Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 302: Wed Nov 2

Let's Scare Jessica To Death (Hancock, 1971): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.45pm


This 35mm presentation, also being screened on November 19th,
is part of the 'In Dreams Are Monsters' season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.

Kim Newman has written about this film in the latest Sight & Sound as it's in his top ten in the magazine's forthcoming Greatest Films poll and it's well worth a read.

Here is an extract from Tom Fellows' review at the classichorror.com website:
That Let's Scare Jessica to Death should be overlooked as one of the finest horror pictures of the 1970s is apt. Lacking the guttural, attention grabbing scares of contemporaries Night of the Living Dead and Last House on the Left, the film is a more somber, subdued affair. Its autumnal light casts dark shadows and the rural farmhouse location becomes secondary to the inner landscape of a mentally unstable mind. Also Let's Scare Jessica to Death refuses the sensationalism usually associated with movie madness (no cannibal doctors or men dressed as their mothers here) and instead retreats inward, sharing whispered thoughts and ghostly warnings. Like its central protagonist, it is a movie that shyly refuses to draw attention to itself, but underneath lays insanity, sadness and startling beauty. A masterpiece.

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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