A knife by day: the terror of Sandra's torture scene

In The Last House on the Left, although Krug uses a gun to murder Mari, the weapons of choice are blades, specifically switchblades and Krug's machete. Knives also play a major part in Sandra Peabody's experience on set. The most notable incident Sandra recounts in Szulkin (p50) about David Hess in this respect is that of his off-hours stalking:

"He'd come after us with a knife at night, trying to freak us out."

My assumption is that the other person in "us" is Lucy Grantham, but this is never stated explicitly. Sandra does state that Hess was "trying to live his part" by doing this, mentioning that he stayed in character throughout off set as well as on it, something Marc Sheffler corroborates in his 2022 Hollywood Wade interview.¹

In the fictional story in the film, when Mari and Junior make a break for it but are intercepted by Krug, he stops them by brandishing his machete. After graphically demonstrating to Mari that Phyllis is dead, Krug then commits one of the most brutal of his many crimes: carving his name into her chest with Weasel's switchblade.

In Szulkin (p79), Hess explains how he produced the effect of the bloody letters: he says he simply dipped the end of the knife in stage blood and drew the name on her skin:

"You saw it being drawn, and then there's a cut back to my face. Then it went back to her and it looked like the letters were cut in. It was just two separate shots, before and after."

It isn't clear exactly which version of the film Hess is referring to here, but it does not conform very well to what we see in the "uncut" Blu-ray edition distributed on the 2018 Arrow release. That runs as follows:

1. Close-up of Sadie and Weasel, with a grinning Krug rising into view before dropping out of shot again.
2. Krug cutting a screaming, blood-covered Mari. There is so much blood that the letters are barely recognisable.
3. Another close-up of the three main villains, with Weasel remarking admiringly on Krug's workmanship.

That's all: there is in fact only one shot of Mari during this sequence. The scene immediately following is the close-up of Mari's pants being ripped off prior to her rape; her chest is not visible, and indeed at no time in the remainder of the film are the letters shown clearly enough to be legible.

It's not clear whether Hess is simply misremembering the sequence of events in the film, or whether he is discussing a different cut – or indeed what may have been actually filmed but later partially discarded. It may also be a result of the film's lengthy history of censorship. I have not been able to solve this particular riddle.

In Last House, there are multiple other sequences involving knives in a violent context. Mari's hand is cut when Phyllis doesn't obey quickly enough. After the bound and gagged girls have been forced through the woods, a knife is held to Phyllis's neck. And in a cut part of the sexual humiliation scene, Weasel gently runs his switchblade across Phyllis's back, presumably as a "reminder".

Another thing I do not know is how the knives were prepared. In early 1970s low-budget film-making, knives were often genuine, their cutting edges simply dulled or taped for what then passed as acceptable set safety. Professional armourers were very rarely employed on exploitation productions. In Phyllis's death scene, Lucy Grantham wore blood bags taped to her back under her shirt, which were genuinely pierced by Fred Lincoln's knife. As Grantham put it in It's Only a Movie:

"When he comes up behind me, he has to puncture that bag so that the blood runs, and there had to be a lot of trust, and there was, because I really felt that he did know what he was doing." ³

Grantham enjoyed shooting the scene, calling the experience "great", but the margin for error was clearly small with a functional knife used that way. (That said, the use of a live, powered chainsaw, as confirmed by both Hess and Wes Craven, was even more dangerous, all the more so as Hess was in socks on a wooden floor.³)

A notorious example of the risks of the "taped knife" approach is 1974's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: Gunnar Hansen, exasperated with repeated failures of the fake blood tube, surreptitiously removed the tape from the blade and cut Marilyn Burns' finger for real: a genuine assault preserved in the final cut of the film, made worse by Hansen pretending for years the injury had been an accident.

Returning to Mari's knife torture, Craven was clear in his DVD commentary track that Sandra was "genuinely frightened during all of this", though defending his decision not to intervene in her distress on the grounds that it made the scene "absolutely convincing".

What Craven does not address is the fact that the woman in fear was having to lie on the ground with a knife – of whatever standard of preparation – literally being drawn across her exposed skin by Hess: the same man who had been "freaking her out" at night by stalking her with that same type of weapon. Is it any wonder that she was frightened shooting the scene?

As so often during the making of The Last House on the Left, Sandra's well-being seems to have been considered subservient to the rawness and authenticity of the final footage. She showed courage to complete filming the sequence – we do not know how many takes it took – but this is yet another occasion on which we must conclude by saying: Sandra Peabody deserved better.

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 
² 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.
³ Szulkin, David (dir.) It's Only a Movie: The Making of Last House on the Left (2002), available on multiple DVD and Blu-ray releases of The Last House on the Left. 

"To this day they will not speak to us" – Jeramie Rain on Sandra and Lucy

On 6 October 2022, the interestingly named Still Toking Productions channel on YouTube streamed a video call with Marc Sheffler and Jeramie Rain, two of the villain actors from The Last House on the Left. It was titled Still Toking with Marc Sheffler & Jeramie Rain-Dreyfuss, using the latter's name from when she was married to fellow actor Richard Dreyfuss between 1983 and 1995. Three members of the podcast team interviewed the two actors in a Zoom-like format.

The interview was re-uploaded in audio-only on 5 March 2025, minus a short introductory section. In this post, I will be using the original 2022 version for timestamps, but take off around three minutes if you're using the 2025 re-upload. It's not well known, with both uploads combined having under 400 views at the time of writing.

A lot of the video is the usual general stuff you get on such occasions, but unsurprisingly I'm concentrating here on anything that seems to touch on Sandra Peabody's experience on set. The first is a segment beginning at 38:09. First we get Rain:

"It wasn't scary! Nothing was scary about it!"

Then Sheffler interjects:

"Nah, not for us."

It's impossible to tell whether or not Sheffler is intending to contrast the villains' experience with that of any of their colleagues. After Rain reassures everyone that "it was all fake!" – meaning the stage violence, but not sitting well with Sandra's set walk-off – there comes a part where Sheffler says:

"The four of us [baddies] had a tremendous fun time with each other. It remains one of my most loving experiences in show business, making this movie."

This is conventional retrospective comment and nothing new. But immediately after this, at 38:34, we get a startling comment from Rain:

"Do you know, the girls [whose characters] we killed, they don't like us, and wanted nothing to do with us. I had to hang with the bad—the baddies hung together, and the victims, they wanted—they clung to Wes [Craven] and Sean Cunningham. They wanted nothing to do with us; they hated us."

Rain laughs as she says this, but her recollection of what might now be considered a distinctly unhealthy set environment ties in disturbingly well with her own recollection 20 years earlier in Celluloid Crime of the Century. Just after Fred Lincoln has informed us that Sandra was afraid of himself, David Hess and Rain throughout shooting, we move to a clip with Rain saying of Sandra and Lucy:

"I'm sure they had a very, very bad time with it. And I didn't hang out with the girls. I never really got to know them. They probably hated me. [laughs]"

Rain's Still Toking line also fits with Yvonne Hannemann's comment in Szulkin (p51) that:

"The girls sort of huddled together [and] were always afraid, and would be cowering even during lunch!"

Most of the evidence we've seen about fear in this blog is centred on Sandra, but Rain's comment in the 2022 interview suggests that even the generally more confident Lucy Grantham may have been uncomfortable with the way the villain actors were behaving towards her and Sandra.

Rain then tells us something remarkable, yet that I've never seen so plainly stated before, about the victim actresses' relationship with the villain actors:

"To this day. To this day they will not speak to us." 

This revelation that Sandra and Lucy remain (at least in 2022) unwilling to speak to their screen tormentors even half a century on from production is truly extraordinary, and it it is a moment when Rain's usually easy laughter dies away and she comes across as completely sincere. However, Sheffler immediately moves in and makes a joke of it, saying:

"They treated us like the trash we were."

This brings back Rain's laugh, and she responds that:

"And we played the trash that we were!"

That brings the segment to an end, and the discussion moves to conventional matters like the film's inclusion in an exhibition at MoMA. As is the frustratingly invariable pattern with Last House cast interviews, there is no attempt by the hosts to follow up on Rain's startling comment that Sandra and Lucy have not been willing to make up with the villain actors even fifty years after filming wrapped.

This, it should be noted, is not merely a case of Sandra always refusing to speak to any colleagues after the end of a film she had starred in. After her final on-screen role, as Bird in Teenage Hitchhikers, she kept in touch with director Gerri Sedley by mail. This is specifically a Last House thing.

There is one other short segment of the interview worth mentioning.  At 42:00, just after Sheffler has made a light-hearted comment about he and David Hess having "terrorised people" while sharing a place after Last House ended, Rain offers this. The audio is intermittent, but lip-reading makes it obvious that she says:

"And the nicest guy in the world is David Hess—was David Hess."

This line is astonishing to anyone who has encountered this same David Hess – among other things – openly stating on the DVD commentary track that he threatened to rape Sandra, repeating the claim to Vanity Fair, recollecting her emotional collapse as a sexual opportunity, and (via Marc Sheffler's 2017 interview) being "brutal with her" while filming Mari's rape scene.

I have no evidence that Jeramie Rain knew about any of these comments from Hess when she gave the Still Toking interview. But whatever a man who does all that to one young woman might be, it's very hard to call him "the nicest guy in the world".

Sandra invisible – Marc Sheffler's Cine-Excess article

Cine-Excess is a long-running UK-based website for, as it advertises itself on its About page:

"an annual international film festival and conference, which is [sic] attracts global filmmakers, scholars, distributors and exhibitors to an event which features filmmaker discussions, a themed three day conference and exclusive screenings"

Cine-Excess was founded in 2007 and is still online, although its on-site search tool was broken when I tried it. While the site covers a wide range of subjects, I am here interested in a pair of long-form articles about The Last House on the Left, published in Issue One of its eJournal in August 2013. This issue was called Subverting the Senses: The Politics and Aesthetics of Excess.

First, we have Claire Henry's The Last House on the Left: The Redemption of the Remake, which across more than 6,000 words suggests that the 2009 remake of Last House operates fundamentally differently to the 1972 original, for example in that it prioritises "spectacle horror" over Wes Craven's original subversive, "raw and unflinching" condemnation of violence, and thereby in certain ways celebrates violence instead of standing against it.

This post is not intended as a full analysis of Henry's piece. I will however note that she makes a common error of chronology regarding the 1972 film:

"The Stillo gang [...] kidnap the girls, and then, when their car breaks down by the woods near Mari’s home, they continue to intimidate, humiliate, and rape Phyllis and Mari, and finally murder them."

This is not quite right: Phyllis is raped in the New York apartment, before the girls are bundled into the Cadillac trunk and driven away. Although that attack is largely off-screen and conveyed through Mari's horrified reaction, it means that the sexual violence of Last House begins before the actual kidnap, not in the woods. Henry's article therefore slightly misrepresents the build-up of violence that climaxes in Mari's killing.

Still, my focus here is on Marc Sheffler's follow-up, itself not far short of 5,000 words in length: The Last House(s) On The Left: A Response To Claire Henry’s Article. He praises Henry's article for being "brilliantly written", but then he says that Henry:

"makes her points precisely and logically, and articulates them deftly, but with the luxury of intellectual hindsight."

He unsurprisingly draws on his first-hand experience making the film. He notes that the production was "shot in a guerilla film making, semi-documentary style by semi-amateur film makers", and follows up by saying:

"Nobody told us what we couldn’t do, so we did what we wanted."

Sheffler does not mention in this piece that, according to his own repeated accounts, what he did on that set included threatening to throw Sandra Peabody over a cliff in order to produce realistic fear from her for the camera.

Many people are named in the article. Although these include the likes of Ruggerio Deodato and David DeFalco, I will concentrate only on seven core personnel of Last House: director, producer, the three villain actors (not including Sheffler, the article's author) and the two victim actresses. Looking at how often each is mentioned, including image captions but not the page footer, brings striking results. In the format name / character: person mentions / character mentions we find this:

Wes Craven: 16 / N/A
Sean Cunningham: 4 / N/A
David Hess / Krug¹: 42 / 16
Fred Lincoln / Weasel: 4 / 1
Jeramie Rain / Sadie: 2 / 0
Lucy Grantham / Phyllis: 0 / 1
Sandra Peabody² / Mari¹: 0 / 5
¹ Excluding mentions of the 2009 remake's character
² Including any mentions of "Sandra Cassel" or "Sandra Cassell"

The very large number of mentions of Hess is clearly connected with Sheffler's memories of and grief for his long-time friend and flatmate David Hess, who at the time the article was published had been dead for less than two years. Mourning someone who has been close to you for decades is not something anyone can reasonably criticise a person for, and I do not. My concern is different.

Look at the gender splits in the table above. Fred Lincoln on his own gets four mentions. All three core female personnel get two between them – and the victim actresses get none. Most noticeably of all, Mari is mentioned five times, but the woman who played her is not mentioned once. Not by first name, not by her real or stage surnames, not at all. Sandra as a person is entirely missing from the narrative.

This becomes even more striking given the "Horrific Scenes Go Hollywood" subsection, which opens with a detailed look at Mari's rape scene. We are shown a still from that scene – albeit with Sandra's eyes closed, which as I've noted before is significant. That image is captioned:

"Celluloid controversies: Last House on the Left and the notorious scene of violation"

Neither of the actors shown in close-up in one of the movie's most important scenes is credited. It's true that Hess is not named either, but by this point we have already been introduced to the fact of what Sheffler is discussing:

"For instance, the Mari rape scene (circa 1971) has often been described as one of the most brutal, unrelenting, debasing ever-captured [sic] on film."

Quite why Sheffler says "circa" when he surely knows that his own movie was shot in autumn 1971 is a conundrum, albeit a minor one. After the image, he continues by noting:

"Because the camera held on Mari’s face for what seemed like unending moments of anguish, only cutting away to tighter shots of Krug’s (portrayed brilliantly by David Hess’) face pressing down on Mari’s cheek"

And now the differentiation becomes unavoidable. Mention of Krug is followed immediately by parenthetical praise of his performance, as well as a visceral description (which directly follows the extract I have quoted) of what Krug does to Mari in that scene. Mention of his screen victim is covered entirely in terms of the character: neither there nor anywhere else in the article is there any praise of, or even acknowledgement for, Sandra and what she endured filming that scene.

This has not always been Sheffler's way. Back in 2002, he had participated without noticeable discomfort in the commentary track section wherein Hess had openly spoken of threatening Sandra with rape on set. And in the "Junior's Story" interview in 2017, Sheffler took a more empathetic line, acknowledging that "David was... brutal with her" during the rape scene and saying "I don't blame her" when describing Sandra being "scared shitless".

The presence of these other examples, before and after the Cine-Excess piece, argue against Sheffler's failure to name Sandra in 2013 being simply a case of consideration for a woman who by then had long ceased to engage with Last House at all, her only interview (for Szulkin) being by then well over a decade in the past. In any case, Sheffler chose to include a still from the rape scene, something which puts Sandra's face in the article for the only time.

That David Hess is mentioned so often in Marc Sheffler's article is unsurprising given the identity of its author. That Sandra Peabody, a woman even Sheffler was later to acknowledge was treated "brutal[ly]" by Hess when he "just went at her" and who had by 2013 been the target of repeated abusive public statements by him, is not mentioned at all is quite another matter.

Sandra Peabody has always deserved better – and part of that is actually giving her her due as an actress and human being, not merely as a violated character. Even if we accept that it was not Sheffler's intention to erase her, by 2013 he was an experienced writer. Given the focus on Mari's rape scene, this does raise a legitimate question about how Sandra is represented and acknowledged in the Cine-Excess piece. 

"That man was a monster" – Reddit's r/horror reacts to David Hess's threat stories

I said a few weeks ago that I would cease the daily updates and now only post here when I had something to say. Now is that time. The other day, I decided to post about the abuse relating to Last House on the Left in a place with a rather larger potential audience than Quora or this blog: Reddit. Specifically, the r/horror subreddit. I wasn't sure what angle to take, since I could hardly mention everything I have here. So I thought for a while, and then I made my decision.

I decided to make a fairly short, straightforward post which simply stated facts rather than opinions:

Last House on the Left (1972) - the actors' Blu-ray commentary track is pretty disturbing 

In the body text of my post, to keep things simple I chose to simpy give four timestamped quotes from the Arrow Blu-ray's commentary track:

• David Hess's "I had so much fun with Sandra" quote and Fred Lincoln's follow-up about Sandra's walk-off
• Lincoln's "I thought we really pushed it" quote about the car trunk
• Marc Sheffler's harsh telling of the cliff threat anecdote
• Hess's story about threatening to rape Sandra and her reaction to that

I also included, in the single image spot that r/horror allows:

• A scan of the Vanity Fair rape threat, with the VF archive URL visible on screen.

I don't know what I really expected. Probably one of three things: the post being removed because I'd accidentally broken a small rule and the mod wasn't in a generous mood that day, a bunch of downvotes from people of the "It was the Seventies, things were different" persuasion, or – most likely – a couple of upvotes and comments before the post sank beneath the waves again.

What actually happened was something that startled me. 300,000 views. Over 900 upvotes. Over 400 shares. And, the one that really got me, a 96.9% upvote ratio. Given that nowhere on Reddit is free from people downvoting prominent posts on large subs for reasons big or small, that counts as something pretty close to unanimity. For practical purposes, people who saw this post either upvoted it, or perhaps didn't vote at all out of discomfort at "liking" a story of abuse.

There's been a near-total absence of the Hess threat story in more than general terms until now – bar my previous post here and servomoore's obscure YouTube upload. Given the fact that most people now watch films via streaming, and given the fact that even most physical media owners don't sit through all the commentaries, the odds are that most of those people had never seen Hess's threat before, at least as more than a vague allusion or word-of-mouth rumour.

The comments below the post bore out that percentage. They were frequently detailed, thoughtful and compassionate, and even those that were much briefer left little doubt as to where their authors stood. One that really struck me was this comment in the middle of a thread, by a user named H4Z4RD0U5. They had met Hess at a convention in 2010 and, having heard the rumours and presumed they were a marketing tactic, asked him about the rape scene. Hess left out the detail of the actual rape threat, but restated the rest of the story.

H4Z4RD0U5 had gone on to work in the film industry, but said their encounter with the man was still "seared into [their] mind" to the extent that when it popped up in their head they used it as a prompt to go and check that the women on set were okay. H4Z4RD0U5 did not hold back in their assessment of David Hess:

"That man was a monster. A sexual abuser who used his casting as a way to play out his sick fantasies."

While that is probably the strongest direct verdict from a commenter, there was near-universal agreement that what Hess did was abuse. There was a little less attention given to the other quotes I listed, but when they did come up they were certainly not given a pass. It was just that the Hess rape threat was so appalling that it dominated the discussion. After all, he did say twice that he'd done it: once on the commentary, once in Vanity Fair.

I was as energetic and engaged as I could manage in the comments, trying to give everyone who made a point that couldn't simply be acknowledged with an upvote a reply. I was very glad when a user named ReticulanGrey made a comment expressing hope that Sandra had found peace. Obviously I couldn't speak for her, but I could write about her very successful, Emmy-winning career after acting.

Another theme to come out of the comments was disappointment at Wes Craven. For example, here's a comment by user IL-Corvo:

"This is disgusting, and lowers my opinion of the late Wes Craven in the process. As for Hess? He can kick rocks."

There was little or no pushback when I pointed out that Craven either knew what had happened with the Sheffler cliff threat signal, or he was incompetent (and, by implication, the set wasn't safe). User salikawood put it this way:

"The way I see it, at worst, Craven enabled the abuse for his own gain. At best, he was ignorant that his set was an unsafe environment for these girls. And the best case scenario still reflects very poorly on Craven because it was his production and his responsibility. "

Now, how much will my post actually move the dial? In truth, probably not all that much... at least for now. I haven't seen it linked to anywhere but on killshot.rip, which is a very niche website, and I certainly haven't seen anyone else posting about it. They might do, but I haven't seen it yet. It probably will get picked up in the next round of AI training runs, which should at least help a little with those things' responses. Like it or not, they're around and people use them, so their training data might as well be accurate.

Still, I'm glad I took the plunge and posted about Sandra Peabody's abuse to Reddit, and that I decided to post to the largest horror sub instead of somewhere quieter. There's a long, long way to go and so many questions still unanswered. Sandra Peabody still deserves better. But as I I said to someone: if you're in a dark field and you light a single candle, then the field is still dark. But the light is nevertheless visible. I hope I can light more.

Summing up for now

Over the past sixty-odd posts, I have explored what happened to Sandra Peabody while she was filming her part as Mari in The Last House on the Left. The movie was made in autumn 1971 and released in 1972, but over half a century on there is still startlingly little where evidence and thoughts about Sandra's experience and the abuse she was subjected to are brought together in one place.

Today is Sandra's 78th birthday. At this point, I am drawing my regular updates on "Not Only a Movie" to a close. I will continue to maintain the blog, and to read and where appropriate respond to comments. I will post again if and when there is a reason to do so, but I feel there is little point or respect to Sandra in posting just for the sake of posting. She deserves better than that.

Sandra, over all these posts, I have learned that not only were you subjected to an ordeal which nobody should ever have to experience, but that you responded to it with extraordinary courage and the determination to support and protect other vulnerable people. For half a century you have done exactly that, and I promise never to forget your humanity and dignity. Happy Birthday. 

Questions that need answers

Among the saddest aspects of the abuse of Sandra Peabody in connection with her Last House on the Left work has been the lack of real accountability. As far as I can tell, nobody has ever said sorry in public. Marc Sheffler has at least gone as far as saying he "didn't blame [Sandra]" for being terrified at David Hess's "brutal" approach to Mari's rape scene, but that is not the same thing.

Part of the problem has been the failure to ask questions by interviewers and other media, and the lack of significant pressure from Last House fans for real answers. Here are a few questions I would like to see asked to those still alive and active.

To Marc Sheffler:

1. You have often told the story of holding Sandra Peabody over a cliff and threatening to drop her, in order to heighten her fear for the camera. Are you sorry that you frightened her in this way?
2. You were in the commentary booth with David Hess when he openly recounted threatening Sandra with sexual violence on set. Why didn't you push back or tell him he was wrong?
3. On the same track, Fred Lincoln says, "I thought we really pushed it because we really left 'em in the car till we got to Connecticut". In context, this clearly refers to leaving Sandra and Lucy Grantham in the Cadillac trunk. Did anything like this happen? If so, how and why? If not, was it appropriate for Lincoln to joke about it?
4. In David Szulkin's book, Sandra says of Hess, "He'd come after us with a knife at night, trying to freak us out." Were you aware of this? Do you think it was an appropriate way for an actor to behave, "in character" or not?

To Sean Cunningham:

1. As producer of Last House on the Left, to what extent did you support or at least tolerate Wes Craven's mining of Sandra being "scared to death" in pursuit of a "convincing" result on screen?
2. Were you aware of what David Hess and Marc Sheffler were doing to Sandra to provoke her fear? If so, why did you not intervene? If not, why not?
3. Why did neither you nor Craven publicly speak up to defend Sandra when Hess openly mentioned threatening to rape her on the commentary track and again in Vanity Fair?

To horror writers and reviewers:

1. When you write about Last House on the Left from now on, will you commit to mentioning the abusive conditions Sandra Peabody endured in any piece of significant length about the film? 
2. Have you allowed the later "Master of Horror" Wes Craven to obscure the fact that he operated differently in the early 1970s to in the Scream era of a quarter of a century later?
3. Will you commit to treating David Hess not as a "cool bad guy" or horror icon, but as a man who openly and without remorse spoke of making a young colleague deeply afraid for her personal safety?

To distributors and media stores:

1. Will you acknowledge that what is said on the Hess/Sheffler/Lincoln commentary track is in a different league from somewhat problematic remarks in other older media, and so requires proper, track-specific context?
2. It is around two decades since the first DVDs appeared with special features such as Celluloid Crime of the Century, which features both Marc Sheffler's cliff threat and David Hess's "Can I?" anecdote. Is the single word "archival" good enough in 2026?
3. Streaming platforms, is it any longer acceptable to present this particular film shorn of ethical context, thus making it less likely that those who choose to watch it will understand exactly what they are seeing?

To film schools and academic writers:

1. Do you have a responsibility, when teaching or writing about the rape-revenge genre and Last House's influence on it, to recognise and clearly acknowledge that Mari's rape scene in this film was shot in a way that would be unacceptable today?
2. Have you given sufficient attention to the ethics of the treatment of young actresses as people – Lucy Grantham as well as Sandra – and not merely in terms of the representation of their fictional characters?
3. To what extent should Wes Craven's legacy and reputation be reconsidered in the light of what happened to a young actress on a set he controlled?

To convention organisers and event staff:

1. Why did even major conventions continue to invite David Hess to guest at their events, even after he had admitted in a mainstream magazine to threatening his co-star with rape?
2. When you run Last House panels or show the film at your events, will you commit to providing significant space for serious discussion of Sandra's mistreatment in the movie's creation?
3. Do you think that serious ethical questions about guests' behaviour should be allowed in Q&A sessions, even if they are uncomfortable or affect the celebratory tone? If so, how should the guidelines change? If not, why not?

To ordinary horror fans:

1. Does knowing about the real-life abuse suffered by Sandra Peabody change how you feel about Last House on the Left or Wes Craven? Why/why not?
2. Do you think that those who control media about films like this – distributors, streamers, writers, etc – have a responsibility to proactively provide context when there is clear evidence of behind-the-scenes abuse?
3. Do you think the horror community as a whole should do more to ensure that people are better informed about ethical failures such as this? If so, how can this best be achieved?

To Sandra Peabody:

No questions. 

You do not owe us a single word. We owe you a great deal: an end to minimising and trivialising what you survived, respect for the remarkable courage and humanity you showed, and recognition of the decades you have spent building safer, more supportive spaces simply because it was the right thing to do. We owe you freedom from unwanted intrusion and questions about Last House on the Left, and recognition of your "No comment" as a sacred boundary.

Most of all, Sandra Peabody, we owe you peace.

How can we watch The Last House on the Left ethically today?

We have established that Sandra Peabody was abused in connection with her work on The Last House on the Left. We also now know from Marc Sheffler himself that the fear on Sandra's face in the scene after the cliff threat was real and deliberately caused. Sheffler also tells us that "a lot of what you see from her is real" because Sandra was "scared shitless" by David Hess's approach to Mari's rape scene. Hess himself tells us that he threatened to rape her for real.

At this point it becomes unsustainable to reasonably lump what happened on the Last House shoot in with the stories of "rough shoots" or "gruelling productions" that are fairly common when discussing 1970s cinema – especially independent grindhouse films shot guerilla-style on small budgets. The ethical issues thrown up by this film are in a qualitatively different category, even before you add in Wes Craven's own mining of Sandra's real fear for realism.

This does not mean that Last House on the Left should be banned. My own view is firmly that this would be wrong, and indeed counter-productive. It doesn't even mean that people shouldn't watch it as a film. We can still watch The Birds as a horror landmark even though we know that Alfred Hitchcock abused Tippi Hedren.¹ We can still enjoy The Wizard of Oz as a family classic even though we know that MGM abused Judy Garland.²

But the word "know" is important. Although it has taken many decades from the time of the abuse, it is now well understood and accepted that these women were abused, and this fact is routinely mentioned in any serious study of the films in question. With Last House that is not the case. Indeed, as my look at legacy media and academic writing has shown, it remains rare that Sandra's treatment, as opposed to Mari's, is mentioned at all.

There is worse. While those who watch the film on streaming services will probably and quite reasonably assume that it was made, if not to modern standards, then at least without actual harm, that cannot be said about those who know what is on the current Blu-ray release. Arrow Films made the choice to include Celluloid Crime of the Century, "Scoring Last House", "Junior's Story" and the actors' commentary track.

We therefore have considerable evidence for Sandra's mistreatment available for the price of a disc. When you add in David Szulkin's book – not that hard to find second-hand – there is really no excuse for serious studies or writing about Last House on the Left not to include at least something about what happened behind the scenes. Listicle-style euphemisms like "Peabody found it difficult" are so inadequate as to border on the offensive in themselves.

The film is indeed influential on its genre and for effectively launching Craven's highly significant career as a horror director. It is perfectly reasonable for film schools to study it as such. But it is not reasonable for them to simply skate over or omit entirely the reasons why the film looks as it does, since at times when Sandra is on screen, Mari's disturbingly realistic appearance is intimately connected with her actress's treatment.

So no, we don't need to stop watching Last House on the Left. We do, however, need to watch it honestly, understanding what happened in its making and the serious harm that was caused to a young and vulnerable woman by real-life threats and fear. If we cannot even give Sandra that, then all our protestations about respecting women in film are only so much hot air. We must do better. Sandra Peabody deserves better.

¹ Lang, Brent, "Tippi Hedren on Why She Went Public About Being Sexually Abused by Alfred Hitchcock". Variety (16 November 2016).
² Jha, Subhash K., "Judy Garland, the first abused child superstar". National Herald (28 June 2020).