Directed by John Hancock
89 minutes
In English with English subtitles

This cult classic never became really big because it was simply too unwieldy and offbeat. It splits audiences like crazy, depending on if you are open to it or not. Most movies clearly define their framework, either being a dreamlike movie or a realistic one, but this one is intentionally zigzagging in between. It refuses to take sides, and that's the beauty of it. It's also why it was never a hit, and was hugely overlooked… It was before its time and offered something radically different. David Bowie once said an artist who creates something really original is always the loser, and it's the person who imitates it who gets all the credit. Bowie was pretty cynical and was probably talking about himself… but it's true, that's often been the case in history.

This flick begins with a group of semi-hippie types who have escaped the rat-race of the big city to retreat to the countryside. For many viewers, although it is a folk horror film it is also a commentary on the death of the hippie generation. And indeed, the car that our protagonists are driving is actually a black hearse with "love + peace" graffiti written on the door. Once they arrive at their destination, an old farm located near a cove, they attempt to start a new life. But of course nothing is ever really new, there is always a past lingering somewhere. In this case, the farm has a dark past, but it also seems that our lead character, Jessica, has also recently been released from a psychiatric hospital. That's how the filming begins, and it shoots off from there. 

Another underlying impulse throughout the entire film is a submerged lesbian vampire thread, influenced by the first vampire story ever written—Sheridan Le Fanu's 1871 novella Carmilla—written exactly 100 years before this movie was made. Some have even referred to Jessica as a feminist horror movie. One reviewer aptly called it "A lesbian panic melodrama in New England gothic drag..."

It's a film that refuses to let itself be nailed down, and can be interpreted in different ways. It is unclear what is supernatural, historical, or psychological. The narration is unhinged and you are always questioning everything you see. It was one of the earlier movies exploring the 'unreliable narrator' device taken from literature. Therefore because of its destabilized sense of reality, most people see it as a proto-Lynch film, a predecessor to something like Mulholland Drive. Indeed after you have seen this film everything feels slightly bizarre and unreal... it has the power to haunt. All of this is accentuated by the experimental soundtrack that includes Moog synthesizers… something that would become popular years later especially in the movies of John Carpenter. 

It's clear this film had an profound influence on future visionaries... besides Lynch, Stephen King and the Twilight Zone‘s Rod Serling both cited it as having an impact on their work. But at the same time even though it was so influential, its been strangely forgotten and almost impossible to see for ages.