Let's Scare Jessica to Death

John Hancock’s uniquely strange psychodrama is one of the most underrated of the ‘70s—a gothic horror film for the hippie generation. The rural Connecticut locations are charged with exquisite foreboding, and Hancock makes subtle connections between vampirism and the free love philosophy. Zohra Lampert plays Jessica, a mentally fragile artist who moves into a decrepit country farmhouse with her husband and his best friend. After the party links up with a red-haired wanderer who eerily resembles a woman drowned in a nearby lake, Jessica gradually loses her grip on sanity. The plot is threadbare to the point of abstraction, but Hancock gets great mileage out of ordinary props (a wedding gown, a Victorian photograph, a cello case), and crafts at least one memorable set piece—a sequence in which an undead woman emerges from a lake in full matrimonial dress. The film doesn’t add up in the end, but it works uncommonly well as a succession of dreamy, elusive horror images.