Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971): trivia & fun facts

Fun facts

• Actress Zohra Lampert was cast in the lead role of Jessica, the titular character who finds herself questioning her sanity.
• Mariclare Costello, an actress who had worked as a casting director on Hancock's stage production of The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake (1967), was cast opposite Lampert as the mysterious hippie, Emily.
• Gretchen Corbett, also an established New York-based stage actress from Portland, Oregon, was cast as the mysterious mute girl whom Jessica encounters, and was the only performer in the principal cast to have not worked with Hancock prior.
• Let's Scare Jessica to Death was filmed over a period of 26 days in the fall of 1970, in various towns in Connecticut; the production budget was $250,000.
• Initially conceived by writer Lee Kalcheim as a satirical horror film about a group of hippies preyed upon by a monster in a lake, the screenplay was significantly reworked after director Hancock signed on to the project.
• Let's Scare Jessica to Death was one of the first horror films to prominently feature a synthesizer in its musical score, which was composed by Orville Stoeber.
• The song sung by Costello's character was initially going to be dubbed by a professional singer, but Hancock and the producers decided to keep her voice as it was recorded.
• During its opening week of August 27–September 1, 1971 at New York City's Criterion Theatre, the film grossed a total of $47,651 in ticket sales.
• Let's Scare Jessica to Death has been named one of the scariest films of all time by several critical publications: in 2006, the Chicago Film Critics Association pronounced Let's Scare Jessica to Death the 87th scariest film ever made.
• In a 2012 poll for Sight & Sound, Let's Scare Jessica to Death was ranked the 849th greatest film of all time.
• Inspired by Henry James' novella The Turn of the Screw and Robert Wise's film The Haunting (1963), Hancock wanted to center the screenplay on a protagonist whose credibility interpreting events could be questioned by the audience so they could use their imagination.
• Rober Firsching, reviewing the film for AllMovie, similarly deemed it an "eerie low-budget chiller."

Source: Wikipedia

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