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

YOU'LL LIKE MY MOTHER 1972

Spoiler alert: This is a critical essay, not a review. Pertinent 

details and plot points are referenced for the purpose of analysis.

The suspense thriller is one of my favorite movie genres, but some films age better than others. The Patty Duke starrer You’ll Like My Mother had already been branded a word-of-mouth “sleeper hit” when it opened in the San Francisco Bay Area in December of 1972, having already built a momentum of respectable reviews and favorable public response during its East Coast engagements earlier in the fall. By the time this minimally-publicized release from Bing Crosby Productions made its way out West (BCP's low-budget horror-thriller Willard had enjoyed a similar surprise success in 1970), the advance buzz about the film was considerable. Public interest in the film received a significant leg-up when up-and-coming co-star Richard Thomas became an overnight household name as the star of TV’s The Waltons, which had premiered that September. 

Additional free publicity (though hardly favorable) was generated by the tabloids making much of  Patty Duke's real-life Mamma Mia!-like paternity scandal. The Oscar-winning actress had recently given birth to son Sean, whose father was potentially one of three men: May/December fling Desi Arnaz, Jr (Duke was 24, Arnaz 17); quickie 13-day ex-husband Michael Tell*; or current husband (wed just 4 months at the time) John Astin. The fan magazines ate it up, and in spite of the potential public backlash, Universal Studios didn't seem to mind, given how often the word "mother" had to be used in each article. *In 1994 Sean Astin had a DNA test to determine Tell as his biological father. 

Patty Duke as Francesca Kinsolving

Rosemary Murphy as Mrs. Kinsolving

Richard Thomas as Kenneth Kinsolving

Sian Barbara Allen as Kathleen Kinsolving

Although my subscription to Rona Barrett’s Hollywood had kept me abreast of all the aforementioned Patty Duke daddy drama, I’d somehow avoided hearing a single thing about You’ll Like My Mother before catching sight of the poster for the film at Hollywood’s Cinerama Dome during our family's Christmas Season visit to Los Angeles. Looking at the poster now, it reveals a graphic heavy-handedness and lack of confidence in its audience I would later find to be characteristic of the film itself; but at the time, I was so intrigued by those scissors and all those exclamation points, I couldn’t wait to see it. 

Lest someone get the wrong idea and mistake it for a bit of homespun wholesomeness like TV's The Waltons, the film was marketed with the words "a thriller" in large type and in such close proximity, it appeared to be part of the complete title

Francesca (Duke) is the enormously pregnant wife of an Army pilot recently killed in Vietnam. Having met and wed in a whirlwind, Francesca and husband Matthew hadn’t been married long, nor even knew that much about the other, but during their brief time together Matthew would often say to his bride, “You’ll like my mother.”

On the strength of that endorsement, Francesca, widowed and without family of her own, braves a 3-day winter bus journey from Los Angeles to Minnesota to visit her mother-in-law; a woman she’s never met, never spoken to, or knows anything about.  

A snowstorm greets Francesca’s arrival at her destination, a small, remote town far from anything but snow, snow, and more snow. But the storm is like a day at the beach compared to the frosty response she receives from townsfolk whenever she mentions her husband's family name: Kinsolving...red flag number one. With weather conditions preventing vehicle transportation to the doorway of Kinsolving home, Francesca, ill-dressed for the occasion and looking every day of her clearly-advanced state of pregnancy, has to trudge through Zhivago-levels of snow to make it to her mother-in-law's home--a large, imposing estate possessing all the coziness of The Overlook Hotel. 

The Kinsolving home is actually the Glensheen mansion in Duluth, Minnesota. In real life, the location gained notoriety in 1977 as the site of the shocking Congdon heiress double murder

If at first glance the Jacobean-style architecture of the Kinsolving mansion appears lacking in the sort of eerie ornamentation one comes to expect from Gothic melodramas like this, fear not, for Francesca’s knock on the door summons forth a true flesh-and-blood gargoyle: Mrs. Kinsolving herself. Frostily disdainful of her uninvited guest from the get-go (“Why did you feel you had to come here?”), Mrs. Kinsolving’s internal Frigidaire setting hits glacier-level when the sight of her daughter-in-law’s filled-to-bursting state of pregnancy fails to inspire grandmotherly concern. Rather, it triggers she's-trying-to-horn-in-on-the-inheritance apprehension—"Since I didn’t acknowledge [you] the first time as Matthew’s wife, I saw no reason to applaud the progress [you’ve] made.”

Adding further to Francesca’s newfound family tree fun is the double-barreled discovery that Matthew has an intellectually-disabled, virtually non-verbal sister he never told her about, plus a distant, clearly homicidal cousin named Kenny who currently just so happens to be on the loose and wanted for a brutal murder.
When Francesca makes the wise decision, there and then, to hightail it out of Kinsolving Place as fast as her belly and boots will allow, she can hardly be blamed. But alas, her departure is waylaid by a stalled car, a disconnected phone (along with no TV, houses like this never have working phones), and an encroaching blizzard. When snow-clogged roads turn an awkward overnight stay into an acrimonious open-ended sojourn, Francesca's guest status soon takes on the appearance of imprisonment.   

Mrs. Kinsolving allows Francesca to stay in Matthew's old room

Thus far, an irresistible (if a shade familiar) stage has been set in having unforeseeable circumstances (a storm) force Francesca to confront a suspicious situation rife with questions both she and the viewer are asking: Why do the townsfolk react like horses hearing the name Frau Blücher whenever Francesca mentions the Kinsolving family? Why is Matthew’s mother so blatantly hostile and why did she lie about not receiving a telegram announcing her son’s marriage? Why hadn't Matthew told Francesca about weird cousin Kenny and kept his sister a secret? Is there someone else in the house? Mystery and viewer-identification are intensified from initially only knowing as much as Francesca knows. Later, when more information is disclosed, suspense springs from knowing...long before it dawns on Francesca...precisely the degree of real danger she's placed herself in.

The element of time becomes a suspense factor as well, as Mrs. Kinsolving needs to get Francesca out of the house before the unwanted visitor has time to unearth the secrets everyone in the household is so invested in keeping hidden.  Meanwhile, tension mounts as Francesca’s any-minute-now delivery date render an escape on foot an impossibility, while also leaving her vulnerable to Mrs. Kinsolving’s inclination (she’s a registered nurse) to drugging her and giving her shots without consent.

You’ll Like My Mother is a nifty, PG-rated (thrills are on the effective-but-tepid side), woman-in-peril suspenser in the classic tradition of all those paperback Gothics with covers featuring a woman in a long flowing gown running away from a sinister-looking mansion looming in the distance. Well-acted, atmospheric, but populated with stock characters and rarely deviating from formula; it’s a film that plays well on first viewing but whose plot doesn’t withstand the scrutiny of repeat visits.

Dennis Rucker as Red Cooper

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I enjoy You’ll Like My Mother a great deal, but the disparity in my response to seeing it in 1972 and now is rather jarring. For the longest time, I harbored memories of it being this incredibly intense moviegoing experience…a nail-biting, suspenseful thrill ride I treated myself to four times over that Christmas holiday. Part Rosemary’s Baby (1968), part captive-damsel-in-distress/hag-horror Gothic à la Tallulah Bankhead’s Die! Die! My Darling! (1965); I remember being thoroughly gripped by Patty Duke’s predicament and startled by each new plot twist and character revelation. Because virtually no one else at school had even heard of it, I sang the film’s praises to any and all as this undiscovered gem they simply had to see.

When I watch the film now—seeing it through a nostalgia prism which takes into consideration my having been a 15-year-old at the time and not very well-versed in the clichés of the women-in-peril genre—I’m still able to access certain things I responded to so favorably long ago. For instance, I continue to be impressed by Rosemary Murphy’s iron butterfly take on motherhood, the shivery Minnesota setting, and the plot overall retains its bizarre quirkiness. But by and large, I find myself a little bemused when confronted with just how little it took for a movie to scare me in those days.

Sparsely populated, over-reliant on close-ups, with nearly every plot device spelled out for even the slowest on the uptake, You’ll Like My Mother plays more like your better-than-average made-for-TV movie than a major feature film. This is no doubt due to the film being helmed by veteran television director Lamont Johnson (That Certain Summer -1972) who directed Patty Duke to her only Emmy Award win in 1970s My Sweet Charlie. 

Though only 92-minutes long, You’ll Like My Mother is paced in that deliberate way characteristic of a great many ‘70s films, but in this instance the leisurely unfolding of the film's minimal action (once Duke is in that house, she's IN that house) calls attention to the many holes in the plot while inviting the viewer to remain always one step ahead of the familiar storyline.

Pray for Francesca's Baby

In the final analysis, nostalgia aside and divorced from any expectation for the film to live up to my teenage experience of it, You'll Like My Mother measures up as a fine, low-wattage suspense thriller that feels perfectly scaled for the small screen. Devoid of the clockwork shock cuts and audience-pandering excesses of so many of today's thrillers, I found myself appreciative of the film's direct, no-frills approach to the material. The performances still hold up--a little less so in regard to Sian Barbara Allen's Golden Globe-nominated turn. But the film benefits from a lack of Neely O'Hara overplaying on the part of from Patty Duke, and from an effectively offbeat (make that downright weird) story. While no edge-of-the-seat thrill-ride, I was surprised to find  You'll Like My Mother still crazy after all these years.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

In the language of the studio pitch meeting, You’ll Like My Mother really is Rosemary’s Baby meets Die! Die! My Darling!, with perhaps a little bit of Psycho mother-fixation on the side. Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as narratively assured as Polanski’s classic, nor as agreeably camp as Bankhead’s cinema swan song. But the mother-son stuff measures up as appropriately creepy.

Most obviously, You’ll Like My Mother evokes memories of Rosemary’s Baby in that a major thrust of the story is how Francesca’s pregnancy and baby are placed at risk. For not only is Francesca constantly lied to and given mysterious drugs in drinks, but her own predicament and the potential fate of her child is metaphorically foreshadowed when she arrives at the Kinsolving home just as her mother-in-law has drowned a litter of kittens. Mrs. Kinsolving’s pointed explanation to her daughter-in-law is that her beloved and pedigreed feline “Forgot herself and mated with an alley cat. The kittens were no good of course.” 

A Boy's Best Friend Is His Mother
Mrs. Kinsolving's relationship with creepy Kenny has a Norman & Mrs. Bates quality to it

Because they share a guest-as-captive-prisoner theme, You’ll Like My Mother most closely resembles the less well-known Die! Die! My Darling!. Both films featuring large, isolated estates without phones--although in Mother that plot point is something of a red-herring--lorded over by imperious,  loony, matriarchs with unconventional surnames (Bankhead’s is Mrs. Trefoile) suggesting great wealth and closets full of skeletons. The films share the central dramatic conflict of a young heroine locked in a room at the mercy of a rancorous old woman who blames the girl for the death of her son and the alienation of maternal affection. I’m not sure why developmentally disabled household help was such a staple of the genre, but in the Bankhead film, the pathos duties assigned to Sian Barbara Allen are assumed by a young Donald Sutherland. 

PERFORMANCES

After the blissful debacle of Valley of the Dolls, Patty Duke worked almost exclusively in television, making only one other film before this one--1969s Me, Natalie for which she won a Golden Globe. Duke has said that it took years for her to appreciate Valley of the Dolls for the beloved camp classic it eventually became, but by her superb work in Me, Natalie, and her muted, underplaying performance here, it appears it didn't take her very long to learn the lesson of less is more. Duke gives a persuasive, intelligent performance here, displaying a subdued naturalism that would keep her working continually in television and film until her untimely death in 2016 at the age of 69.

Although their in-law relationship is antagonistic in You'll Like My Mother, Rosemary Murphy
and Patty Duke went on to play mother and daughter in the 1979 TV movie Before and After 

Not being a fan of The Waltons, my only awareness of Richard Thomas at the time was as one of the sociopathic teenagers in Frank Perry's disturbing Last Summer (1969), so his being cast as a possible rapist and serial killer didn't shock me as much as those who associated Thomas with the angel-faced John-boy Walton. Thomas is very good here, his malevolent boyishness creating the nightmare impression of a grown-up Dennis the Menace.
Actress Sian Barbara Allen gets an "introducing" credit in You'll Like My Mother, and her performance garnered near-unanimous praise along with the aforementioned Golden Globe nomination as Most Promising Newcomer. Although I still find her performance to be very touching and sympathetic, I must confess it was more effective when I was younger. These days I'm distracted by the fact that her characterization reminds me so much of Mia Farrow in Joseph Losey's Secret Ceremony -- all downcast cow eyes and dark hair cascading over her features. At the time, Allen and Thomas were quite the romantic item.

However, it's character actress Rosemary Murphy who makes the film for me. She's a credible villainess; ruthless, but not heartless. And she never once goes over the top or turns her character into a caricature. Her cool bearing hides a steely determination that makes Mrs. Kinsolving's motives unreadable and her actions all the more frightening.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Genre films are bound by a paradox that demands originality and freshness while still adhering to form. Robert Altman’s That Cold Day in the Park (1969) or even Julie Christie's sci-fi curiosity Demon Seed (1977) stand as good examples of creative variations/subversions of the "captivity" melodrama. You’ll Like My Mother, which intentionally hews close to classic Gothic tradition, may not offer much in the way of novelty, but in being written by women, it bears the distinction of a female perspective. The original 1969 novel is by Naomi A. Hintze, its setting featuring an overflowing river instead of a snowstorm. Hintze's book was adapted for the screen by Jo Heims, the female screenwriter credited with writing the story for Clint Eastwood's directing debut - 1971’s Play Misty for Me.

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009

THE VELVET VAMPIRE 1971

“Susan, have you ever noticed how men envy us?”

“Envy us, how?”

“The pleasure we have that only we can have. We can’t help it. It’s just our nature, the way we are. And in their secret hearts, they hate us for it because they can never know what it’s like.”

I was never much into vampire movies growing up. That I’ve managed to see so many of them…Dracula, his brides, sons, and daughters included…is due to my older sister; a dyed-in-the-wool horror fan who used her size and age advantage to make sure that every Saturday night the family TV was tuned to Channel 2’s Creature Features, a double-barreled parade of classic and (mostly) not-so-classic horror and sci-fi flicks hosted by the bespectacled Bob Wilkins. Since it was either vampires or go to bed early on one of the few nights I was allowed to stay up, the Gothic bloodsuckers invariably won out.

My feelings about vampire movies weren’t rooted in anything specific, merely that they failed to capture my imagination because I never found them to be very scary. Monsters being more to my taste back then, to my way of thinking vampire movies were essentially just Gothic romances where the “necking” was taken to its literal extreme. (I do recall having had this weird, neat-freak reaction to the way vampires in movies always allowed the blood to run down their faces after feeding. Here they were, these genteel, over-refined Counts turned out in fastidious Victorian finery, yet dribbling blood down the sides of their mouths like babies without bibs. What were all those lace handkerchiefs for? Weren’t there any anal-retentive, OCD vampires?)

But whatever the reason, it was clear my personal indifference to vampires was out of step with the timbre of the times. The most vivid example is the whole Dark Shadows craze that swept through my high school in 1971. For the unversed, Dark Shadows was a popular Gothic daytime TV soap opera about a lovesick vampire who couldn’t remember his lines. Each weekday, kids by the hundreds would race home from school to catch its 4pm broadcast, the following day devoting entire lunchtimes to recounting to one another the sundry supernatural exploits of Barnabas Collins and the rest of the blooper-prone denizens of Collinwood.

Dark Shadows and vampire mania hit my best friend Smedley particularly hard (I attended a Catholic boy’s school where, for some reason, we all addressed one another by our last names), he being so enamored of the show that he took to wearing a cape to school in our Sophomore year. Decades before the term cosplay even existed, Smedley could be seen striding around campus, cape billowing in the wind behind his blue jeans and Adidas sneakers.
The 1972 release of Blacula, the first African-American vampire, emboldened Smedley to add to his ensemble: a heavy wooden cane with a polished silver skull handle, a pentagram pinkie ring with a glass eye in its center, and a black, wide-brimmed hat. Alas, the school’s principal, who’d heretofore proved uncommonly tolerant of a kid wandering the halls of a Catholic school looking like the Prince of Darkness, ultimately intervened, putting a halt to Smedley’s sartorial shenanigans the minute he began taking on the appearance of a teenage Super Fly. Besides, there were no lockers big enough for that hat. 

The Lady in Red Stalks Her Prey

But the Dark Shadows phenomenon was just one aspect of the vampire renaissance of the 1970s. Following a decline in popularity during the sci-fi/atomic monster craze of the ’50s, vampire movies received a much-needed genre transfusion when relaxed censorship regulations in the late-1960s granted filmmakers broader latitude in the depiction of violence and the display of nudity. Free to render explicit all the sexual metaphor and eroticism heretofore only hinted at in previous vampire flicks; there appeared a rash of fang & coffin features virtually awash in Technicolor blood and upholstered with acres of exposed flesh.
Along similar lines, shifts in the ‘70s cultural landscape (race relations, the sexual revolution, the women’s movement, gay rights) precipitated occasionally ingenious–but mostly silly–reimaginings of the traditional vampire myth.

Blacula’s William Marshal was cinema’s first African-American vampire, but there were also Kung Fu vampires (The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires – 1974), swashbuckling vampires (Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter – 1974), and hippie vampires (Let’s Scare Jessica to Death – 1971). But most popular of all…for reasons both subversive and prurient…was the female vampire.

Among the glut of horror films about female vampires that flooded the market at the time, films with heavy-breathing titles like Vampire Lovers (1970), Vampyros Lesbos (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971), Daughters of Darkness (1971), and Twins of Evil (1971), only The Velvet Vampire had the distinction of having been directed by a woman.

Celeste Yarnall as Diane Le Fanu

Michael Blodgett as Lee Ritter

Sherry Miles as Susan Ritter

Vapid young couple Lee and Susan Ritter (Michel Blodgett & Sherry Miles, both looking as though they’d just wandered in from a Sun-In© hair lightener commercial) meet vampy vampire Diane Le Fanu (Celeste Yarnall) at a Los Angeles art gallery (The [Bram] Stoker Gallery...wink, wink). Though the couple has been married only two years, the reptilian Lee begins coming on to the raven-haired Diane almost instantly. Diane, whom we’ve just seen overpower and kill an assailant on her way to the gallery (a girl’s gotta eat), responds favorably, meanwhile, Susan struggles hard to process…well, everything.

When Diane invites the blank-eyed pair to spend the weekend at her villa in the Mojave Desert, Lee, ever the horndog, leaps at the offer, while worrywart Susan harbors serious, poorly-articulated misgivings before ultimately acquiescing. Their drive through the desert to Diane's house is plagued with blazing heat, a curious absence of other drivers on the road, engine trouble, and weirdly hostile locals—all ominous harbingers and portents of danger signaling to our hapless couple (imagine a debauched, significantly denser Brad and Janet from The Rocky Horror Picture Show) to turn back. But a horny husband is nothing if not determined, so the dull-witted pair soldiers on, heedless of their setbacks, until their car finally stalls out completely, stranding them on a deserted stretch of desert road. But, lo and behold, out of nowhere appears Diane to the rescue in her canary yellow dune buggy!

Yes, although covered from head to toe in the kind of mod, midi-skirt-and-boots ensemble favored by Ann Marie during the final season of That Girl, Diane is clearly a vampire who doesn’t crumble into a heap of dust in the glare of the sun. Similarly, we were shown earlier that she is also a vampire capable of casting a reflection in a mirror; thus it's fair to assume that the gender of our predatory protagonist is not going to be the only deliberate genre subversion The Velvet Vampire has up its cape. 

Diamonds...Daisies...Snowflakes...That Ghoul

  

The trio’s arrival at Diane’s remote desert domicile sees more Gothic clichés upended, as the sun-drenched villa and barren surrounding landscape stand as the living (if one can use that word when speaking of the undead) antithesis to the gloomy castles and foggy moors of Transylvanian legend. Yet the occasional nod to vampire tradition can still be found. For example, there's the nearby, well-populated cemetery harboring a dark, heavily-guarded secret: and by way of a Renfield stand-in, Diane has a devoted Native-American manservant named Juan (Jerry Daniels) who supplies his mistress with victims...but shows no evidence of personally having a taste for rodents or insects.

Having lured the prey to her lair, Diane embarks on an aggressive but ill-defined course of action involving dual seduction, voyeuristic stalking, and mutual dream invasion (Lee and Susan share the same surreal nightmare in which Diane is seen as a dissevering entity…but to what purpose?). The latter point supplying The Velvet Vampire’s only suspense, for we’re as in the dark about Diane’s intentions for the couple as they are. Because her ambiguous objectives have to be carried out before the weekend is over (or before our slow-on-the-pickup newlyweds catch on), the element of time factors in as a source of narrative tension, but there's precious little else. 

Juan (Jerry Daniels), the vigilant vampire valet, catches Susan snooping around

The plot of The Velvet Vampire shares similarities with the far-superior Belgian erotic vampire film Daughters of Darkness, in that both involve sexually-fluid female vampires who become obsessed with a married couple in a less-than-satisfying relationship. Indeed, remove the vampire element, and The Velvet Vampire even foreshadows the aforementioned The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) in its often-humorous depiction (both intentional and un) of the ease with which bland innocence can be corrupted by sophisticated evil.

Daughters of Darkness may even have played a part in The Velvet Vampire poor box-office performance and rapid retreat from theaters in 1971 due to their overlapping release schedules. Both sought to hit the Halloween market by coming out in October, in the SF Bay area, Daughters of Darkness (marketed to the arthouse crowd) was released a full two-weeks before The Velvet Vampire, making the latter look like a bargain-basement, Drive-In imitation by comparison.

above: The Velvet Vampire / below: Daughters of Darkness

In both films, a beautiful female vampire insinuates herself into the lives of a handsome couple. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Produced by the legendary Roger Corman as one of the earliest releases from his recently-formed New World Pictures, The Velvet Vampire lives up (or down) to just what you’d expect from the prolific exploitation producer/director known as the “King of the Bs.” There’s stilted dialog, cut-rate production values, clumsy staging, unconvincing special effects, erratic pacing, and some really monumentally bad acting. All of which goes toward making the film both rousingly entertaining and something of a must-see howler for fans of unintentional humor.

"Diane doesn't turn me on. She's a desert freak!"

That being said, The Velvet Vampire is also a film--against all odds and wholly within the restricted confines of exploitation and its own prohibitively modest budget--that nevertheless works. And rather spectacularly.
What gives it distinction and spares it from being just another one cheapie horror entry driven by Corman's grindhouse axiom: “The men are killed, the women are raped,” is that this horror film bears the rare, indelible stamp of having been directed and co-written by a woman: Stephanie Rothman.

Director of one of my favorite off-brand beach party movies- It’s a Bikini World (1967), Corman protégé Stephanie Rothman clearly hasn’t a lot to work with in The Velvet Vampire in terms of either money or onscreen talent; but evident in nearly every frame of the movie is her humor, artistic vision, creative ingenuity, and feminist commitment to subverting as many of the overused tropes and sexist clichés associated with horror movies as possible. All while satisfying the requirements of the genre itself: to supply a higher degree of sensationalized violence and nudity than available in most mainstream films of the time. 

Rothman in a 1973 interview: "I'm very tired of the whole tradition in western art
 in which women are always presented nude and men aren't."

PERFORMANCES

There’s a slick professionalism to the look of The Velvet Vampire that’s hard to deny (the cinematography is by onetime Claude

In this priceless exchange, Diane tells Lee that if he's willing to take the time to warm up
 her dune buggy properly, he can ride it as long and as hard as he likes

Third-billed Celeste Yarnall is really the film’s chief asset as the sensuous vampire who may or may not be simply a delusional woman suffering from a rare blood-craving disease. She doesn't have a lot of range, and the role doesn't call for it, but she can act, knows her way around a funny line, and gives the film's most assured performance. Something that can't be said for the rest of the cast. Heavy-lidded Michael Blodgett might be the most high-profile member of the cast, having achieved an immortality of sorts as the leopard-skinned-bikini-wearing gigolo Lance Rocke in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), but he’s an inert presence and practically sleepwalks through his role...which, in a way, suits the film’s subtext pertaining to passive men and resourceful women.

However, the worst offender (thus, my personal favorite) is Sherry Miles, an attractive actress who, when other characters are speaking, always manages to look like she’s translating their words from English into Mandarin Chinese, then back again to English in her head. Possessed of vacant eyes and Dallesandro-flat line delivery, she gives an astonishingly awful performance of the sort that sends MST3K fans into wild ecstatics. I've never seen Miles in anything else, so I can't tell if her flawless depiction of a whiny California bubblehead is comic brilliance or simply doin’ what comes natur’lly. But either way, I treasure every moment she's onscreen.

Interviews with the director and DVD commentary by Celeste Yarnall affirm that Miles, a former teen model who'd achieved a level of success on TV, was "difficult" during the filming. The most startling disclosure of all is that she actually had her acting coach (!?) on set and consulted with them frequently

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Movies being what they were, Hollywood being what it is, and heterosexual men being what they are, the whole Lesbian Vampire Craze was but a ‘70s pop-culture mashup of age-old sex and violence tropes customized for the Sexual Revolution and the Women’s Movement. Facing criticism for their violent victimization of women and routine depiction of them as passive targets of male aggression, horror films hoped to make amends by turning the tables and reassigning the strong-but-sexy femme fatale paradigm of film noir to the vampire genre. In this context the woman is allowed to both propel the plot and be an agent of violent action while still pandering to the conventional male perception that women possessing such qualities (strength, aggression, self-preservation) are essentially dangerous, to be feared, and not actually "real" women.  

The lesbian vampires in these films were seldom (if ever) really lesbian, rather, they were the usual projected male fantasy: women of such voracious sexual appetite that they are drawn to both sexes equally. If a female preference was shown by the vampire, it was invariably conveyed in ways which reinforced butch/fem - dominant/passive stereotypes.

But this was the '70s, and during the era of the buddy-picture, the anti-hero, and all the many male-centric movie trends of the time; the image of woman as self-directed predator was not only a refreshing change of pace, but this female-centric angle brought about the welcome introduction of the heroine who is capable of saving herself, or, better still, rescuing the hero.

The Velvet Vampire largely plays by the genre rules, but from its haunting and surreal dream sequences to its subtle feminist self-awareness, it remains a very watchable film that uses the feminine gaze to play fast and loose with what we've come to expect from a horror movie.


THE STUFF OF DREAMS

It wasn’t until I was in film school and saw F. W. Murnau’s brilliant Nosferatu (1922) that my antipathy towards vampire movies underwent a change. That was about 1976. I became a full-fledged convert when I saw Werner Herzog’s mesmerizing remake of Nosferatu in 1979. Since then I’ve come to appreciate vampire movies for their atmosphere and sensual mystery. I no longer felt they had to be "scary" in order to be effective.

Murnau's and Herzog's films inspired me to better appreciate was the nightmarish, melancholy side of what a vampire curse suggested. To be doomed to an eternity of unappeasable longing (for blood and for love, as vampires are often linked to some kind of romantic yearning) is to forever be forced to confront and live with the loss of hope. It’s a dreadful fate to contemplate, but one so humanly compelling that vampire films that even tangentially address this issue (The Hunger- 1983 and The Addiction -1995, come to mind) tend to become favorites.

In order to meet the more sensational requirements of the exploitation genre, Rothman's screenplay (co-written with Maurice Charles and her husband Charles S. Swartz) had minimal opportunity to address the side of the story relating to Diane's loneliness and bereaved longing for her (very, very) late husband

The Velvet Vampire is not on par with either of the above-mentioned films by any reasonable aesthetic comparison, but in terms of the capturing a feminine perspective and breathing new life (there’s that word again) into the vampire mythos, I’d say Stephanie Rothman’s film is a more than worthy member of the genre sisterhood.

Copyright © Ken Anderson