1971@50: LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH

A woman sits in a rowboat near the shore of a lake. She faces away from us and we hear her thoughts ask if what she has just been through is real or imagined. Cut to days before as she, Jessica, is being driven along with her husband and a friend to a family house in the country for some rest and rec. Authentic rest n rec, actually, as Jessica is just out from a spell in a mental health facility and needs some seriously fresh air. Along the way and on approaching the house she has glimpses, phantasms, of things that make her doubt herself. Figures in the landscape that disappear on a second look. Something just under the surface of the lake. When they get to the house she sees a pair of legs at the top of the stairs that run off. Her husband, Duncan, assuages her, "I saw it, too" and runs after the intruder along with the friend, Woody. They catch up with a young woman, a hippy drifter who was just going to stay until she rested up. She's not so threatening so she stays for dinner and the morning after the vote is to let her stay. Oh, she's Emily.

The rest of this is detail as we find out more about Emily and why someone in a family portrait from generations before looks exactly like her. Oh and why the locals are bandaged and blissed out as well as honking rednecks. Oh and who the eerie girl from the turn of the last century is trying to get their attention. This film does not claim to be anything other than a horror movie but the lack of tension as some of the more violent moments happen, whether through ineptitude or by design, gather a numb (not numb-ing) mesmerism.

What tension there is lies in how much of this is taking place in Jessica's fragile awareness as her head gets louder with whispers. Emily who might be a strange form of vampire or succubus is also disconcertingly of the present time and convincingly everyday, however seductive. Duncan does seem to care deeply for Jessica but a few phantasms later also seems to be using that as a mask for his steady drift into lust for Emily. The pace is slow. Sometimes that feels like art and sometimes it feels like inexperience. 

But then there are aspects which are deliberate. The electronic score variously shrieks, charms or weighs down with a stark drone or pulse, nothing like you'd expect from the rustic setting, however steeped it is in genre. The somatised yokels in the town seem to value their plasters and bandaids like a village of proto-Cronenbergian  new flesh zombies. Bingo! That, as I write it, is what I'm looking at: this film from 1971 looks like Shivers, Rabid or Videodrome from years later. 

It's on par with another anomalous horror film from the same year The Brotherhood of Satan which blended a pre-Exorcist occultism with a rough realism to great effect. The sense that this population-wide malady or cult effect will just keep spreading is only barely suggested but is present on screen. But then we end with Jessica still wondering about what she just experienced and if she didn't just concoct it with her brain chemistry. And you feel, when you see it that it only needs the tiniest flick of a Cronenberg for this tale to bloom into proto body horror - the close ups of the wounds you do get to see are ghastly for looking genuine rather than like fang punctures - and a cinematic revolution, however quiet.