Greene Screene: Let’s Scare Jessica to Death

Andrew Greene
2 min readApr 11, 2021

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Now Showing on The Greene Screene: Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

“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.” -Jessica

Me neither, Jessica. Every day I oscillate between both extremes, or fantasize of the possibility, instead falling in that unsatisfying and realistic middle ground. Thankfully, movies like John Hancock’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death exist to stretch my brain and tempt further leaps into honesty and nightmare.

There’s nothing scarier than a deteriorating marriage wherein one party stops believing in the other, though a bloodthirsty ghost isn’t far behind in Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, an all-time great movie title that is twice as good as your most optimistic projections based on such a ridiculous title.

A future 2020 Andy Hall of Fame nomination, this is a movie shot like an indie art film where fucking, stabbing and sucking blood is on the table in nearly every scene. Throw in a tremendous lo-fi synth score by Walter Sear and one of the most honest and effective voice overs in a horror movie I’ve ever encountered, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is the kind of discovery that gives me faith in film.

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Andrew Greene

Writer, director. Creator of The Naked Man Podcast. Human sampler tray following breadcrumbs, forever hungry. @WanderingGreene on IG, Letterboxd & Twitter