Let's Scare Jessica To Death

True Psychological Horror has never been more unnerving and frightening as Let's Scare Jessica To Death.  It takes you into the horrors of the human mind.  And the most frightening thing is that there are people who really are so mentally imbalanced that they cannot discern between what's real and what's not.  Most of the time, they act upon what isn't real at all.  It is all in their mind.

Nightmares, Dreams, Sanity, or Madness, who can tell the difference?  Jessica cannot apparently, and it just seems that everybody around her, her husband Duncan, Woody, Emily and the rest of the town village seems to feed off her fragile state of mind in some way.  Of course, Emily, the stunning red head, whom Woody and Duncan take a liking to, somehow knows Jessica's frame of mind before getting to really know her...

Let's look at Jessica here.  She is still struggling with an adjustment to reality after being institutionalized for a couple of months.  Now what exactly drove her to the brink of insanity, we don't know for sure.  But I can surmise that Duncan was a big factor in this equation.  Duncan flirts with Emily = Jessica's paranoia that he may lust for Emily.  I for one, could not help but notice Duncan's guilty expressions in the movie.  Perhaps it was Duncan's prior indiscretions that put a major dent in his marriage and that emotional alienation Jessica felt, pushed her to her breaking point. It may not have been mentioned per se, but thinking logically, it makes a ton of sense.  There is obvious tension between Duncan and Jessica and them moving into a new house in the village was most likely an attempt to start over.  (Gee did Duncan seriously think temptation wouldn't find him?)  And Jessica, as lovely and sweet as can be, can only take so much it seems.  I always feel that its the sweet and innocent ones who end up breaking beyond repair.  Unfortunately however, there was very little to no mercy in her surrounding.  None of the village townspeople who had "telltale" scars and bandages on their necks and arms, and Emily made sure that there wouldn't be.

Now you have Emily. She is a hippie chick that Jessica, Duncan, and Woody find lurking in the house they are staying in. Duncan and Woody take an apparent liking to her, however, Emily is not all that she seems.  Apparently as an old town tale would have it, a woman named Abigail Bishop drowns on her wedding day and her ghost feeds off the blood of the village.  Abigail bears a very uncanny resemblance to Emily in the pictures.  As instinct and fear may have it, Jessica knows Abigail and Emily is the same person when Emily tries to drown Jessica in the lake and underwater, Jessica sees Abigail in her wedding dress.  Jessica is somehow able to put two and two together when she sees the men in the village all scarred and bandaged up.  But who would believe Jessica?

Now we don't know how Emily/Abigail became the village temptress and vampire.  But at one point she was seemingly normal I am sure. I will go out on another limb and say that Abigail was the apple of every man's eye in the village.  She had every man spellbound.  She was also very conniving and manipulative and never stopped at anything to get what she wanted.  She was evil.  She was the Devil in a white dress.  Her husband to be probably had it with Abigail's abuse and indiscretions so he took it upon himself to drown his bride to be.  Now if you think logically, you can make the connection here.  Emily/Abigail kills the antique dealer, seduces Duncan, frames Jessica when she stabs the mule, kills Woody, kills the mute girl who tried to warn Jessica, and slowly but surely just pushed Jessica back to where she came from; insanity. 

There is an underlying fear of doubt and losing self control.  There is an even greater fear at somebody preying on your vulnerabilities.  It makes me wonder, what did Jessica do to deserve this mental cruelty?  Did Duncan set her up secretly by taking her far away to a town with an evil secret?  Did he even know?  Why were the townspeople after Jessica?  Why did Duncan try to come after Jessica in the lake pushing Jessica to kill him?  What was left of Jessica now?

These are questions we can ask ourselves and draw our own conclusions.  But the horrors of the human mind is never something to toy around with.  Jessica was pushed to the brink of madness in the end when she killed her own husband.  Where there is intimacy, lies a dependency that when severed, you lose your sanity.  The one man Jessica loved who was supposed to hold her together, broke her trust hence destroying the solid foundation of love that they had built together, leaving her all alone in the darkness of her own mind.  So does that mean Jessica got rid of the "problem" by accidently killing Duncan? 

I'll say it one last time, the horrors of the human mind isn't something to mess around with.