There are films that we are drawn back to, again and again, because of the place to which they take us. It isn’t the depth of the characterization or complexity of the plot that fosters an enduring love for certain films; instead, it’s the way that they preserve a time and place like life in a jar of formaldehyde. For me that time is the seventies, and that film is Let’s Scare Jessica to Death.

Sure, I didn’t see this film until I rented it on VHS in the late eighties. I am certain that I rented it on one of those terribly long and boring summer days you encounter during your teens when you’re on summer vacation. Likely I was wearing my beloved red-striped shirt and a pair of cut-off jeans. I walked all the way to what was then called Loehmann’s Plaza on 98th Street and Normandale Boulevard, a depressing little strip mall about a mile and a half away from my house — a long way for a fat kid to walk, for sure. Loehmann’s Plaza always had a scant few shops during those years: a family restaurant called ‘The Cottage,’ a Pizza Hut, a bank, and The Dress Barn. Nowadays it’s come back to life a bit. It’s got Subway, Famous Dave’s, a Lund’s, and a Haskell’s.

The only real place of interest back then was 98th Street video — an independently owned video rental place that, along with renting videotapes and games for the Sega, sold used movie posters. I would save up my allowance and the money I made from doing odd jobs and spend it on buying posters that had advertised upcoming video releases, a practice my father found almost pathologically objectionable. My favorite was a poster for the James Bond film A View to a Kill. Roger Moore and Grace Jones appeared on that poster, back-to-back, both holding pistols if I remember correctly. Grace Jones, with her butch demeanor, good looks, and muscular thighs was a prototype for the domineering woman I would grow to find so interesting in later years. Watching Grace Jones beat Christopher Walken in a karate fight, then throw Roger Moore around in bed was likely fodder for my burgeoning adolescent sexuality.

What drew me immediately to Let’s Scare Jessica to Death was that it looked to be a genuinely frightening movie. I don’t recall how it was that I was allowed to rent it, surely I didn’t have the legal rights for renting quasi-vampire films back then; it must have been un-rated having emerged from a time before the MPAA decided to ruin the childhood of every horror film fan below the age of seventeen. Anyhow, I was able to rent it, and I returned home with it to the air-conditioned comfort of my parents’ neo colonial-style suburban home. While most kids were out playing basketball or running relay races, I was inside, with the curtains drawn, watching horror and science fiction films on VHS… a practice that was the right of every latch-key child in suburban America during the eighties.

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, or Jessica as I will begin calling it now, tells the story of a group of friends who decide to leave the urban blight of 1970’s-era New York City behind in exchange for an old house in God’ country (which is somewhere near Connecticut) when one of them, Jessica, suffers a nervous breakdown. The group of friends begins working on keeping up an apple orchard on the land and selling off the odd junk that was left in the house by the former owners, an old couple who’ve not lived on the premises in many years. On the first night in their new house, the group stumbles upon a young woman who’s been squatting in the abandoned home. Of course, she plays the acoustic guitar and wears tightly-fitting corduroy jeans. What’s surprising is that she may or may not be the former tenant’s vampiric daughter. As Jessica is the only one of the group that suspects there is something amiss in the old house, the others begin to question her mental stability. What began simply enough as Jessica’s voice-over narration becomes the increasingly bizarre inner monologue of a woman doubting her own sanity when she is confronted with the possibility that she and her friends have happened upon the supernatural.

The film absolutely reeks of the seventies. A decade I know, from photographic evidence that exists like android memory implants in boxes around my parents’ house, that I existed in but scarcely can grasp memory of. Watching Jessica is like visiting some kind of a living history museum, where historical re-enactors eat fondue, walk around in burnt orange turtlenecks and say things like “groovy.” This is a world primarily preserved by the kinds of films I saw in high school health class, movies with sickly sweet soundtracks featuring acne-ridden teenagers sitting in bean bags, eating cotton candy, and discussing issues of personal hygiene. While watching it again recently I was struck with an odd sense of disbelief as I watched the early-thirtysomething cast of Jessica sit around their kitchen table having an impromptu sing-along with the homeless woman they’ve found living in their house. When were white people ever this comfortable with themselves?

It’s interesting the way history binds an individual to their times… one doesn’t think of George Washington doing anything other than crossing the Potomac or chopping down cherry trees; in this same way it is difficult to rescue the characters in Jessica from their times… I can only see them becoming the type of people who at some point put aside their LSD and their vegetarian cookbooks in exchange for selling insurance policies, giving birth to oddly-named children, and eating organic produce. Nonetheless, in the odd way in which I have pieced together my unremembered seventies existence from borrowed memories used to tear away the remembered years of my life like layers of old wallpaper, so Jessica lives on as a testament to a time when there was no kitsch value in macrame wall-hangings and men were allowed to emerge from the waters of a lake after skinny-dipping, naked and uncircumcised like something savage and prehistoric.

The makers of Jessica use lots of horror film axioms to their advantage — the old dark house, isolation, and the questionable sanity of the main character — in crafting a uniquely frightening vampire film that is rivaled only by Let the Right One In and Martin for originality in the vampire genre. Jessica’s re-issue on DVD is well-deserved. Its erie atmosphere and unsettling story of a town possibly in the clutches of an ages old vampire clan are enough to make it worth adding to your queue.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 12:24 pm and is filed under Movies, Reviews, Video Funhouse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.