The Metrodome Region 2 DVD box set

The front and back covers of my own DVD set

This is the version of The Last House on the Left that I own. As you can see, it's not new – in fact, I travelled about fifty miles so I could get a second-hand copy. It is in fact the Metrodome edition – copyrighted 2007 but released in 2008 – which claims to be the first "uncut" version of the film in the UK. As anyone who has read Szulkin will know, what exactly constitutes "uncut" is a vexed question. However, as the film's BBFC page shows, 2008 really was the first time the British censor's cuts had been waived.

This loudly proclaims itself to be a "3 Disc Ultimate Edition", but in fact that's not quite the case as the third disc is Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film and a couple of extras: a commentary track, deleted scenes and the kind of quiz that was popular in the heyday of DVDs. Going to Pieces is a well produced documentary, and in fact in many ways is considerably better produced than Last House itself, but it's not our subject here.

The cover design is a lot brasher than some more recent releases – even if Arrow's current Blu-ray isn't exactly restrained. It's very in-your-face with its bold red capitals, and you'd never mistake this for the more cerebral kind of horror. Although the price label on my copy partially obscures it, you can see at the bottom left the film's well-known tagline: "To avoid fainting, keep repeating: It's only a movie... only a movie... only a movie..." Forgive me if I avoid saying it at all.

The most striking feature of the cover design is that Mari is given heavy prominence, with the knife-wielding Krug merely a lurking, shadowy presence beneath. Anyone who knows the film will instantly recognise that Mari already has KRUG carved in her chest. The DVD's distributors have therefore decided not to play up the presence of the sadistic and dangerous gang leader. Instead, our attention is drawn to a terribly abused young woman. This design feels exploitative, doubtless deliberately so to hark back to exploitation-era posters.

Mari appears prominently on the back cover too, again in some distress, along with several small stills from the film. We have the machete-wielding Krug talking to Sadie, Mari's rape scene, Mr Collingwood with the chainsaw, and the menaced Phyllis in the woods. This is clearly not a set aimed at people who've never seen Last House on the Left. Like the front cover, the rear makes heavy use of bloody red, spilling over onto the white in a rather heavy-handed attempt at showing the destruction of innocence.

There's a rather over-the-top quote from Channel4.com of all places, praising the film as a classic and calling it "a nihilistic howl of rage". Apart from the BBFC 18 certificate (a legal requirement; there's no equivalent of the US "unrated release" in the UK) that just leaves us with the "over 5 hours of special features". I've already covered the third disc, which is really unrelated to the rest of the DVD set, but there's a lot on the other two. Here's what we have:

Disc One

• Commentary from Craven/Cunningham – where Craven talks about fear
• Commentary from Hess/Sheffler/Lincoln – where Lincoln says "I thought we really pushed it"
• Celluloid Crime of the Century – where Sheffler recounts the cliff threat
• Scoring Last House – where Hess tells about "fatality in her face"
• Krug Conquers England – about Hess visiting the UK for a tour
• Tales That'll Tear Your Heart Out – Craven's unfinished 1976 zombie-western anthology
• Twenty minutes of outtakes and dailies
• US theatrical trailer, plus TV and radio ads 

Disc Two

• The "Krug & Company" cut of Last House on the Left, which differs in that Mari's parents find her just before she dies and so she is able to pass on brief details about what happened
•  An interview with Carl Daft of Blue Underground
• What is breathlessly announced as "WORLD EXCLUSIVE never before seen footage only recently discovered"

By 2007-08 DVD standards this is a pretty comprehensive set of extras. As you'll note, we've already met several of them in the course of this blog, and I will both be returning to those and looking at several more. As we've already seen, actually looking at the extras (or listening to them in the case of the commentary tracks) can produce interesting and sometimes startling results. I shall mine that seam further in due course. 

"I wanted that reaction from her" – David Hess's 2011 Terror Trap interview

David Hess died in October 2011. In February of that year, he had given what proved to be one of his final interviews, to the website The Terror Trap. This site specialised (it seems to have been inactive since around 2014) in horror and thriller films from 1925 to 1987, and so The Last House on the Left fell squarely into its remit. Hess's interview is fairly lengthy and, as was normal for this kind of coverage, not especially hard-edged. It is, however, interesting.

Hess talks at considerable length here about many of the people he worked with throughout his career, briefly about music but in far more detail when it comes to his film career. He says Corinne Clery could have been "the love of [his] life" despite being his screen rape victim in Hitch-Hike (1977). He says he's worked with "really good friend" Ruggiero Deodato five times. He shows compassion when discussing a family tragedy Louis Jourdan had suffered just before they worked together on Swamp Thing, the 1982 superhero movie directed by Wes Craven.

When it comes to Last House associates, Hess says Craven was "more professional" on Swamp Thing than he had been a decade earlier. He mentions still being close friends with Jeramie Rain and Marc Sheffler. He calls Lucy Grantham "incredible" and opines that if he and her "got together tomorrow, it would be like there was no time in between". Finally, when asked what this film had that would be nearly impossible to recapture today (ie in 2011), he suggests friendship: "we were all friends so we worked for each other". (Underlining is The Terror Trap's.)

When it comes to Sandra Peabody, however, the tone is very different. First, Hess is asked about his audition and whether any of the other Last House principals had been with him apart from Martin Kove, who had taken him along. Szulkin (p38) tells us that Kove himself had originally been asked to play the role, but felt it too dark and so recommended Hess. On the audition question. Hess is clear:

No. Just us and Sean Cunningham (the producer). And the girl who I scared half to death. (Laughs.)

Both Hess himself and Sandra (p41) give fairly extensive reminiscences about this audition in Szulkin, but neither so much as mentions the other being present. Still, there's no reasonable candidate for "the girl who [he] scared half to death" other than Sandra.

Immediately after the section about Grantham, Hess without prompting goes on to say, "Sandra was a little different. I think she was more… vulnerable. Memory-wise, there's a visceral attraction to Sandra's Mari in the film. Krug does that." Frustratingly, the Terror Trap interviewer does not quiz Hess on what he means by the somewhat confusing second half of that quote. Hess then goes on to suggest that Krug feels "kind of filthy" to attack the innocent Mari, but has "gone too far at this point." At which point Hess adds:

And that’s the way we inter-related, even when we weren’t shooting. Sandra was an innocent and I held my character. She didn’t want to get anywhere near me. [...] She didn’t want any part of me. She thought I was a fucking monster.

After this, the Terror Trap interviewer does ask an interesting question, which prompts an even more interesting answer:

Terror Trap: Was that because she was a really enthusiastic Method actress and she was creating that whole thing? Or was she actually really scared of you?

David Hess: I think she was really scared. She wasn’t what I would call a complete Method actress. I mean, I studied with Sandy Meisner and Stella Adler. I knew what the fuck I was doing. I knew how to maintain that character, even off screen. And for very good reason. I wanted that reaction from her.  

There is a lot to unpack here. First: "I think she was really scared", in 2011. This is the same man who in 2008 admitted threatening to rape her. The same man who Fred Lincoln and Wes Craven both noted Sandra as being afraid of in Celluloid Crime of the Century in 2002. The same man who Sandra herself said "I was scared" about in Szulkin (2nd edition 2000) in connection with his knife stalking. Hess, speaking some years later than that, says he thought she was really scared.

Then there's the name-dropping. We've already met Sanford "Sandy" Meisner on this blog, since Sandra spent two years studying under him in the late 1960s. It is... somewhat surprising that a man who also studied with him would not recognise a fellow Meisner-trained professional. It is also... somewhat surprising that a man who studied with him would imagine that Meisner's principle of "living truthfully under imaginary circumstances" could ever include threats of real sexual violence as a legitimate part of an acting toolkit.

Marc Sheffler, speaking for an interview in 2022¹ and a man who knew David Hess well for a number of years, has a very different perspective on Hess's acting background during his Last House days. Sheffler says:

He knew nothing about acting, he was doing what he thought people should do, so he was in character 24/7 the entire shoot.

This creates a conflict. A man who "studied with Sandy Meisner and Stella Adler" cannot be a man who "knew nothing about acting". It's not possible for both Hess and Sheffler to be accurate here. This is one case where the answer seems crystal clear: Sheffler is correct. He was speaking more than a decade after Hess had died, so unfairly denigrating his former associate would have looked gratuitously insulting. Hess, meanwhile, was making the point to the Terror Trap interviewer that he "knew what the fuck [he] was doing".

Except that he didn't. 

Finally, consider the warmth Hess shows to so many former colleagues, the genuine concern for Jourdan, the friendship with Deodato, the praise for Grantham. There is one and only one person here who he covers more than incidentally who gets absolutely none of this. No remorse, no regret, no warmth, no compassion. Most actors, forty years on from a difficult film and considering a co-star who has retreated from acting, will at least manage a formulaic "I hope she's happy in her life now" or similar.

Sandra Peabody gets nothing. 

1 "Marc Sheffler sits down w/ Hollywood Wade to discuss the infamous Horror film Last house on the Left", Hollywood Wade | Crime & Entertainment, 4 Sep 2022. Timestamp 35:06

"I thought we really pushed it" – Fred Lincoln's strangely unnoticed commentary track line

A commentary track for The Last House on the Left featuring the three actors of the male gang members – David Hess, Marc Sheffler and Fred Lincoln – appeared more than twenty years ago, I believe for the Region 2 Anchor Bay release of the DVD. It's a notable track, both for its content and for how little that content has been examined by DVD and Blu-ray reviewers. I will be returning to that point in the future, but for now here's an example of what is on that track.

First, some background. About twenty minutes into the film, we see the drugged, bound and gagged Mari being kidnapped. She is carried over the shoulder of Krug, who runs to the waiting Cadillac and places her into the car's spacious trunk (boot if you're British like me!) to join the already confined Phyllis. Krug does this reasonably carefully, after Sadie tells him not to hurt them. The trunk is closed, then the gang get quickly into the car and drive off towards the woods.

Sandra Peabody remembered that scene as part of her interview with Szulkin (p60) and had this to say about it:

One serious scene was where that guy put me over his shoulder, ran down a couple of flights of stairs and threw me into a car. Those guys were kind of mean to me when they did that... especially that method actor [Hess] who was trying to be mean all of the time.

(The clarification is Szulkin's.) Sandra doesn't expand on what "mean" refers to in this context, but it seems reasonable to assume that it included some in-character comments, given what we've seen elsewhere. The term "serious scene" is also slightly odd given that pretty much all of Last House after the first few minutes is serious for Mari, but again Sandra doesn't expand.

David Hess also provides his recollections of the same scene:

I sprained my ankle going down that fire escape. [...] The scene was shot in downtown New York, not too far from the Fulton fish market. The fire escape itself was [...] really rickety and dangerous. When I think about the stuff I did, it's unbelievable! I could have been killed... but one didn't think about that.

The way Hess frames that comment, given what and who the scene involved, is very noticeable. As far as the movie itself goes, though, that would pretty much be that. What adds a new angle to it is Fred Lincoln's line on the commentary track, delivered as the car is driving away:

I thought we really pushed it because we really left 'em in the car till we got to Connecticut. But that was because we didn't have enough money to buy another car. We only had room for that many people.

On the face of it, this is an extraordinary comment by Lincoln. From the filming location, helpfully supplied by Hess, it is around twenty miles even to the Connecticut state line, let alone any of the woods locations within that state. Is he really saying that Sandra and Lucy Grantham were confined in a car trunk, bound and gagged, for an extended journey?

We don't have any specific corroboration or denials in any source that I'm aware of. As such, we need to rely on circumstantial evidence here. Let's see how it stacks up:

For the "trunk incident" happening:

• Lincoln's tone on the audio is flat and matter-of-fact – the other two men do not laugh, and neither does he.
• Last House on the Left was indeed shot on an extremely tight budget – figures vary, but AFICatalogue gives $90,000.
• Hess and Sheffler have both told eye-opening stories on the public record – Hess's rape threat, Sheffler's cliff threat.
• Sandra walked off set very early in the Connecticut shoot, even more understandable if she'd arrived this way.
• In 1971, even regular transport was routinely much more uncomfortable than today – choosing to travel in a trunk to avoid entrance fees at a drive-in or sports venue was not unheard of.
• Lincoln's "really pushed it" suggests something that wasn't routine even for a veteran like him. 

Against the "trunk incident" happening:

• Lincoln already knew Sandra from previous work together, as he points out in Celluloid Crime of the Century.
• He was able to talk her into returning after the walk-off, which suggests trust had not completely broken down.
• His income came from underground and adult movies – genres whose existence depended on flying under the radar.
• He was very much capable of telling off-colour jokes so dry that people were unsure whether they were jokes. 
• Wes Craven could be hands-off about Sandra's fear, but his own words suggest that physical danger would be over the line for him.
• No other person has, as far as I have been able to ascertain, ever said that this "trunk incident" happened. Not even Lucy Grantham.
• The scene is not shot in one unedited take: there is a cut just as the men get in which is where Sandra and Phyllis could have been let out of the trunk off-camera.
• Borrowing a car or even hiring a cab would have done the same job and been far cheaper than buying one. 

Assessing these arguments, I think the likelihood tilts strongly towards Lincoln not speaking literally about the incident.

The first key point is that about Craven. On a set as small as Last House's, the director would – or certainly should – know everything that went on, and something as irregular as this would absolutely have needed his active consent. He treated Sandra poorly – very poorly by modern standards – in terms of allowing her to remain genuinely terrified during a scene as extreme as Mari's torture and rape, but I find it hard to believe he would have allowed the genuine physical risk of her (and Lucy's) extended confinement in a car trunk in running traffic.

The other key factor is Lincoln himself. The journey was from New York to Connecticut, which meant it crossed state lines. A patrolman stopping the car and finding two young women shut in the trunk would immediately suspect kidnapping – and because the journey was interstate this would mean federal jurisdiction. Even in 1971, if you get hit with a suspected federal kidnapping charge you do not smooth it over by saying, "We're just making a movie, officer" and accepting a ticket. You are in big trouble.

As I noted, Fred Lincoln's livelihood came from a part of the film industry that operated in a grey area, cutting corners and shooting without permits as a matter of course. (Indeed, the Last House production itself lacked permits, as Wes Craven notes in Celluloid Crime of the Century.) A federal kidnapping investigation could have brought attention that was very much unwanted – it could even have meant the FBI deciding to seriously investigate the adult and grindhouse production industry. This would likely have been catastrophic for Lincoln and his associates in the same game.

As such, unless new evidence emerges that tips the balance back the other way, my judgement is that Lincoln was making a bone-dry joke. The upsides of transporting the two actresses in such an unsafe way were minor even for a scrappy production that needed to watch every penny; the downsides were potentially catastrophic not only for the film but for the entire low-budget movie ecosystem. Add to that Lincoln's connection with Sandra, which would give him an unusual personal reason to care about her, and the conclusion seems clear.

Assuming no new evidence does appear, perhaps the most important point to be made about whether the "trunk incident" happened is: what does it say about Sandra's experience on the Last House on the Left set that we need to ask the question at all?

Sandra Peabody and Sanford Meisner

As I noted in my post last week about Sandra Peabody's career beyond acting, her approach to the craft was and remains informed by the Meisner technique. This was summed up by its originator, Sanford Meisner (1905–97) as "living truthfully under imaginary circumstances". That means an emphasis on emotional authenticity and moment-to-moment connection. Meisner himself is considered one of the greatest teachers in American acting history; Sandra's acceptance by his Neighborhood Playhouse and two years of study with him were a mark of her considerable promise as a 19-year-old Carnegie Mellon drama student.

Meisner became disenchanted with the then (and later) popular Method approach to acting. While the Meisner Technique Studio that bears his name makes a point – as Meisner himself did – of not disparaging actors who find Method works for them, it also points out that the "sense memory" approach to Method acting was limiting, and that this view was in fact shared by the famed Russian acting teacher Konstantin Stanislavski (1863–1938): Sense Memory was limiting. The Studio's website notes that:

Sandy did not believe an actor needed to experience trauma in order to play a traumatized person. He also noticed harmful habits in actors who relied on their emotional scars. To that end, he developed a new approach, centered around an actor’s imagination. 

In other words, rather than drawing on real past trauma as a way of getting "inside the head" of a similar character, Meisner's technique teaches actors to develop imaginary backgrounds but to react to them in the moment as real. The psychological health benefits include the avoidance of potentially retraumatising "dredging up" of old memories from real life, and the ability to more easily "de-role" (step out of character) after a scene without lasting harm.

This combination makes Meisner's technique very useful for playing difficult emotional roles. An actor whose character is unnerved by their scene partner's character will "live authentically in the moment" and so react genuinely instead of consciously "play-acting" their responses. With cinema, where the camera's close gaze makes micro-reactions much more noticeable to viewers than they are in some other forms of acting, this makes the person's reactions believable – because, in the moment, they are real.

The Meisner teaching programme is demanding, and Meisner himself is described by emotionalpreparation.com as "a tough but passionate teacher, pushing his students to their limits but always with the intention of helping them become truthful and honest actors". Sandra would not have been able to cruise through her two years by any means.

She would have undertaken exercises like the Repetition Game (two actors repeat phrases back and forth, focusing on their partner's behavioural and emotional shifts) which "helps actors get out of their heads"; and learned the Reality of Doing: an actor who needs to cry for a scene should be feel that need naturally, without forcing or consciously pretending. Meisner's technique places the emphasis on "truth, instinct, and emotional authenticity".

For Meisner to be successful and safe, an actor requires their scene partner to be emotionally open, responsive to impulses, present and attentive and committed to listening. Since the technique requires openness and vulnerability, as well as spontaneous responses, both partners must also have complete mutual trust. This allows the emotional vulnerability that is necessary for Meisner to be safe and effective. As a professional Meisner teacher, Sandra's own assessment of her student Alicia Lagano noted her willingness "to be open and real".

Sandra has now been teaching Meisner's technique for a quarter of a century. Her earlier work as a children's television producer gave her further insights into what actors need from the outside. Children are in general naturally more open than adults, and Sandra frequently teaches young people in her acting classes. Her apprenticeship from Meisner himself, her experience as a screen actress, and the experience she later gained in production and teaching, all go together to explain her success in coaching actors like Lagano and Bret Harrison who have achieved professional acting careers.

Sandra Peabody clearly grasped Meisner's technique very, very well indeed.

The loudest two words of all

Although the whole of David A. Szulkin's Wes Craven's Last House on the Left: The Making of a Horror Classic is notably well written for a making-of publication, perhaps the most important section is chapter three: "Babes in the Woods: A Crash Course in Guerilla Film Making". This gives us a more or less chronological run through how the movie was shot. And in that chapter, on page 79, Szulkin covers the most brutal sequence in Mari's story: her knife torture and savage rape by Krug. It's in a section where we get direct quotes from four people.

First, Wes Craven, who expresses a certain old-fashioned admiration for Peabody, calling her "very pretty, and very plucky", and noting that she "hung in there" despite the very rough nature of the scene. Rather heartbreakingly now we know more, he says that Mari "took an enormous amount of abuse". Still, the most striking part of Craven's comment comes at the end, when he quotes Sandra as saying to him afterwards: "My God... I had the feeling they really hated me." This indirect quote is all we have from her about this scene apart from her own contribution. As presented by Szulkin:

Sandra Cassell: No comment.

Next comes David Hess. He talks about how the scene was difficult for him. In fact, most things here are about him, including how he likes to "go over the edge" in rehearsal and "set [his] parameters", after which he considers himself "free to do whatever [he] want[s] within [his] character". Hess does eventually mention his scene partner, noting Sandra being intimidated and frightened "a few times", that he "got pretty physical with her", and that "she couldn't back off when the camera was running". He doesn't say so, but that wasn't just professional pressure: Sandra was physically pinned beneath Hess for the scene.

Finally, assistant director Yvonne Hannemann, who is notably empathetic. She tells us that the scene was "really quite upsetting" and "really got very rough". We're also told that Sandra needed to be consoled after filming it, although the book doesn't tell us who did that consoling. Finally, she notes how frightening Hess was, rounding off her comments –and the sequence as a whole – by saying that much of the acting that went on during the scene was "sort of method acting."

Since Szulkin doesn't editorialise between the quotes, Sandra's brief contribution is extremely noticeable. Many writers would have either left her contribution out entirely or included a neutral editorial note. Here, though, it's in quotes as direct speech. Nobody else in the entire book gets "No comment" written out in words. Sandra does. 

Sandra Peabody's two words here are louder than the rest of the quote sequence put together.

Fred Lincoln and Sandra's set walk-off

We've so far met two of the three male members of Krug's gang, David Hess and Marc Sheffler. The third was Fred Lincoln. He was different from the others for two reasons. One, he had significant film acting experience, much of it in the New York adult movie scene – although Szulkin (p37) tells us that he had also worked as a stunt man on The French Connection (1971).

And two, he already knew Sandra Peabody. He notes in Celluloid Crime of the Century that "she was somebody that I knew from legitimate movies too. We had done things together". I can't find a film on which both actors worked, but not everything in that era would have been as clearly recorded as it is today. On the DVD commentary track Lincoln shares with Hess and Sheffler,¹ he says he'd known her "for eight years". Since that timescale would make Sandra a fifteen-year-old high-school student, two years before her known movie debut in Misfit (1965), Lincoln may be misremembering.

One thing he did not misremember, however, was that early in the filming process Sandra left the set temporarily. In Szulkin (p50) Lincoln explicitly ties this action to her fear:

[The film] was really a fun thing... except, for some reason, Sandra was afraid. Sometimes, she was scared to death... in fact, she left the production after one or two days, and we had to talk her into coming back!

Szulkin immediately asks Sandra herself if she was upset during the shoot. She does not touch on her walk-off, but does say:

I was upset because I'm an emotional person, and I reacted to what was going on as if it were real. [...] I ended up doing a horrible job in the film. I was very upset, and I felt like I should have channeled that, but I couldn't... I was a young actress and I was still learning to balance any emotions I had from outside of the film into my scene work.

Sandra does not expand on what those emotions "outside the film" might have been, but her self-assessment as having done "a horrible job" is not shared by the majority of Last House fans. Indeed, her performance as Mari is often considered the emotional heart of the movie.

Lincoln again notes the earliness of Sandra's walk-off in Celluloid Crime of the Century, where he says it was "the night before shooting". Meanwhile, Marc Sheffler corroborates Lincoln's story in a 2018 interview.² He says:

I recall she walked out at one point, she she left the set, she ran away and was hitchhiking back to New York. And Freddie [Lincoln] knew her so I think Sean [Cunningham] and Wes [Craven] sent Freddie to go find her.

The "hitchhiking" detail is also mentioned by Sheffler in the 2022 interview with Hollywood Wade that I mentioned in my post about David Hess's night-time knife stalking. In that interview Sheffler goes on to call Sandra a "sweet, kind, harmless girl" and say he could "see very clearly" how Hess remaining in character 24/7 would "scare the shit out of her".³

Sandra's walk-off has been on the public record for many years, at least since Szulkin published Wes Craven's Last House on the Left a quarter of a century ago. It's generally been framed as, to put it bluntly, an overwhelmed girl running away from material she couldn't deal with. I'm not so sure.

For a start, we now know that it wasn't only the on-screen events of Last House that were frightening. Sheffler tells us that David Hess was in character round the clock and severely scared Sandra. Sheffler knew that Hess scared her at the time, just as Craven knew. What he didn't know, of course, was a far more serious reason for Sandra's fear: that Hess was also the man who stalked her with a knife and threatened to rape her.

Sheffler also provides another important note: Sandra was hitchhiking "back to New York" – in other words, she didn't walk off set in the urban settings where the early parts of the movie are set, but in the Connecticut woods. That's a bigger deal. And in fact, it's an even bigger deal than it at first appears.

1970s exploitation was a small world. Most of its practitioners knew each other and word got around. Even regular society was pervaded by misogyny – at the time Last House on the Left appeared, no US state criminalised marital rape. The same was true of acting: women who asserted boundaries were often branded "difficult", replaced by other, more malleable performers, and found it hard to get future exploitation acting gigs. While the Last House production team was not sexist in this way, as a young actress Sandra Peabody would hope to be working for others in the future, not all of whom would share the relatively liberal outlook of Craven and Cunningham.

She wasn't as new to low-budget acting as is often made out, either. Sandra herself says (Szulkin, p197) that after her debut in Misfit, she "started getting roles in low-budget drive-in movies that were being shot in Florida". One of these was the mystery thriller The Horse Killer (1970), also now lost. Szulkin notes that after Last House she went on to act in a movie filmed in New York then called The Seven Deadly Sins but which then changed title to something Sandra couldn't remember; this became Massage Parlor Murders.

Put all that together and the walk-off picture becomes considerably more nuanced. While her fear doubtless played a part, Sandra was also taking a rather radical step: asserting her boundaries. This show of agency doesn't surprise us today, but for a young and still relatively inexperienced actress in exploitation, that was not a low-risk manoeuvre. She could have ended up in that "difficult" box and struggled to find work in the future. Sandra Peabody was potentially risking her career rather than endure.

Lincoln, whom she knew already, persuaded her back with lengthy ("I talked to her and talked to her") and quiet reassurance ("It’s only a movie, nobody’s going to hurt you") as he remembers telling her in Celluloid Crime of the Century. Lincoln was sadly wrong about the second part of that. But even if Sandra's walk-off was temporary, the fact that it happened at all in that era and genre is remarkable.

Sandra stood up for herself when it would have been easier to say nothing – another example of the moral courage that would serve her so well in later life. 

¹ Commentary track featuring actors David Hess, Marc Sheffler and Fred Lincoln, available on multiple DVD and Blu-ray releases of The Last House on the Left. 
² "Marc Sheffler of Wes Craven's Last House on the Left interview". withoutyourhead, 4 Apr 2018. Timestamp 28:55
³ "Marc Sheffler sits down w/ Hollywood Wade to discuss the infamous Horror film Last house on the Left", Hollywood Wade | Crime & Entertainment, 4 Sep 2022. Timestamp 35:43

Wes Craven's old-school attitude to actress fear

Wes Craven is sometimes referred to as an "old-school director". Indeed, John Carpenter of Halloween fame used that exact phrase when paying tribute to Craven after the latter had died in 2015. For the most part, people who say this are doing so as a compliment. This plays into the overwhelmingly positive reputation that Craven has these days – so much so that any serious criticism at all of him is fairly unusual. Blogger AntBit in Projected Figures did use the word "hagiography" in 2020 in their negative assessment of The Hills Have Eyes Part II, but wording that strong is definitely not the norm.

One of the things that's often mentioned about Craven is his "gentlemanly" approach to his actors. Biographies and retrospectives often contrast him with directors like Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) who could push their actors beyond reasonable limits – Marilyn Burns may later have leaned into her experience making that film, but Leatherface actor Gunnar Hansen's insider account Chain Saw Confidential makes it clear that Hooper's approach sometimes extended far beyond anything that would be considered ethical today.

But to return to Craven, let's look at his comments on a commentary track he recorded (along with producer Sean S. Cunningham) for DVDs of The Last House on the Left.¹ This is included on my Metrodrome Region 2 edition (copyrighted 2007 and released in 2008) but I believe it dates from a few years earlier than that. Commentary tracks are frequently revealing, with the informal setting often encouraging cast or crew to speak more freely than they would in a more structured interview. That is the case with Craven. Here, for example, he talks about the scene where Mari is attempting to get Junior to let her go:

I remember doing this scene over and over and over with Sandra, just pushing her and pushing her and pushing her until she got frantic enough, you know. I remember her looking at me like [she was thinking] ‘Just leave me alone, you monster.’ [laughs, pauses until end of scene] And so, like, there’s the take. Just made that moment work.

This particular memory is somewhat troubling by 2025 ethical standards, but it would probably be given a pass by audiences two decades earlier watching a movie three decades older even than that... were it not for the fact that this is the very same scene where Marc Sheffler made his threat to drop Sandra Peabody off a cliff if she did not get it right, as he admitted on Celluloid Crime of the Century.

What's perhaps more striking in its own right is when Craven acknowledges severe fear on Sandra's part. One of the most disturbing parts of Last House is the scene where Krug's gang force Phyllis and Mari to strip and perform sexual acts on each other. Szulkin (p73) calls this sequence "stark and ugly" and "especially creepy". Here's an extract from what Craven has to say about that scene on his commentary track:

David [Hess] was quite scary, especially to Sandra. [...] he wasn’t a nice guy between takes or anything like that, he kept to himself with [Sandra and Lucy Grantham]. I always told her that, you know, he’s an actor and he’ll be responsible, but [...] this all had a very real sense to her [...] Sandra was scared shitless here.

"Scared shitless" is strong language from a director who rarely swears during this commentary. There's no real acknowledgement of Sandra's fear being something requiring intervention, at least beyond Craven's assurances about Hess – which we now know were mistaken.

Finally, and surely most strikingly from the perspective of a modern listener, there's Craven's comment on the sequence where Mari's knife torture leads into her rape. He says about this:

Sandra was, I know, scared to death in this film, but it made for a scene that was absolutely convincing. Because she was genuinely frightened during all of this and as a director sometimes you just stand back and let something play out, you know, the actor’s not really in danger, but it took on a terrible reality. 

This is a startling passage to encounter now. Craven's attitude of non-intervention, of letting an actress's real fear be used to enhance a scene's realism, has far more in common with other exploitation horror directors of the 1970s than it does with the thoughtful and sympathetic elder statesman of horror that he later became. Craven also uses the old-fashioned definition of "danger" as meaning only physical danger. That would not be tolerated on a film set today, not now we know so much more about the importance of psychological and emotional health.

But back in those Connecticut woods in autumn 1971, and even thirty years later when talking about those times, Wes Craven's attitude to a very scared young actress's fear was not quite what many of Craven's modern biographers, assessors – and yes, hagiographers – tend to make it out to be.

¹ Commentary track featuring director Wes Craven and producer Sean S. Cunningham, available on multiple DVD and Blu-ray releases of The Last House on the Left.