Let's Scare Jessica to Death turns 50

That subject is a bit of a joke. When using the wording "turns xx," where xx equals some number of years, in a headline about a movie, you're usually talking about something much more central to cinema history, whether it's a Star Wars or a Casablanca or a Titanic or a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. A semi-obscure horror movie from the early 1970s does not fit the bill.

But I've been wanting to rewatch this movie ever since I first saw it on Halloween of 2009, and it was just a coincidence that that desire reached critical mass in October of 2021, when John D. Hancock's 1971 film turns half a century old.

We're actually six weeks past the 50th birthday. While nowadays it would be smart to release a movie like Let's Scare Jessica to Death at the beginning of October, to capitalize on viewers' newly reawakened desire for horror content, August 27th seemed to Paramount the best date to release it back in 1971. Of course, this was still four years before Jaws codified some of our modern understandings about when to release big films to maximize their impact on the audience and at the box office.

Saturday night, twelve years after my first viewing, it still scared the shit out of me. This is not a horror movie of big gestures or grand guignol kills. It's eerie in the little details, only occasionally building toward something more graphic, and it's all the better for it. It's soaking in glorious 1970s atmosphere and has some really chilling performances at its center -- from both the sinister characters and the innocent ones, making it confronting and complex as well.

As I was watching, and thinking generally about the great horror of 1970s cinema, I asked myself the following question: What other Let's Scare Jessica to Deaths are there out there?

Surely there are other semi-obscure 1970s horror movies I could name that I've already seen, but for the purposes of this exercise, I'm interested in those I haven't.

So I'm going to use the 26 remaining days before Halloween to try to dig up some great gems that might give me that Jessica vibe. Even if it means -- gasp -- renting them on iTunes, rather than just relying on what's available on streaming. (Kanopy would probably be the best resource for this but it can be a bit hit or miss.)

At first I thought I would watch only 1970s horror to scratch this October's horror itch, but since then, I've already noticed at least one new release that I want to watch within the next few weeks. So instead I'll just lean toward that goal, which will be easier to do, given that I've already scraped the bottom of the streamer barrel for horror movies worth watching from the past decade.

I can't wait to see what movies I find. I hope they scare me to death as much as Jessica did.