Picture for event

Hellfire Video Club present BLOODLINES!

Let's Scare Jessica to Death

John D. Hancock/ 1971/ USA/ 89mins/ Cert: 15

-
Fri 12 May 2023 // 20:00

Tickets: £5

HFVC are rising from their musty tomb once more to bring you this quietly creepy and highly atmospheric rural chiller on the big screen. A cult sleeper hit in the US, as it crept insidiously into the minds of a generation of seventies kids over late night TV re-runs later that decade, in the UK Jessica simply sank into obscurity after its unassuming cinema release, and only began to find its audience in the post-internet age.

Recently released from a psychiatric institution, Jessica, with her husband and a friend, retreats to a Victorian farmhouse in an isolated part of rural Connecticut. Here they encounter unaccountably hostile locals, as well as an enigmatic hippy drifter named Emily squatting the house. Almost immediately, Jessica's fragile mental health once again collapses, believing Emily to be a supernatural force. Is she relapsing, paranoid, or are vampires real??

Fans of modern jump-scare CGI horror need not apply, for Jessica is a slower, wispier beast. Like all the best 70s Stateside horror, it hums with a slightly dislocated, post hippy world-view that seems to be struggling to anchor itself in a culture ripped up and spat out by the tumultuous late 60s psychedelic revolution. Dreamlike distancing, and a slowly creeping unease are the film’s major tones, and it’s not hard to see why it might have freaked the kids out, as the adult world it represents - of domesticity gone awry - is disquieting enough in itself. And that’s even before the horror kicks in...

PLUS! Be sure to stick around late, for we’ll be returning to our old ways. By which we mean there will be some more cross generational post-counterculture horror to follow, for those who like to wallow.

HFVC DJs will be spinning their fave bummed out tunes in the bar.