Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971)
Directed by John D. Hancock
Newly released from a mental ward, Jessica hopes to return to life the way it was before her nervous breakdown. But when Jessica moves to a country house with her husband and a close friend, she finds a mysterious girl living in there. Jessica's terror and paranoia resurface as evil forces surround her.
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What critics compared Let's Scare Jessica to Death to
West wears his influences on his sleeve, deliberately invoking the visual language of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (especially during the early, on-the-road scenes in their van), as well as the long zooms and creepy score that recall “Let’s Scare Jessica to Death.”
In the same way that Let’s Scare Jessica To Death embraces a melancholy end of the 1960s, X feels like Ti West looking back on the 1970s with similar sadness as he reflects back on the exploitation, horror, and pornographic films of the era.
Its refreshing lack of prudishness and its wholesale rejection of final girl tropes seem to frame it as a response to our current trend of constant artistic re-litigation of FUCKING EVERYTHING, wrapped in the clothes of Just Before Dawn or Let’s Scare Jessica to Death .
Queen of Earth uses these themes to pulpy effect, plugging in the paranoid claustrophobia of Rosemary’s Baby and Michael Winner’s The Sentinel, as well as the watery spectre of Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, into its wheelhouse.
The calmly eerie house-by-the-lake setting exactly resembles the places where terrible things happen to women in Let’s Scare Jessica To Death, The Last House On The Left and I Spit On Your Grave, and a climactic party freak-out shifts into full-on terror with ghoul-like guests – making the point that a few wrong words can make being ordinarily miserable feel like being trapped in a nightmare movie.
Die My Love makes perfect company with films like Shinya Tsukamoto’s Kotoko (2011), The Piano Teacher (dir. Michael Haneke, 2002), Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (dir. John D. Hancock, 1971), and other portrayals of “hysterical” women.