Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

If you can ignore the basic and sometimes crappy production values, you can expect a surprising good movie. This is a B movie after it shows in some of the dialogue. Don't let that distract you.At times very slow moving and some would say quite boring to the point where a lot of people would turn it off.......DON'T. The last 30 minutes of so makes up for the whole movie and for me made it worth watching to the end.Really good performances from Zohra Lampert and Mariclare Costello, neither of whom I had never heard of until I watched this. The rest of the actors are a bit wooden, but that could easily be blamed on the script and dialogue.The really great thing about this movie is that the ending is completely open to interpretation. Did it all happen or was it all the imagination of a really messed up mind?If you don't mind old movies with low production values this is one worth watching.An easy 7/10 for me, well worth the 90 minutes.

I was born in 1976 and my mother told me that she named me after a movie entitled "Lets scare Jessica to Death". Sure enough, it exists, so I will watch it. Now I feel like it's sort of creepy that I was named after this movie. It's a horror movie. Strange. It's the first time my mom heard the name Jessica. Is that strange? My dilemma is if I SHOULD or should NOT watch it because I don't want to feel bad I was named after this. It's always been a little bit creepy to be honest; but now after reading the summary, it seems super creepy. I need all the responses I can get. Please be nice-I know its corny, but I'm truly not sure if I should leave it alone or see it.

The lurid title could easily side-track you from what is essentially an extremely frightening exploration of a woman's descent into madness. You can read it, of course, in a material sense as the title suggests; but everything in this film has the potential to signify something else entirely, and its this ambiguity that makes this film so macabre and interesting. Everything, from the killing of the 'mole' to the conclusion where Jessica is trapped in the middle of a lake on a barely floating boat, could be signifying or at least implying something else. Classic metaphors for the human consciousness are bodies of water; being trapped in one or drowning metaphors for madness. The films ambivalent set of monsters, from a strange set of undead elderly villagers to sexually promiscuous vampires, threaten Jessica and her sanity. The fact that there is no ultimate explanation for the strange set of phenomena that take place is also demonstrative of the horrific and inexplicable quality of psychotic behaviour for those suffering from schizophrenia (for those of us that have had the misfortune to experience it) or the side-effects of drugs. This film is really worth seeing

This was a disappointment. I found this movie when I was looking for "haunted house" movies, but LSJTD does not follow that classic, well tried-out formula at all. It is not scary in the "good and pure" way, that makes you shiver with fear and delight mixed. Instead it is scary in a black, unpleasant, disturbing way. You feel so sorry for Jessica, the vulnerable main character, and afterwards you feel depressed.What made me most disturbed, was in fact not the supernatural part of it, which felt mostly silly. But the adultery aspect. Because there are a lot of women like Emily in reality, without them being vampires in the literal sense of the word. Bad morals and no conscience about stealing someone else's husband, is enough for them to bring great havoc to everybody, and destroy another woman's life for ever...What more is there to say about LSJTD..? Maybe that it was very "seventish", complete with the "green wave", and long-haired women in floating dresses and unruly-haired men... the 70:s was a hairy period! :-) All-in-all this movie was a little clumsily made. A little amateurish. I am not impressed!