Bishop, who drowned in the cove outside their home shortly before her wedding day in 1880, Jes- sica becomes convinced that Emily is an even greater threat than she first imagined. While the film retains a number of elements from the plot of Le Fanu’s novella, including a charming female vampire and an ancestral por- trait that provides a valuable clue to her identity, its fidelity to the source is most evident in its tone and underlying themes. JESSICA is not only a perfect example of the type of “quiet horror” that was Le Fanu’s forte, but is also far more success- ful than any other adaptation in portraying CARMILLA’s tense atmosphere of deception and betrayal. By ingeniously setting the film within the last gasps of the 1960s counter-culture, writer and director Hancock is not only able to provide a clever rationale for getting the vampire into the victims’ home, but is also able to generate true pathos as the hopes and values of the “love generation” are kicked to the ground one last time. As in the no- vella, the plot is never dependent on the stupidity of the victims, and it is precisely because they act in the spirit of charity that they become easy prey to a cunning predator who transforms their dream of communal living in a bucolic haven into a nightmare of violence and death.
In Hancock’s film, the “opening of the inner eye” that permits perception of the supernatural is equated—as it surely would be today—with
schizophrenia, and the authenticity of Lampert’s performance is startling, perfectly capturing not only the vulnerability of Jessica’s fragile mental state but also her strained efforts to retain her com- posure as she struggles to discern the real from the hallucinatory. Costello’s outstanding perfor- mance as Emily, a predator capable of commit- ting the most vicious acts while simultaneously reassuring her victim that nothing untoward is oc- curring, is simply the most faithful portrayal of Carmilla on film. Although the lesbian content of CARMILLA is largely absent, it does appear in the film’s subtext—as Emily’s female victims (both Jessica and the young mute girl played by Gretchen Corbett) seem destined for a different fate than the exsan- guinated male zombies that populate the town. The film is also notable for being the first ad-
aptation of CARMILLA set in the United States— although this would not have been the case had Robert Wise and Val Lewton realized their planned color film adaptation that would have transposed the story to colonial America—a setting that per- fectly mirrors the novella’s ambiance of geographi- cal isolation and gentility. A cult favorite that gained its reputation largely from repeated television airings, LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH de- serves rediscovery not only as a perfectly realized ghost story and a credible adaptation of CARMILLA, but as a eulogy for the 1960s on par with GIMME SHELTER (1970) and WITHNAIL AND I (1987).
LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH: “a credible adaptation of CARMILLA... [and] a eulogy for the 1960s.”
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