Summary
Jessica and her dopey, unappealing husband head for the hills in the hopes that the peaceful countryside will improve her fragile mental state. Unfortunately for Jessica, her husband did a really, really poor job of planning the trip. Apparently it never crossed his mind that perhaps spending every penny they had on a lonely house with a violent past located several miles outside of a small, creepy town entirely inhabited by hostile old men with odd scars located on an isolated island was not the best plan. Maybe he figured that being driven up there in the back of a hearse right next to his giant double bass case that looks like a coffin would relax her. Or that the grave rubbings she made to decorate their room with would make her feel more at home. In any case it turns out that their new home came equipped with a built-in vampire, albeit a fairly lethargic one, and Jessica spends the rest of the movie trying (and failing) to hold on to her sanity and her marriage.
Warning! Spoilers ahead!
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Barbara's Rant
Would someone please explain to me why there were voice-overs in this movie? Zohra Lampert does a terrific job showing us Jessica's growing desperation, we don't need her to tell us that her husband wouldn't believe her if she told him that she just saw a mysterious figure in white in the graveyard. Also, it's fairly central to the film that Jessica hears voices that no one else can, usually a woman's whisper, which happens to sound awfully similar to Jessica's internal voice. We're already wondering whether these threatening voices are due to the supernatual or to her own mental illness, and we certainly don't need the added confusion of wondering whether a particular incident was supposed to be a spirit voice or Jessica's own internal monologue.
Let's compare Jessica to three more famous horror movie women, shall we? Consider Wendy (The Shining, 1980), Rosemary (Rosemary's Baby, 1968), and Joanna (The Stepford Wives, 1975). All of these women are attractive, intelligent, and thin to the point of fragility. Upon meeting each of their husbands, it's immediately obvious to the audience that these women are married to complete jerks, although the women are committed to making the relationship work. As events play out, the men only become more loathsome and the women become more sympathic. And of the four, only Wendy escapes with her life, her mind, and her soul. What's interesting about these four movies is that the husbands are by far the most disturbing characters. A house with an evil heart is terrible, but giving up your soul and your son's life to evil without any kind of resistance is worse (and yes, I know that in the book Jack does struggle in vain to protect his family, but I'm talking about Jack Nicholson's completely heartless performance). Plotting to bring about the birth of the Anti-Christ is a betrayal of God, but Guy's betrayal of his wife feels more personal and more shocking. The idea of replacing women with robots is horrifying, but killing your own wife in order to acquire a personal slave is much worse. Jessica's story is even more extreme since the vampire Emily isn't especially violent or effective, and Jessica's husband is so cruel to her and so ready to betray her. Maybe we were supposed to think that her husband was hypnotized in some way, but I don't buy it. For me, the creepiness of the island and its inhabitants was only the backdrop for the disintigration of Jessica and Duncan's marriage. In a larger sense, though, I think all four of these movies are pretty dark statements about the tension between men and women, and I don't think it's an accident that they were all made at a time when women were taking positions of power and influence that were once unavailable to them. These movies strike me as warnings. Even though Jessica, Wendy, Rosemary, and Joanna all love and trust their husbands, given the opportunity, their husbands all betray them in turn.
Of course, even worse than all that is the graphic illustration of the perils of wrap-around skirts this move provides for us. I believe that is the lesson we should all take home from Jessica's sad story. Never, never forget that a knee-length, bell-cut, polyester wrap-around skirt is one of the few articles of clothing that can be frumpy and indecent at the same time. Beware! BEWARE!!!
BARBARA MAY
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