A woman named Jessica is ill in New York City. She’s treated for six months, and afterwards, she’s better; everyone agrees. She moves to her new life in a strangely grand house surrounded by nature: apple orchards, lakes. But she keeps hearing voices in her head insisting something’s wrong, calling her crazy, saying she’ll never get well. Pretty soon, she begins to believe them.

I was sick for six months in New York City. I got better, the tests said so. I moved to a new life in California, in a strangely grand house surrounded by nature. I lived with sweet people in the San Gabriel foothills; at night, owls hooted me to sleep. But I kept bolting awake at 4am sweating from fear, convinced something was wrong. My name is, also, Jessica.

“Everything we see onscreen is a fiction that we are asked to believe, and we believe in it because we can find truth in that fiction.” So says the writer Kier-La Janisse in her 2012 book House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films, which features on its cover a montage of images from the 1971 movie Let’s Scare Jessica to Death. Janisse’s book is part personal narrative, part encyclopedic cinema analysis. She tells her own and her mother’s history of alcoholism, mental illness, gaslighting, and abuse primarily by summarizing the plots of giallo, horror, and exploitation B-movies, which stand in for and comment on these life episodes. 

This need to measure real life against the thin, breathing skin of cinema is a kind of paranoia: everything that has happened to you has happened before. You can point to it, see your trauma reflected back through the mirror of the movie screen. Most of us have probably experienced some version of this spooky synchronicity, but Janisse is something of an extreme example; as she puts it in the book’s introduction, “… the films I watch align with my personal experience in that every woman I have ever met in my entire life is completely crazy.“ 

As the seminal queer theorist Eve Kosovsky Sedgewick has argued, “Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly.” Janisse’s determination to obsessively catalog her life via more than 100 cinematic works of “female neurosis” excites me for the subversive feminist power she unearths in the films themselves, and in her reading of them. But the work still begins and ends with fear. Janisse articulates her book’s central question as: “What happens when you feed crazy with more crazy?” Her only answer is a neurotic one: Obsession. Compulsion. In her conclusion, Janisse writes: “ … you go into the minefield so much, tracing your steps back and forth, that you memorize where everything is buried so that you can gaze upon the danger and learn to sidestep it at the same time.” 

There’s something glorious in this desire not for healing or progression, but simply for better and more complete information; a more carefully drawn map of the emotional “minefield.” And yet I want more for my trauma than mere knowledge through repetition. I want what might be impossible; I want a little peace. 

* * * 

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is, Janisse writes, “one of the most subtle masterpieces of ‘70s genre cinema,” because it interweaves the heroine’s mental illness, fear, guilt, and jealousy seamlessly with the vampiric visions and voices she starts experiencing in her spooky new house. “Even for the viewer, there is confusion between which off-screen voices are Jessica’s own, and which are those of the supernatural forces with which she is apparently attuned.” 

The New York stage actress Zohra Lampert, in one of her few screen performances, captures with uncanny precision a deeply relatable psychic experience: Jessica is trying desperately not only to believe she’s normal, but also to believe that normalcy is possible. Patriarchy and her own struggles with mental illness are conspiring to alienate her from reality; but she continues, cheerfully, determinedly, to try to believe that “I’m okay now.”

And sure, the Victorian mansion her husband bought them in rural Connecticut has a terrifying black-and-white photo in the attic, featuring a woman who looks a lot like the hippie redhead they found squatting in the house when they moved in. And yes, the neighboring town’s various roaming old guys are all sporting deep cuts on their necks. But Jessica tries to believe what people keep telling her: that she’s fine. “See?” her husband Duncan chirps. “You’re less frightened already.”

She isn’t; but she smiles anyway. She makes jokes, cooks dinner for everyone, invites the hippie squatter woman, Emily, to stay for a few days. She looks the other way when Emily flirts with Duncan. Jessica plays her part beautifully: a free-spirit in long nightgowns; a musician’s wife. And when the voices in her head murmur “Jessica, why have you come here” and “Don’t tell them, they won’t believe you,” she shakes it off with a smile and clears the plates after supper.

I didn’t know how to tell people in California I’d just had cancer. Often, I did it awkwardly, dropping it into otherwise normal conversations: “Well, my oncologist would say … “ or “During chemo last year.” I didn’t overshare, never went into details, but I insisted, lightly, over and over, on making it a part of my public perception. My hair was still patchy, my chemo port scar visible in the tank tops the LA heat required; I needed to explain, I told myself, or people would see and wonder. But it was simply that I needed to be seen in what I had survived; admired, even. Witnessed.

Janisse argues that Jessica’s “guilt over not being able to ‘act normal’ only exacerbated her awkwardness and invited the kind of self-hatred that would unravel her.”  In this reading, it’s Jessica’s cycle of self-recrimination and policing, her relentless and fruitless attempts to perform good humor and fun, that ultimately destroy her life. But some of that sounds more like Janisse’s own mother, driven by “repression and guilt” to alcoholism, self-loathing, and cruelty.

Jessica, on the other hand, tries to reach out to the people around her for reassurance, especially her husband—who inevitably gaslights her. When they finally have it out in a late-night bedroom argument and, in response to her terrified tears, her husband pissily whispers “Be quiet, they’ll hear you!” and Jessica shouts back, “Who cares!” she asserts herself and her feelings, and he responds by going off in a huff to sleep in the other room with Emily, the probable vampire.

Sedgewick defines paranoia as, among other things, “anticipatory”—averse to surprise—“reflexive and mimetic”—understanding itself through imitation—and as a structure that insists on “knowledge in the form of exposure.” Some of the best horror films are structured by surprise and resist our understanding, refuse exposure or revelation. Yet again and again, Janisse draws conclusions about her life through the narrative arcs of these movies. She uses her own particular reading of each film to interpret and make sense of the events of her life—to expose their underlying truth. But in so doing, she also narrows the possibilities of the film itself. By insisting on her own life’s imitation of a particular narrative, she’s unable to grasp the other potential narratives lurking inside horror’s uncanny relationship to reality.

***

It’s a thrill, projecting your life into film. You start to feel big, important, universal.

But it can become its own addiction: to the madness of coincidence, to our “stories … that make people laugh, make people incredulous, make them proud of me,” as Janisse puts it. Instead of a helpful mirror, you wind up inside a mise-en-abyme of life and fiction, mirroring back and forth until the line between each begins to blur and you’re no longer sure if you’re seeing yourself in the movie, or living your life like a film. 

In the opening scene of Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, we see a hearse driving merrily through the scenic countryside with “Love” scrawled in hippie font on the side. It’s Jessica and her husband Duncan, coming to their new life, and Jessica—barefoot and carefree—runs from the car to take grave rubbings in a beautiful old cemetery. The sequence feels like a comment on hippie culture’s whimsical approach to the big facts of life: love, death. 

But watching it, all I could think about was the cemetery in our little New Jersey town where I grew up, and where I, too, used to take grave rubbings. I’d run my fingers over the tracing paper outlines afterwards, just like Jessica in the film, marveling at the names and ages of the dead: how young they were, how forgotten. I was a romantic—or, as Susan Sontag wrote through cancer in Illness as a Metaphor, a member of the death cult commonly referred to as Romanticism. I was a Romantic right up until my own cancer diagnosis, at which point I couldn’t really justify being “half in love with Death” anymore. Unable to bear the voices in her head, Jessica tears down the grave rubbings she’s hung on the walls of her bedroom. Maybe she’s not a Romantic anymore, either.

“Jessica, come to me,” the voices call. “Jessica, Jessica, I’m here.” Death wants her, calls her. Death—in the form of vampiric Emily—rubs Jessica’s back with suntan lotion, playfully dunks her in the lake before trying to drag her down. Yet again and again, the film demands that Jessica face her desire for death, and then reject it. She has to abandon the hearse with “Love” written on the side; flee the living-dead old white guys with gashes in their necks; throw off the Victorian succubus Emily; and, finally, stab her white-suited, gaslighting husband in the back with some kind of fishing hook. 

In my reading, these events aren’t the result of Jessica’s paranoid repression of her own mental illness; they arise from her determination to flee—or destroy—anything and everything that asks her to lay down and die. The final scene of the film is the same as the first: Jessica sits in a rowboat on the lake, having left them all behind—the living, the dead, and everyone in between. In voiceover, she intones, “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.” In Janisse’s reading, these are the words of a completely dissociated being, a woman whose “attempts to rebuild her life failed.”

Citing the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, Eve Kosovsky Sedgewick distinguishes between what she calls “paranoid” and “reparative” modes of reading a text. To the paranoid reader, everything is already known to be horrible, and “no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new.” But to a reparative reader, “Because there can be terrible surprises, there can also be good ones. … the reader has room … to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past could have happened differently from the way it actually did.” 

You can give yourself to death, or to a story—someone else’s story that becomes, or maybe always was, your own. And then the movie’s over, and you’re back in your own small life: as nonsensical as it ever was, as crazy as it often feels. For whatever it’s worth, I choose the reparative reading that Jessica, in her peaceful rowboat floating on that lake, did what she needed to do to survive. I choose the reading that her muddy belief in the events of the past, and her confusion about the possibilities of the future, might propel her in her little rowboat towards something strange, new, even pleasurable. I don’t know either what to believe at the end of this movie; but I know that Jessica was not—and maybe never will be—scared to death.