Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (4K UHD Review)
- Review Date: Sep 05, 2025
- Format: 4K Ultra HD
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Director
John HancockRelease Date(s)
1971 (July 29, 2025)Studio(s)
The Jessica Company/Paramount Pictures (Vinegar Syndrome)- Film/Program Grade: B
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: B+
- Extras Grade: B+
Review
“I sit here and I can’t believe that it happened. And yet I have to believe it. Dreams or nightmares? Madness or sanity? I don’t know which is which.”
Let’s Scare Jessica to Death opens with these words, spoken in voiceover by Jessica (Zohra Lampert) as she sits adrift in a rowboat, contemplating the many horrors that she has just experienced. From there, the film flashes back to show what happened in order to bring her to that point. The problem with using this kind of structure in a horror film is that it robs the narrative of any real suspense regarding whether or not the protagonist will survive to see the dawn. Of course, horror movies have always had a trick to get around that issue, since they can conclude by picking back up where the prologue left off and then continuing with a twist that pulls the rug out from under the main character (and the audience as well).
Yet the real trick in Let’s Scare Jessica to Death starts with the title and Jessica’s first words. To put it bluntly, they sell a bill of goods that the film never even tries to deliver. It sets up expectations of a Diabolique type story where the protagonist is an unstable individual who is going to be driven to the brink of madness by nefarious parties who are deceiving her in order to push her over the edge. And Jessica is indeed a person who has had some kind of an unspecified mental breakdown and been institutionalized as a result. She’s been recently released back into the custody of her husband Duncan (Barton Heyman), and along with their friend Woody (Kevin O’Connor), they travel out to a rural farmhouse that they’ve just purchased in order to start a new life. Jessica immediately starts seeing uncanny visions of a dreamlike girl (Gretchen Corbett) that have her questioning her own sanity, but Duncan and Woody can see her as well, and that’s where Let’s Scare Jessica to Death starts to diverge from any expectations that the title may have created.
Another vision that isn’t really a vision is an intruder that Jessica spots as soon as they enter their new home, and when the men chase her down, they find out that she’s just a harmless squatter named Emily (Mariclare Costello). Emily offers to pack up her bags and leave, but Jessica feels sorry for her and invites her to stay in their new home, at least temporarily. That seemingly insignificant invitation provides a clue about where the story of Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is heading, but as with Jessica’s later reflections on her experiences, that fact is only apparent in hindsight. “I am not what I am,” Iago muses in Shakespeare’s Othello, and Emily is not what she is, meaning that Let’s Scare Jessica to Death isn’t what viewers thought it was going to be.
The fascinating thing is that none of this is what Let’s Scare Jessica to Death was originally intended to be, either. The project began life as a screenplay by Lee Kalcheim titled It Drinks Hippie Blood, and it was supposed to be a satirical creature feature. Yet when theatre director John D. Hancock came on board to direct what would be his first feature film, he rewrote the script to suit his own tastes, removing most of the humor and turning everything into a much more serious horror tale. (Hancock and Kalcheim are credited under the pseudonyms Ralph Rose and Norman Jonas, respectively.)
Hancock also had the idea to turn Jessica into something of an unreliable narrator, leaving room for doubt about whether or not the events that she experiences are really happening. Yet intentionally or not, they undercut that concept by not necessarily showing the events in the film from her point of view. The camera frequently takes an omniscient perspective, providing viewers with horrific details that Jessica doesn’t even notice, which makes everything seem more concrete than what Hancock had in mind. Regardless of whether or not Jessica may suffer from schizophrenia, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death does. Yet paradoxically, that’s one of the reasons why the film works as well as it does, because any apparent conflict between the two perspectives helps to convey the instability that is the core of Jessica’s troubled psyche. For Hancock, whether or not her experiences are real isn’t as important as how all of it affects her. The other characters start out by doubting her, but even after they discover to their dismay that her visions are indeed all too real, Jessica still ends up doubting herself.
All of that means Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is a psychological horror film that operates a little differently than most other examples of the subgenre. This isn’t a Val Lewton production that relies on suggestion to create horrors that only exist in the mind’s eye of the viewer. Oh, there’s an element of suggestion present, but there’s no real ambiguity involved, and it’s the concrete nature of the horrors that have the deepest effect on Jessica. As a result, the real trick in the title Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is that it’s a perfectly accurate description of the film. It’s just that it can be easily misread due to assumptions regarding the contraction “let’s.” The reality is that it’s not the other characters in the film who are trying to push Jessica past the brink of madness; the actual culprit is co-writer/director John D. Hancock, and he’s openly inviting us to join in the fun. As horror movie fans, we’re always at least partially complicit in the mental and physical tortures that we view—we paid for the tickets to watch them, after all—but Hancock’s ingeniously self-referential trick was to acknowledge that fact before a single frame of the film even had a chance to unspool. If Jessica really is mad, then we’re all a little mad here.
Cinematographer Robert M. Baldwin shot Let’s Scare Jessica to Death on 35mm film using spherical lenses, framed at 1.85 for its theatrical release. This version is based on a 4K scan of the original camera negative, cleaned up and graded for High Dynamic Range in Dolby Vision and HDR10. It’s a noticeable upgrade over the previous Blu-ray versions, with visible improvements in fine detail and grain reproduction. Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is a moderately grainy film, so that’s important, and there are no issues here with encoding artifacts. The colors are beautifully bold and saturated but not pushed so far that they look unnatural, and they enhance the fairy-tale feel of the film. The contrast range is strong, with deep blacks and perfectly resolved highlights that never look blown out. There’s little to criticize here. Fans of Let’s Scare Jessica to Death should be thrilled.
Audio is offered in English 2.0 mono DTS-HD Master Audio, with optional English SDH subtitles. The sound is clean and free of any significant distortion or other artifacts. While much of the dialogue was dubbed during post-production, it’s still clear and comprehensible. Orville Stoeber’s memorable electronic score sounds surprisingly good here, with a fair amount of depth on the low end—the bass violin in particular digs really deep.
The Vinegar Syndrome 4K Ultra HD release of Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is a two-disc set that includes a Blu-ray with a 1080p copy of the film. The insert is reversible, featuring new artwork by Luke Insect on one side and the iconic theatrical poster artwork on the other. Vinegar Syndrome is also offering a Limited Edition version featuring a spot gloss hard slipcase and slipcover combo designed by Insect, as well as a 40-page booklet with essays by Molly Henery, Quatoyiah Murry, and Jason Bailey. That version is available directly from their webstore and at a few select retailers, limited to 8000 units (there are still over 2000 left as of this writing). The following extras are included, all of them in HD:
DISC ONE: UHD
- Audio Commentary with Kim Newman and Sean Hogan
- Audio Commentary with John D. Hancock
DISC TWO: BD
- Audio Commentary with Kim Newman and Sean Hogan
- Audio Commentary with John D. Hancock
- A New Medium (15:19)
- The Stars Align (11:26)
- The Sound of Terror (12:08)
- A Haunted Quality (21:48)
- Theatrical Trailer (3:02)
- TV Spot (:56)
- Radio Spot (1:05)
- Image Gallery (2:20)
All of these extras are new to this release, starting with two different commentary tracks. The first one pairs Hancock with Vinegar Syndrome’s Justin LaLiberty, who serves as moderator for the track. Hancock provides details about his background and his influences, as well as offering some stories about the making of Let’s Scare Jessica to Death. There was some kind of a recording issue that makes LaLiberty a little difficult to understand at times, but Hancock’s answers help clarify the questions that he was asking.
The second commentary is with critic/author Kim Newman and director/author Sean Hogan. Newman has championed Let’s Scare Jessica to Death ever since his 1984 book Nightmare Movies: Wide Screen Horror Since 1968, following on the heels of the praise that Stephen King offered in Danse Macabre in 1984. Together, Newman and Hogan offer a full-throated appreciation of the film, analyzing it from a thematic point of view and exploring the complicated history of its production and release, including the challenges that it’s faced on home video. Despite some undeniably rough edges, they feel that it’s a fully worked out film that’s a credit to the genre.
Aside from a collection of trailers and an Image Gallery, the rest of the extras consist of new interviews. A New Medium is with Hancock, who provides an overview of how he became involved with the project after his theatrical experiences and how the tone changed drastically when he came aboard. He also explains the influences that guided the way that he reshaped the story, and shares details about the production and release of the film (including his disagreement with the original cinematographer). Some of this information is repeated in his commentary track, so think of this as being a précis.
The Stars Align is with co-producer Bill Badalato, who goes even farther back into the prehistory of Let’s Scare Jessica to Death before Hancock’s involvement, and then breaks down the rest of the production from his own point of view. The Sound of Terror is with composer Orville Stoeber, who explains his own background, how he became involved with the film, and some of the radical techniques that he used in creating the score (even the seemingly simple piano parts were played without using the pedals, giving them a deliberately clunky quality). A Haunted Quality is with Stephen Thrower, author of Nightmare USA. He also feels that Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is a misleading title, as is the idea that it’s an ambiguous film—it’s clear that the supernatural elements are real. He analyzes it from the genre angle and from a thematic point of view, and offers plenty of praise for how Lampert’s performance is the key to making everything work.
Interestingly enough, while many of these participants have been involved with extras on previous releases of Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, none of their old ones have been included here. The original DVD release of the film was bare-bones (and it never even made it to LaserDisc), but Shout! Factory’s 2020 Blu-ray version offered a commentary with Hancock and Badalato, interviews with Stoeber and Kim Newman, and a “then and now” location comparison. The 2021 Blu-ray from Via Vision in Australia added two additional commentaries, one with Newman and Prano Bailey-Bond and the other with Kat Ellinger If you have either of those releases, you’ll want to hang onto them for the extras alone. On the other hand, once you’ve seen Let’s Scare Jessica to Death in 4K, you’ll never want to watch it any other way. Vinegar Syndrome did a bang-up job on this one, breathing new life into the undead. It’s definitely a recommended upgrade.
-Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).