HD TV, it’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death. Already dealt a death blow with a grossly misleading shocker title that sets the viewer up for deathly scares that never materialize, the addition of commercials and comedy bumpers completely blows Let’s Scare Jessica to Death's deliberate pacing and low-simmer disquietude straight to hell. The first time I saw it, Let's Scare Jessica to Death felt like the slowest, darkest (as in underlit), least-eventful horror film I’d ever seen. I only made it through about 30 minutes before I grew impatient with waiting for something to happen. Nearly 30 years would pass before we’d meet again and I'd come to realize that when it comes to certain films, patience is definitely a virtue.  

Zohra Lampert as Jessica

Barton Heyman as Duncan

Mariclare Costello as Emily

Kevin O'Connor as Woody

Following the death of her father, New Yorker Jessica (who appears to be a folk artist of some sort) suffers a nervous breakdown and is institutionalized for six months. Upon her release, Jessica's husband Duncan quits his job as cellist for the New York Philharmonic, and in the interest of starting a new life, sinks all of their savings into the purchase of a 19^th Century farmhouse and apple orchard in a remote rural section of Connecticut. With the help of their family friend, Woody, Jessica and Duncan embark on their pilgrimage, Jessica (whom it’s alluded has had no say or hand in the selection of the house) expending considerable energy in trying to convince them...and herself...that all is “fine” and that the ever-escalating doubts she harbors about the state of her sanity are baseless. But they aren't.
Almost immediately upon arrival, Jessica begins hearing voices and experiencing what she believes to be hallucinations, but she's afraid to voice her concerns. Not an easy task, given that their new home looks like it was once owned by The Munsters and that its history is attached to a macabre local vampire legend. Adding further fuel to Jessica's mental health fires, the nearby town is totally devoid of women and populated exclusively by bandaged, oddly antagonistic, old men. 

Upon moving in, Jessica discovers their new home to be occupied by a beautiful hippie interloper ("squatter" is such an inelegant word, don’t you find?) named Emily, whom she invites to stay, much to the barely-contained delight of both Duncan and Woody. Unfortunately, this act of hippie-era generosity sets into motion a series of events that exposes the new tenants to a deadly, ages-old supernatural threat and stoke the fires of madness leading to Jessica’s mental and emotional disintegration.

Gretchen Corbett as The Girl in White

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

It was 2010 before I ever sat down and watched Let’s Scare Jessica to Death in its entirety. By which time the middling state of contemporary horror films had given me an appreciation of the very things I once hadn't cared for in this movie back when I first saw it in 1978. In fact, its depiction of post-60s hippiedom is so evocative that I really wish I had seen it during its initial 1971 release. It perfectly captures the feel of what I recall about ‘70s-era Berkeley: a time when many of the privileged Bay Area hippies grew tired of playing at being poor and either resettled, en masse, in Mill Valley, or seized up ll the old Victorian houses around Berkeley and renovated them. Most of these post-'60s hippies looked a great deal like the cast of this movie. 

But I digress.  

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is largely a mood-piece vampire film, another in the 1970s female vampire movie trend (Daughters of Darkness, The Velvet Vampire) which cribbed liberally from the 1872 Gothic novel Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu that predated Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 26 years. Although it has a couple of scenes that made me start and got the hairs on my neck to stand up, it’s principally one of those horror movies I’d categorize as disturbing. It’s get-under-your-skin creepy rather than jump out of your seat scary. A genuinely unsettling horror movie that works on a number of levels, all playing to things like paranoia, the fluidity of reality, and the human capacity to make the ordinary look sinister if we try hard enough. 

Relatable Horror
Let's Scare Jessica to Death plays on everyday fears: shadowy hallways, whispered voices, and unexplained noises. In this instance, the dreaded "Something's grabbed my leg!!"  terror of every outdoor swimmer.

To its benefit, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death tries to do something different with the tropes of the vampire genre; giving a nod to tradition here and there (whether treated reverentially or casually, impending death remains a constant presence), but deviating from the expected in interesting ways. For instance, I like how the vampire, a bride who drowned just before her wedding 100 years ago, doesn’t have fangs, wears white, and, in lieu of biting a victim's neck as a means of blood extraction, uses the knife intended for her wedding cake.

Because the film is largely concerned with creating a haunting mood of menace and dread, not a lot of what occurs actually adds up logically. But the central conceit of presenting the film from Jessica’s subjective, arguably splintered, point of view, allows for narrative murkiness to work in the film’s favor.

Flirting with Death
They drive around in a hearse, her husband's cello case looks like a coffin, and
Jessica's hobby is visiting graveyards to make tombstone rubbings

PERFORMANCES

The strength of Zohra Lampert’s performance is so persuasive that I tend to (mistakenly) regard Let’s Scare Jessica to Death as a character-based horror film. It’s not, its characters are sketchily written at best, and while uniformly good, few of the other actors register beyond par-for-the-course for the exploitation horror genre. Mariclare Costello brings an assured, assertive quality to a character meant to be enigmatic. The likable Kevin O’Connor (who portrayed Humphrey Bogart in the truly dreadful 1980 TV-movie, Bogie) falls victim to tonsorial trendiness: little in the way of a performance is allowed to emerge from behind those huge sideburns, that enormous mane of styled ‘70s hair, and his Ned Flanders mustache.

I quite like Barton Heyman (who some might remember as the physician subjecting poor Linda Blair to all those tests in The Exorcist), as the overconcerned husband. He has several moments where he conveys a protective fear and resigned sympathy for Jessica that makes you wish his role were better written.

But the film is unimaginable without the superb Zohra Lampert. Her Jessica is a Master Class in how an inventive, skilled actor can put ten times more onscreen than is found on the written page. With almost nothing to work with beyond “neurotic,” Lampert (Warren Beatty’s shy bride in 1961’s Splendor in the Grass) sidesteps the clichés of the “woman in peril” and makes Jessica a complex, richly realized, wholly unique (and heartbreaking) character you can’t take your eyes off of. 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Beyond the compelling vulnerability, Zohra Lampert brings to the character of Jessica, I find myself most drawn to Let’s Scare Jessica to Death’s sustained atmosphere of dreamlike creepiness. How it's achieved is clearly deliberate in some instances: the unsettlingly calm shots of the misty cove and surrounding forest; the angled, shadowy claustrophobia of the farmhouse. In others, it’s just as obviously the result of happy accidents: the film’s low-rent production values lend the film a turbid, documentary quality that makes every shot look, to borrow a quote from MST3K, “Like someone’s last known photograph.” 

Another asset, one that’s proved instrumental to Let’s Scare Jessica to Death's cult reputation, is its one-size-fits-all ambiguity. Presented with the prospect that all the events we witness are filtered through Jessica's neurotic gaze, the film opens itself up to myriad interpretations.

Lesbian Panic
One theory posits that the film is a hallucinatory delusion born of Jessica's
friendly/fearful attraction to the sensual Emily 

In making his directorial debut, John D. Hancock (Bang the Drum Slowly - 1973) has cited Henry James' The Turn of the Screw as a direct influence, yet he also readily admits that several of the most tantalizingly obtuse elements in the film aren’t exactly pertinent pieces of an intricately thought-out puzzle. If the séance sequence and the appearance of the mysterious girl in white seem to make no sense and appear to have no connection to the plot, it’s for good reason: both were included at the suggestion of an exhibitor, and the insistence of the producer, respectively.

Feminist Revenge
Another theory sees the film through the prism of Jessica's response to her father's death and 
repressed feelings of hostility/resentment toward her disloyal and infantilizing husband. 

Such is the interactive magic and power of movies, apropos of the horror genre, especially. If you succeed in engaging the audience on a visceral level, to reach them through means of visual theory and emotional engagement, then their imaginations will always work to fill in the plot holes and gaps of logic. For me, Let's Scare Jessica to Death isn't a horror film that works in spite of it not making much sense, it works specifically because it doesn't make much sense. 

The Madwoman in the Attic
Let's Scare Jessica to Death shares with other atmospheric Gothics like The Innocents, Rosemary's Baby, and The Haunting, a heroine whose questionable sanity brands her an unreliable narrator. Ironically, by fade-out, most of these films tend to end on a note of "I Believe the Woman."

THE STUFF OF DREAMS 

Something occurred to me while watching (as much as I could stomach) the horrorshow that was the 2018 SCOTUS hearings. It occurred to me that one of the things that has come to most characterize the current American socio-political climate has been the emergent spectacle of the hysterical male. They’ve always been around, these bastions of toxic/fragile masculinity, but never before has there been such a public parade of wild-eyed, blubbering, irrational, excitable, over-emotional (largely white and heterosexual) men, frothing at the mouth over an incapability of aligning an antiquated, deluded self-image to an evolving reality.

Eve Was Weak
Jessica is about to pick an apple from their recently sprayed orchard
 before Duncan warns her that it's poison

When explored in films at all, the phenomenon of the hysterical male has featured most often in the context of the paranoid thriller: films where a disbelieved male (whom the audience knows is actually right) fights a corrupt system. But given their visible abundance in real life, it's surprising to think how seldom the hysterical male appears in horror films.
Given that masculinity is a social construct only slightly less sturdy than the membrane lining an eggshell, it would seem a natural vulnerability topic for the horror genre; but Gothic tradition has long deemed the psychotic woman to be the defining trope of helplessness. When the psychotic man appears in horror, instead of being depicted as a victim or weak figure (which likely wouldn't sit too well with the genre's sizable male fanbase) his hysteria is inevitably framed in terms of his being an agent of violence or figure of fear.  

"It's OK Jess, I saw it, too."
Encouraged by her mental illness not to trust her own perceptions, Jessica frequently looks to the men in her life to validate her reality. A fine dramatic conceit for a horror film, but one which also reflects a very real (and tiresome) social mindset 

The theme of feminine fragility is a common one in horror films, and Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is no exception when it comes to Jessica’s tenuous grip on reality being both the focus of the film’s dramatic tension and the source of the audience’s emotional involvement. Jessica screams, shrieks, and wails while the men remain at a stoic, emotional remove. Even when she voices perfectly reasonable concerns regarding the strange behavior of the townsfolk or the appearance of the girl in white, the men’s uncurious and dismissive reactions reinforce the genre’s need to render unreliable a woman’s account of her own experience. In horror, women are emotional, the men are rational and sound.

Screams, whispers, and odd noises punctuate the sound design of Let's Scare Jessica to Death.
Another major asset is composer Orville Stoeber's bloodcurdling score.

Standing in contrast to Gothic traditionalism and the theme of "the disbelieved woman" is the gender-based disruption introduced by the character of Emily. In horror films, a female vampire is depicted in ways not dissimilar to that of the femme fatale in film noir. Her power lies in her awareness of men's vulnerability to her sexual allure. She has both agency and control over her fate because men are such easy prey. 

The horror film to explore the terrors of male fragility is perhaps yet to be made, but in having Jessica’s non-stop self-regulating offset by the consequences Duncan and Woody pay for their smug male self-assurance, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is spared from being just another Madwoman in the Attic horror Gothic.

BONUS MATERIAL

There's a good reason why the female performances in Let's Scare Jessica to Death register so strongly.  Zohra Lampert and Mariclare Costello were both members of the prestigious Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center. In 1964 they appeared together in the debut American production of Arthur Miller's After The Fall which also featured Jason Robards and Faye Dunaway.

In 1980 Mariclare Costello appeared as Mary Tyler Moore's 
sister-in-law Audrey in the film Ordinary People

I sit here and I can’t believe that it happened. And yet I have to believe it.

 Dreams or nightmares…madness or sanity. I don’t know which is which. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2018

SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS 1961

The weird thing about sexual repression is how it creates, then proceeds to foster and perpetuate, the atmosphere of shame and sin it purports to be on guard against. Case in point: so-called "family" entertainment.

Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (1955) is the dirtiest movie I ever saw. Really. This corn-fed ode to spring, sparkin', and spoonin' is nothing but a wall-to-wall smut-fest obsessed with fornication. Or, fornicatin' as the characters themselves would probably drawl, were the film able to stop being so coy and wholesome for five minutes and just lay out on the table what is obviously its sole purpose, preoccupation, and focus. For nigh on 2 ½ hours (dialect helps to get into the spirit of things), horny farmhands in tight jeans and overheated farmer's daughters in calico dresses and bullet bras talk and think of little else but sex. Sure, it's all coded and cloaked in innuendo-soaked songs and double-entendre choreography, but Oklahoma! is like one long, whispered-behind-the-barn dirty joke. A rumps and udders horse opera. There's your dim-witted, semi-nymphomaniac who "cain't" say no; Kansas City bur-lee-cue dancers going just as "fer" as they can go; randy traveling salesmen; rape-inclined farmhands; and, lest we forget, that sexual assault disguised as a kiss: The Oklahoma Hello.

If a ten-year-old is capable of moral indignation, then indeed I was. By the time that surrey with the fringe on top rolled in at the end, my cheeks were hotter than Hades, and I could barely look my parents in the eye. 

"A raging torrent of emotion that even nature can't control!"
OK, that's actually the ad copy for the 1953 Marilyn Monroe film Niagara, but it so succinctly captures Splendor in the Grass' metaphorical use of rushing waterfalls barely contained by dams (not to mention the film's overheated, Freudian themes) I just had to use it.

I'll admit my tongue-in-cheek scandalized reaction to Oklahoma! might seem a tad incongruous coming from someone who saw all manner of R-rated movies during his adolescence. Still, I'm not kidding about how vulgar this musical seemed to me when I was young. The comparatively straightforward approach of movies like Barbarella and Midnight Cowboy didn't embarrass me so much as demystified sex for me. Their explicitness made it feel as though sex and nudity were no big deal. Oklahoma!, on the other hand, mirrored my repressed Catholic upbringing. By figuratively and literally dancing around the film's all-pervasive topic of sex, the film turns sex into a sinful no-no suitable only for giggling and snickering about in empty, euphemistic codes of indecency.

A firm memory I hold from my adolescent movie-going years is how filthy I considered the family films of my era (the '60s): David Niven's The Impossible Years, Doris Day's Where Were You When The Lights Went Out, Debbie Reynolds' How Sweet It Is – compared to the permissive, let-it-all-hang-out R-rated films that were coming into fashion.

The pernicious effect of repression and guilt - its power to distort and pervert natural sexuality - is the theme dramatized in Elia Kazan's sensitive film adaptation of William Inge's original screenplay, Splendor in the Grass.

Natalie Wood as Wilma Dean "Deanie" Loomis

Warren Beatty as Arthur "Bud" Stamper

Pat Hingle as Ace Stamper

Barbara Loden as Virginia "Ginny" Stamper

Audrey Christie as Mrs. Loomis

Splendor in the Grass is set in a small town in Kansas in 1928. Not, as immortalized by Rodgers & Hammerstein, a Kansas corny in August, but one overrun with oil derricks born of an oil boom. And all that pumping, pumping, pumping of the land serves as unsubtle metaphoric counterpoint to all the pent-up sexual energy of the town's young folk. Experiencing the first rushes of jazz-age permissiveness, the air is full of sex (in a nice touch, almost all the half-heard background conversations have to do with sex, sin, or something forbidden) and high-school sweethearts Deanie Loomis (Wood) and Bud Stamper (Beatty) find their barely-understood passions clashing with the repressive, Victorian-era values of their parents. As a result, archaic notions of propriety and decency intrude upon their natural urges, and the young lovers suffer painfully and unnecessarily under the strain of trying to do "what's right."

"Mom...is it so terrible to have those feelings for a boy?"
"No nice girl does."
"Doesn't she?"
"No...no nice girl."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

William Inge is one of my favorite playwrights. His works, among them: Picnic, Come Back Little Sheba, and The Dark at the Top of The Stairs, find the poetry and tragedy in small lives – recalling for me the best of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill. In Splendor in the Grass, Inge's gentle evocation of the subtle frustrations, conflicts, and inchoate desires festering below the surface of otherwise tranquil small-town life is engagingly realized by director Kazan (A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, East of Eden).

William Inge appears as the sad-eyed Rev. Whiteman, whose sermon on holding onto
 what's real in times of material prosperity falls mainly on deaf ears. Inge's original screenplay for Splendor in the Grass won an Oscar.

In this story about "innocent" passion, a young couple, excited by newly awakened feelings but confused by their intensity, are left without guidance by well-intentioned adults incapable of doing anything but projecting the failures and frustrations of their own lives onto the pair. The young feel an obligation to live up to the ideals of those who have sacrificed to give them a better life. Yet, in trying to orchestrate the happiness of their children through the stressing of false morals, shame, and repression, these parents succeed only in passing on a legacy of compromise and regret.

The Stampers
This awkward portrait sitting pretty much says all there is
to say about the functionality of the town's wealthiest family

PERFORMANCES

Stage director and Actor's Studio co-founder Elia Kazan is heralded as an "actor's director" for the sensitive performances he's credited with eliciting from those under tutelage. It's not a title I'm likely to argue with in that I think Splendor in the Grass is a remarkably well-cast movie, with everyone involved giving colorful and fleshed-out performances devoid of some of the fussier affectations of Method Acting. Sure, Warren Beatty's pauses can drag on a little, and one strains to hear him speak on a couple of occasions, but by and large, the natural performances here all crackle with vitality and life. 

Future Mrs. Kazan Barbara Loden makes an indelible impression as Ginny Stamper, the flapper-out-of-water in the small, conservative Kansas town. Her screen work is minimal (she died of cancer at age 48), but in 1970 she wrote, directed, and starred in the noteworthy independent film Wanda. 

As deserving of praise as all the players are, I just have to single out a personal favorite, Natalie Wood. Tapping into a natural edginess and heartbreaking eagerness to please that had only been hinted at in previous roles, Wood gives what I consider to be the best performance of her career. As the lovesick, worshipful Deanie, she displays an emotional daring I always find so compelling in actors. She is tragically vulnerable throughout, and she and the absurdly beautiful Warren Beatty (making his film debut) make a stunningly beautiful screen couple and display a palpable chemistry. (Tip: watch her in scenes where she's not the focus. She's entirely in character and reacting to everything at each moment in a way that feels so wonderfully spontaneous. I can't say enough about her in this film. The Oscar nomination she garnered was so very well-deserved.)

Zohra Lampert as Angeline
I have always had a thing for this appealingly sensitive, low-key actress (and marvelous comedienne) who deserved a bigger career. She has a bit of a cult fan base built around the horror film Let's Scare Jessica to Death, but outside of her scene-stealing performance here, I mostly know her as the Goya Beans spokeslady.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Splendor in the Grass is a tragic love story in the grand tradition. True love, in the form of Deanie and Bud, finds no solace or sanctuary in small-town (small-minded) mores that uphold the curious notion that the pursuit of happiness is good, but the pursuit of ecstasy is sinful and wrong. Instead, love that should be simple and uncomplicated descends into confusion and madness, the star-crossed pair suffering at the hands of false morality and parental interference.  

Understatement

Aside from Natalie Wood's stubbornly contemporary look throughout most of the film, Splendor in the Grass has one of its greatest assets in its detailed depiction of small-town life and attention to period. In addition, it's a great-looking film, from the atmospheric cinematography (Boris Kaufman) to the costumes, to the eye-catching art direction.

Personal favorite Sandy Dennis (l.) makes her film debut as Kay,
a somewhat fair-weather friend of Deanie's.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I first saw Splendor in the Grass when I was a youngster back in the late sixties, and recall being struck by how much the film's chronicling of a uniquely American brand of sexual restlessness in the face of cultural change (rampant horniness crossed with faith-based guilt), echoed the cultural climate of what was going on in America at the time. In terms of young people confronting changing attitudes about morality, sex, family, religion, double-standards, and women's roles, the America of the late '60s was not dissimilar to the America of 1929. A reality even 1961 audiences must have felt when confronted by the relative sexual candor of Splendor in the Grass hot on the heels of the conservative Eisenhower years.

Comedienne Phyllis Diller makes her film debut as real-life nightclub owner, Texas Guinan

I can't say I really understood Splendor in the Grass when I first saw it. Thrown by the film's portentous manner and the pedigree of talent both behind and in front of the camera, I simply thought the film had gone over my head. I went away from it thinking I had just seen the most poetic film about blue balls ever made.

Life experience has revealed to me that Splendor in the Grass is about much more than sexual desire. Familial obligation, guilt, love, innocence, loss, and coming-of-age maturity all make William Inge's bittersweet look at young love a film I always enjoy revisiting, and one of my all-time favorite Natalie Wood movies.

Copyright © Ken Anderson     2009 -2013