John D. Hancock’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971) is a moody, low-budget psychological horror shot in Connecticut, emerging at the uneasy dawn of the 1970s when American genre cinema was shifting toward ambiguity and dread rather than monsters and gore. Starring Zohra Lampert as the fragile Jessica, supported by Barton Heyman and Mariclare Costello, the film follows a small group retreating to a rural farmhouse where whispers of the past mingle with Jessica’s precarious mental state. Should this eerie curio languish in obscurity like a ghost no one believes in, or should it be acknowledged as a living, breathing classic of psychological horror?
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