Let's Scare Jessica to Death

Jessica, recovering from a breakdown, moves with her husband to a rural farm. There is a girl already living there. The locals are strange. She keeps hearing a voice telling her she is going mad, and it may be right.

John Hancock made a quiet, ambiguous, deeply unsettling film that refuses to resolve whether Jessica is haunted or relapsing, and the horror is that she cannot tell either, and neither can you.

It has the texture of its year exactly: soft focus, folk on the soundtrack, a rural New England that feels genuinely off.

Zohra Lampert's performance is the film, a woman narrating her own possible breakdown in a fragile voice-over that you cannot trust.

It was dismissed on release and is now regarded as one of the great American horror films of the decade, and an obvious influence on The Witch and Saint Maud.