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. 

"A knife at night" – David Hess's off-the-clock threatening behaviour

It's time now to return to the David Szulkin book I mentioned a few posts ago. If you recall, I titled that post "Sandra in her own words", and it cannot be overstated how important that is. Szulkin is the only place that Sandra Peabody has ever gone on the record with her recollections of The Last House on the Left. However, since the book has been out of print for twenty years, some of its details are barely if at all mentioned today.

One incident that is barely mentioned nowadays, despite being included in the film's Wikipedia page at the time of writing, is this one. As far as I am aware has not been included in any making-of documentary or interview. It appears on p50 of my second UK edition. I'll let Sandra herself take up the story:

One of the characters was a method actor, so he was trying to live his part... He'd come after us with a knife at night, trying to freak us out. This was the guy with the dark curly hair [David Hess] - he tried to play his role on and off the set. It was like, 'Lock your doors and windows at night, you don't want him to come get you!' I was scared: I thought this guy had really been a killer at some time in his past!

There's quite a bit to consider here, so let's proceed carefully.

First, we have confirmation from Sandra's own mouth that Hess remained in character even when off the clock – as she puts it, "on and off the set". She refers to him as a "method actor", a technique common in the 1970s – although Marc Sheffler states in a 2022 YouTube interview that Hess "knew nothing about acting, he was doing what he thought people should do, so he was in character 24/7 the entire shoot."¹

Second, Sandra uses the word "us". She doesn't specify who was targeted other than her, but the likely candidate is her fellow victim-actress, Lucy Grantham (Phyllis). Assistant director Yvonne Hannemann, who we will meet again as a perceptive and compassionate witness to events, notes in Szulkin (p51) that "[t]he girls were always afraid, and they would be cowering even during lunch!"

Third, Hess is coming after the actresses "with a knife at night", trying to "freak [them] out". Last House on the Left was an exceptionally demanding film for the two young women playing the teenage victims of the movie's scenes of extreme and often sexualised violence. Their on-screen attacker never properly switching off meant that they couldn't properly switch off, either. "He'd come after us" suggests Hess's night-time stalking wasn't a one-off.

Fourth, Sandra's comment about locking doors and windows could be read as a joke. But then we get "I was scared: I thought this guy had really been a killer at some time in his past!" We already know, from Wes Craven's comments in Celluloid Crime of the Century, that Sandra "really was afraid of" Hess. Even if the "killer" part of that sentence was intended humorously, it doesn't have to mean that the part about her being scared of "this guy" was.

Looking at what Szulkin's careful record tells us in retrospect, the picture becomes a great deal darker. We now know that the man with the knife was the same man who at some point before Mari's rape scene threatened Sandra Peabody with rape herself if she didn't "behave". In this anecdote, printed before that Vanity Fair piece, David Hess is depicted as a man pretending to be dangerous. In reality, to Sandra at least, he was dangerous.

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

The cliff threat – Celluloid Crime of the Century

After having been denied a certificate for home media distribution in the UK for many years, The Last House on the Left was granted an 18 certificate (albeit with some cuts) by the BBFC in 2002. This was at the heart of the DVD era, and unsurprisingly Region 2 discs and collector's edition box sets appeared quickly. As part of the UK release, Blue Underground made a forty-minute documentary about the making of Last House which has become one of the most commonly included extras on the movie's physical media. This was Celluloid Crime of the Century.

The documentary includes contributions from nearly all the major cast and crew who worked on the film, from Wes Craven to Fred Lincoln. There are two notable absentees. One is Lucy Grantham, although she does appear on a Region 1 documentary called It's Only a Movie. The other is, unsurprisingly, Sandra Peabody. (She is sometimes credited in listings, but that's due to the inclusion of some footage featuring her from the film.) Some people talk about her, but she herself doesn't appear.

Celluloid Crime of the Century, a reference to one of Last House's rejected titles, Sex Crime of the Century, contains plenty of standard making-of anecdotes, such as Jeramie Rain lamenting the "scummy and dirty" state of a pool she was required to fall into after her character was attacked. It contains comments that would have passed unnoticed in the 1970s and to an extent still in 2002, but raise far more eyebrows today, such as Craven's comment that Sandra "very often wasn't acting" her fear and "really was afraid of" Hess.

But one thing that went well beyond these is a segment from Marc Sheffler, who played Junior in the film. Recalling the scene where Mari is trying to persuade Junior to let her go, the two of them sitting on a ledge above water, Sheffler says that he was getting "really upset" because they'd needed multiple takes and he "was hitting it all the time and, you know, [Sandra] wasn't getting it." He then continues:

So, I recall turning to Wes [Craven] and saying, "Uh, uh, shut... give me two minutes with her." And, uh, what happened was I grabbed her and I put her head over the cliff and I said, "If you don't get it right the next time, I'm going to throw you over here and like Wes will shoot it and it'll be great footage and you'll get hurt and you know, they'll take— call an ambulance and that'll be that. But you really need to do this cuz I will throw you over." And she got it on the next take.

That's the end of the story, after which Sheffler ends the segment with a smile and a little chuckle. "She got it on the next take" tells us that the scene we see in the movie – where Mari certainly looks frantic and anxious – was filmed almost immediately after Sandra Peabody had been threatened with being dropped off a cliff. And the way Sheffler tells the story ("give me two minutes with her") tells us that the threat was made away from Craven.

Several things now need to be mentioned. First: there is no suggestion of malicious intent and no reason to doubt Sheffler's statement that he did this out of frustration. Second, and something that differentiates him very clearly from Hess: this was a single incident, not part of a campaign of intimidation. Sheffler doesn't always speak of Sandra kindly (on a DVD commentary track he calls her "a pain in the ass")¹ but that's not the same thing.

Third: Marc Sheffler has told the story in his own words multiple times, whether in a documentary as here, on a commentary track, or in interviews available online. The details do vary somewhat, which is a subject we shall return to, but the broad strokes are consistent: he felt Sandra was not getting the scene right, he threatened her with being dropped over a cliff of some kind, then on the next take she hit her marks and he framed that as successful problem-solving.

This is where the problem comes in. While, again, there was no malice involved, there didn't need to be for this to be deeply problematic. As an analogy: if I produce a gun and threaten to shoot you in the leg unless you obey me, and only later reveal it was a dummy and I'd never have hurt you, that's still wrong. A threat which is received as at least potentially credible by Sandra, which it must have been or it would have had no effect, is in itself unethical.

This is a different kind of incident from those we have looked at concerning David Hess. Most notably, it is not sexualised or predatory abuse. It is also situational: the threat was confined to a single moment. Nevertheless, it was a significant one – mention of an ambulance in Sheffler's wording shows us that the effect on Sandra was not intended to be trivial. That alone adds to the picture of a set which for her was a frightening and unsafe place to be.

Celluloid Crime of the Century is available on many DVD and Blu-ray editions of Last House on the Left. It is also accessible on YouTube. I have chosen not to embed it in this post, but at the time of writing it can be viewed here.

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.

"So much compassion for everything in the world" – Sandra beyond Last House

Although this blog is intended primarily to bring together the evidence to show that Sandra Peabody was severely abused during the production of The Last House on the Left, I very much also want to show a side of Sandra that is often overlooked: what she did after leaving acting. Her final on-screen role was as Bird in Teenage Hitchhikers, which hit drive-ins in 1974. I haven't seen it, but I've always been glad that her farewell to exploitation (and indeed to film acting) was in a silly comedy where she wasn't being brutalised on-screen or off.

After that, she made a move into the production side of things, with a number of television shows to her name. Perhaps most notably, she was executive producer (and a lot more besides) on the Oregon-based children's show Popcorn, which ran from 1985 to 1992 and won Peabody an Emmy, among other awards. I'll be devoting an entire post to that one at some point, as it is a remarkable story and one full of Sandra's deeply admirable devotion of her professional life to creating exactly the safe, supportive spaces she had been denied as a young actor.

For the last quarter-century, Sandra has worked as a talent agent and acting coach, showing a strong interest in working with young people. She has drawn on the Meisner technique (behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances) she learned in her youth from Sanford Meisner himself, and is still giving classes today, even though now into her late seventies. I have chosen not to identify the institution at which she now works; although she does not conceal her involvement, nor does she make a show of publicising it, so I would like to allow her to maintain the peace which she seems to have found in that role.

Some of Peabody's pupils have gone on to professional acting careers. One of these is Alicia Lagano, who among her many roles has appeared as Cristina Castelli in All About Us and Selena in The Client List. Sandra had this to say in 2012 when asked by The Oregonian for her memories of Lagano's early promise:

"She had so much compassion for everything in the world. She was open and affected by everything, which is a great element for an actor to have, that kind of feeling and ability to relate to things and be so open at such a young age. She was willing to try everything, to throw herself on her face. Some people worry about their image and what they look like and what people will think of them. She was just so open and real."

The appreciation was mutual, with Lagano calling Peabody "a great teacher" and "so honest". But look at Sandra's quote there. She praises Lagano first of all for her compassion. Then she goes on to note her openness and realness, and her willingness to be vulnerable. I find that profoundly moving: here we have a woman who was treated by David Hess with the very opposite of compassion, who had her vulnerability and openness exploited for abuse. She is nevertheless encouraging those things safely in her own student.

Moral courage is defined as having the strength to stand up for one's ethical beliefs regardless of adversity. That is exactly what Sandra Peabody displays here. As we will see, it is not the only example of this throughout her life.

"Fatality in her face" – David Hess displaying inappropriate, predatory behaviour in a music featurette

Yes, I said a music featurette.

One of the more common extras on physical copies of The Last House on the Left is the ten-minute "Scoring Last House". In this, David Hess talks about the songs he wrote for the movie, playing some of them on acoustic guitar. Hess was a musician before he was an actor – under the name David Dante he wrote "Speedy Gonzales", later an international hit for Pat Boone. Hess's music for Last House is widely known for its deliberately jarring tonal contrast with the extreme brutality and violence playing out on the screen.

Most of "Scoring Last House", which dates from the 2000s, is about this. However, between four and five minutes into the featurette, we get a truly extraordinary and highly disturbing interlude when he talks about Mari's rape scene. Having just mentioned the blues number he wrote for the sequence, he draws attention to how he was "blown away" by a look Sandra Peabody had on her face because, as Hess puts it, "she really was alone in this scene".

Hess goes on to note the "slapping her around [...] pulling her pants off [and] drooling in her face—which [he] did intentionally" which he did as part of his interpretation of his role as Krug, stating that this so humiliated her that she had this look. At this point he says:

Would have been easy to fuck her. Right there on the set, I mean.

Hess states that this was because she "really gave in" and you could see "this look of, of fatality in her face" that he describes as "real".

This is another time when we need to step back and blink at David Hess's behaviour. How far his physical actions on set were acceptable at all is one thing, but the drooling in particular is deeply invasive. There is no suggestion that it was agreed with Sandra in advance, and so I don't need to go into graphic detail to underline the profoundly violating nature of Hess's action at the end of such a scene. Beyond that, however, a further point for the purposes of this post is the way Hess spoke of Sandra after he had "humiliated" her.

Hess is speaking of a woman who "gave in", in other words someone who had been emotionally shattered by the experience. It shouldn't need saying that a woman in that state cannot possibly give informed consent to sexual activity. Hess must have known this, yet he frames it as an opportunity. Therefore, "would have been easy to fuck her" needs one small change to be honest – in fact, just one four-letter word switched for another.  What Hess is actually saying in that quote is "would have been easy to rape her".

Hess’s words reveal not just a lack of empathy, but an actively predatory mindset: he is relaying his thinking about the possibility of sexual assault of a clearly vulnerable colleague as if it were an interesting production detail.

If you're reading this, consider how you would feel if you found a young woman lying emotionally broken. You would doubtless feel compassion, concern, a need to help. Wouldn't we all? Apparently not if you're David Hess, and not merely because in that case you have caused her emotional collapse in the first place. If you're David Hess, the thought that you feel most worth mentioning – to the viewers of a music featurette, remember – is that you could have raped her.

Even in the harsh context of 1970s exploitation cinema, Hess’s behaviour is entirely egregious. This is not a matter of tough film-making or what made the scene "work", but of the abuse of a real human being, Sandra Peabody, without regard for her autonomy or dignity. 

"Scoring Last House" is available on many DVD and Blu-ray editions of Last House on the Left. It is also accessible, albeit not under that title, on YouTube. I have chosen not to embed it in this post, but at the time of writing it can be viewed here.

Sandra in her own words: the David A. Szulkin book

Today I'm introducing David A. Szulkin's Wes Craven's Last House on the Left: The Making of a Cult Classic. The one in the photo above is my own copy, which as you can see could do with cleaning the fingerprints off. This is an exceptionally important resource, because it is – as far as I am aware – the one and only time that Sandra Peabody has gone on the record with her thoughts about making The Last House on the Left. It's a quarter of a century now since it appeared, but it remains essential reading.

The book was first published in 1997, but an expanded edition appeared in 2000 and that is the one I own. Unfortunately it's not absolutely clear exactly what was added for that edition. The book has been out of print for many years now, so I was very lucky to track down an ex-library copy on AbeBooks for around £25 a few months ago. The book seems to have been published simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic – the price on the back is in both pounds and dollars. My own copy is the UK second edition, published by FAB Press (ISBN: 9781903254011).

Of course, many other people than Sandra (who is mostly referred to here as Sandra Cassell, as she was credited for the movie) are interviewed for the book, and there are times when this is important for alternate perspectives of a particular scene or event. Still, most of those have spoken publicly on multiple occasions over the years, including in published interviews or documentaries. Sandra has not. As such, this is the only place where you can find what she actually said, rather than what people believe she may have thought. That matters.

To look at it from the outside you'd think this would be the usual cheap cash-in making-of book: it's a little smaller than A4 size and has the infamous "It's Only a Movie" logo on the front and a photo of the looming Krug, Weasel and Sadie on the back. That preconception would, however, be unfair to Szulkin, who clearly knows his subject very well indeed. For our purposes on this blog, the third and longest chapter, "Babes in the Woods: A Crash Course in Guerilla Film Making" is by far the most important, and I will be referring to it frequently.

Wes Craven's Last House on the Left seems to have been well received on its publication. Of course publishers generally select the review quotes that make them look best for their back covers, but for example Empire said it "[b]rilliantly reassesse[d] the film's position in the annals of horror", while the short-lived Neon called it "fascinating, professional, and very funny". Obviously from the point of view of this blog, "very funny" might feel inappropriate, but that is no reflection on Szulkin himself.

One vitally important point to bear in mind is that, when this book appeared, we did not have the collection of published sources we do now. David Hess's Vanity Fair confession was still years away, and neither Celluloid Crime of the Century – an important making-of documentary which I will cover in due course – nor key DVD commentary tracks had yet appeared. As we will see, reading Szulkin with knowledge of those later sources can sometimes bring extra understanding (and in places extra concern) about some comments.

This is the only book by David Szulkin that I own, and as far as I know he's never published another one about Last House. As such, if I refer to "Szulkin" as a source without further qualification in the blog, then this is the book I will mean.

David Hess admitted threatening Sandra Peabody with rape in Vanity Fair, and nobody noticed

p308, rendered unreadably small for fair use reasons. Hess's quote is between the black lines

Back in the March 2008 edition of Vanity Fair, there was a five thousand word feature article which went into considerable depth about horror cinema pioneers such as George Romero, Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven. The article was bylined Jason Zinoman and was titled "Killer Instincts". David Hess was interviewed for the piece and provided a few short quotes about his time working on The Last House on the Left, though one does get the impression he actually said a little more than made it to print. Still, the quote that matters here is this one:

David Hess, who played Krug with a coiled, maniacal aggression, approached the role with a Method actor's intensity. "I was very mean to the girls, so when it came to the rape scene, [Sandra Cassell] didn't have to act," he says, referring to a co-star who played one of the victims. "I told her, 'I'm really going to fuck you if you don't behave yourself. They'll just let the camera run. I'm going to devastate you.' I don't think she was too happy about that."

When I first came across this – stumbled over it, frankly – I just stared at it for a while. I'd never seen it before, didn't even know it existed. I'll come back to that point in a minute, but this is the closest we're ever likely to get to a smoking gun. This is David Hess, in print, on the record, in a mainstream publication with fact-checkers and a legal team, saying explicitly that he threatened Sandra with sexual violence in order to get a reaction. Let's not soften this by using the unhelpful American media euphemism "assault", either. "I'm really going to fuck you" is unambiguous. He means rape.

This quote also torpedoes the defence of Hess sometimes offered, and indeed the one hinted at in the extract above: that he was merely an extreme Method actor remaining permanently in character. It's not a good defence at the best of times, since that version of Method acting sometimes seems to treat other people's boundaries, consent and welfare as irritating irrelevances to For The Shot – but it fails completely here. Krug isn't making a movie. He would never have said "They'll just let the camera run." He doesn't even have a camera.

This isn't Krug threatening to rape Mari. It's David Hess threatening to rape Sandra Peabody.

That's also clear from his comment that because he was "very mean" (what a euphemism that is) to the girls – Lucy Grantham (Phyllis) presumably being the other – Sandra "didn't have to act" in Mari's rape scene. This is where I pause once again and ask you to consider. When a woman is playing the victim in a notoriously brutal rape scene, do you really think it's a fantastic idea if she "didn't have to act"? No, 1970s exploitation often didn't devote much time to actress welfare, but there were still limits. On Last House there doesn't seem to have been much of a boundary set by Hess short of "No actual rape." As he wasn't an actual rapist, that didn't bother him.

On top of all this, and that appalling and cruel "devastate" closer, there's the clear coercion revealed in the phrase "if you don't behave yourself". This explicitly ties Sandra's personal safety to doing what Hess wants. It doesn't matter ethically that he would not have followed through on his threat of physical violence; that he made the threat with the intention that it produce terror (she "didn't have to act") is enough to be abusive. The lack of any clear indication of what "behave" actually meant made it worse, as Sandra could not be sure which actions might be considered misbehaviour by Hess.

As I said, this was a five thousand word feature article. Hess's admission comes about two thousand words into the piece. Well, I say "admission" but it's lacking in any kind of regret or compassion. "I don't think she was too happy about that" is stomach-turning; you can almost hear Hess smirking.  Zinoman leaves the quote to stand without editorial comment, startling enough in itself from a 2025 perspective, but then goes on to discuss and interview Wes Craven at some length. The number of words devoted to asking Craven about his lead actor threatening his lead actress with rape on his film set?

Zero.

I'll be fair to Zinoman here and say I suspect that, given the culture of that magazine at the time, this was more of an editorial decision than a writer's. But even if we assume that is the case, it is a staggering ethical failure. I was an adult in 2008. If I'd said what Hess did in the course of my job, my feet wouldn't have touched the ground. I'd have been dismissed the same day for gross misconduct, and rightly so. Yet here's an article published in the mainstream media that same year where "I threatened to rape my co-star" is apparently treated as a snippet of colourful trivia from the old days.

I said I'd come back to my not knowing the Vanity Fair quote existed. That's because, apparently, almost nobody has ever mentioned it. If I do a Google on the terms "David Hess" and "They'll just let the camera run. I'm going to devastate you" (avoiding the swear word in case it's asterisked out in any sources) then guess how many hits I get. Go on, guess. It's been seventeen years, remember. No? Then I'll tell you.

Three.

One is the article itself. One is a 2012 academic paper by Allison Virginia Craig.¹ And one is this Quora post. And that last one was written by me a few weeks ago, just after I discovered the article. That's all. Allowing for the fact that there may have been some coverage in publications now lost or outside the scope of Google, that means that the entirety of the professional, semi-professional and fan horror media have either completely missed a star of a landmark horror movie openly admitting to a rape threat, which is very bad – or have seen it but decided not to cover it, which is even worse.

As we'll see as this blog continues, this is not the only time that a blatant confession of abuse in easily accessible Last House media has been repeatedly ignored. This may be the most egregious example of all, though, since unlike many of the others it would surely have been seen by fans not merely of Last House on the Left but of that era of cinema in general: Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, etc. None of them seem to have posted about Hess's threat anywhere indexed by Google, either.

Outside of Vanity Fair itself, the only people who ever seem to have mentioned this are Craig and me. The people who've read her paper or my Quora post know, and now you know as well. Thank you for adding to their number. As with so much about this film, Sandra Peabody deserves better.

¹ Craig, Allison Virginia, ""Only a girl like this can know what's happened to you" : traumatic subjects in contemporary American narratives" (2012). Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024). 535. https://doi.org/10.54014/P20D-9BFW

Welcome to Not Only a Movie

Welcome to Not Only a Movie. Please remember the most important rule, especially when commenting. The following is a non-negotiable condition:

Respect for Sandra Peabody's boundaries, dignity, humanity and safety.

This blog aims to bring together the scattered and often garbled evidence relating to the treatment of Sandra Peabody (then credited as Sandra Cassell, so I will use both names but mostly stick to the clear "Sandra") in relation to the production of The Last House on the Left. The film was shot in autumn 1971 and released in August 1972. Subjects I will be covering include:

• The commentary track containing explicit admissions of abuse, barely mentioned by Blu-ray reviewers
• Multiple examples of David Hess (Krug) referring to Sandra in disturbing and sexualised ways
• An extraordinary on-the-record admission of abuse that has been almost completely ignored for seventeen years
• Marc Sheffler (Junior) telling a story involving threatening Sandra to produce a desired reaction for a scene
• Fred Lincoln (Weasel) saying something startling that nobody seems to have commented on

• The moment Sandra risked her career to get away from what was happening on the LHOTL film set
• How director Wes Craven allowed Sandra's real fear to be used for the film, even if he didn't know its cause
• Ethical concerns relating to the continued availability of Last House and some of its extras uncontextualised
• Key quotes from Sandra Cassell/Peabody herself in David Szulkin's essential making-of book
• Sandra Peabody's courage, and her lifelong determination to do the opposite of what was done to her

As you can see, there is a lot to get through. However, one thing I won't be doing is simply making unsourced assertions. There's an awful lot of that on the web already, which is a major part of the problem. In my online travels I've seen major scenes wrongly described, mix-ups of major personnel, incorrect dates, you name it. I hope to do better.