"Jess-Belle" is an episode of the American television science fiction and fantasy anthology series The Twilight Zone.

In the telling the story gets added to and embroidered on, so that what might have happened in the time of the Druids is told as if it took place yesterday in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Such stories are best told by an elderly grandfather on a cold winter's night by the fireside in the southern hills of the Twilight Zone.Jess-Belle, determined that ex-boyfriend Billy-Ben Turner and his fiancee Ellwyn Glover not marry, enlists the aid of local witch Granny Hart.

Billy-Ben learns from Granny that to kill Jess-Belle, he must make a figure of her using clothing she has worn and stab it through the heart with silver.

Director Buzz Kulik (who also nominated this as one of his two favourite Twilight Zone episodes) recalled that the leopard also proved very difficult (partly because it had been drugged) and that despite the extensive precautions taken - including the construction of a camera cage - it proved extremely hard to get the leopard to do anything at all, and that it tended to fall asleep during shooting.

As with many other Twilight Zone episodes, there is a link to MGM's Forbidden Planet (1956); in this case it is the presence of the film's co-star Anne Francis (who also starred in The After Hours).

JP at The Twilight Zone Vortex observes, "Hamner was likely ... familiar, at least as a casual reader, with classic and contemporary supernatural fiction, a field in which tales of transformation and witchcraft abound.

Some relevant examples include Ambrose Bierce’s 'The Eyes of the Panther' (1897) in which a man marries into a family of feline shape-shifters.

The rise of fiction magazines saw such stories as Sax Rohmer’s 'In the Valley of the Sorceress' (1916), which uses a witch from ancient Egypt and the familiar black cat to achieve its effects.