"Just wanted to make the day" – Marc Sheffler's 2020 cliff threat statement

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We've already seen the versions of the cliff threat Marc Sheffler told in the 2000s, in the Celluloid Crime of the Century documentary and on the actors' DVD commentary track.¹ As I said at the time, those were not the only versions of this story Sheffler has told. Today we'll look at a more recent example. The basics, such as the fact that this happened after multiple takes of the scene where Mari is trying to get Junior to help her escape, remain the same in these, but the emphases differ.

This one is in a slightly awkward format. In the 2019 YouTube video DRUMDUMS EXPLORES THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972) – all caps – the uploader (Drumdums – not all caps) gives a fairly detailed 13-minute review of Last House. From 8 minutes 8 seconds for a little over a minute, he talks about what he thinks is "the most interesting" thing, stating that the actors "went method". He notes David Hess's "Can I?" story and also says that Sandra's "life was actually threatened" by Sheffler at the cliff.

On 7th February 2020,² a user commented on this video to say Marc Sheffler was their father, and began by saying:

To clear up the story of my dad threatening to push Sandra Peabody off the cliff here is a statement in his own words 

The comment should be highlighted if you follow this link. I have no way to check their claim of a family relationship, but I have no particular reason to doubt it either. It's a fairly long comment, so I've embedded a screenshot of the whole thing at the top of this post so that you can check I'm not misrepresenting it. For clarity here, I'll treat the statement as coming directly from Sheffler rather than having been relayed.

Sheffler begins by saying that they were on:

a natural ledge, overlooking a creek, about 15 feet below us. (I could be wrong about the distance.)

That last note is reasonable. People can forget exact distances over almost half a century. Nobody forgets the difference between 15 feet and six feet, but 12 or 18 they might well. Sheffler then gives some technical details and says his over-the-shoulder close-ups were completed in "only a few takes". But, he says, it was a different story for Sandra:

Take after take after take, she wasn't there emotionally, meaning, she wasn’t acting like a girl in fear of her life.

As in the versions of this story we've met already, Sheffler notes that people on the set were getting restless and frustrated, and that he went to Wes Craven and told him he had an idea and that he'd signal for Craven to start shooting. Sheffler then says:

I returned to my position next to her and pushed and held her a little over the cliff. Immediately, she got scared. That's when I told her quietly that if she didn't get it right this time, I was going to push her over completely.

Sheffler follows up with:

It wasn't so high up that she'd get hurt seriously, but the fear on her face in that moment was real. I then gave Wes the signal, and boom, take shot, and it's the one in the film.

Sheffler's statement then ends with another reminder that he saw this as a product of impatience and frustration, and did not do it out of malice:

Nothing malicious. Just wanted to make the day and get out of there before the light faded. she was never in any real danger. Just the perception of it.

That, of course, is exactly the issue. As I pointed out when we met the first version of this incident, if someone thinks you're going to hurt them, then saying "It's okay, I didn't mean it" afterwards doesn't erase the ethical problem. And Sheffler himself tells us that "the fear on her face [...] was real." Sandra was sufficiently frightened to convince in the take as the required "girl in fear of her life".

As for the height, it seems that back in those woods in 1971 and even in 2020 Sheffler believed that a drop of 15 feet (~4.5 metres) was not "so high up that [Sandra]'d get hurt seriously" – but in that he was unfortunately mistaken. As this piece³ on the website of the [US] National Library of Medicine informs us:

the level 3 guideline of the German Society for Trauma Surgery (DGU) recommends trauma team activation for fall heights greater than 3 m[etres], which is in line with the guidelines of the American College of Surgeons 

Of course Sheffler did not intend actually to push his co-star over the cliff. Nobody reasonable has ever suggested that. But when the man himself tells you that he saw "mak[ing] the day" and fading light as justification for inducing real fear in Sandra, and that the result of this is "the [take] in the film" people watch today, then it raises questions about this aspect of The Last House on the Left's production ethics.

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 Thanks to Hadzy for getting me the exact date.
³ Nau C, Leiblein M, Verboket RD, Hörauf JA, Sturm R, Marzi I, Störmann P. Falls from Great Heights: Risk to Sustain Severe Thoracic and Pelvic Injuries Increases with Height of the Fall. J Clin Med. 2021 May 25;10(11):2307. doi: 10.3390/jcm10112307. PMID: 34070640; PMCID: PMC8199183.

Compassion in the woods

Despite the highly concerning evidence already presented about Sandra Peabody's experience while making The Last House on the Left, it shouldn't be imagined that the set was a place of unrelieved fear and unhappiness. There were plenty of people involved who were simply doing their jobs as well as they could on minuscule resources, and several who stood out in more positive ways.

We've already met assistant director Yvonne Hannemann, whose compassion in the wake of Sandra's distress at filming Mari's rape scene contrasted with David Hess's recollections in particular. Again contrasting with Hess was producer Sean Cunningham's empathetic note about the "terrifying, ugly place to be" that was Mari's actress's position during the torture and rape sequence.

Sandra herself tells us via Szulkin (p47) that she got on well with the cinematographer, Vic Hurwitz:

[He] was one of the better people on that set. That guy was great. He told me, "Have something else in your life besides acting, because it's a terrible business." He was a real fatherly kind of guy to me.

Sandra's opening sentence praises him only in relative terms, which perhaps reveals more about how she saw the set itself than it does about Hurwitz. Nevertheless, she goes on to make it clear that her view of him was genuinely positive. Her choice of the adjective "fatherly" is striking.

Sandra ends her recollection by lamenting Hurwitz's death in a bicycle accident – she says "a few years after Last House", but she was misremembering: Hurwitz died in July 1973. Sandra's liking for the cinematographer makes Marc Sheffler's implication in his commentary track threat that Hurwitz would keep filming if Sheffler dropped her from the cliff feel particularly distressing.

Lucy Grantham had a special position in Last House as Phyllis, Mari's fellow victim of Krug's gang. Hannemann remembers (Szulkin, p51) that "[t]he girls sort of huddled together". However, as Grantham herself points out in Szulkin (p39), the two young actresses were different in reality as well as in fiction:

Sandra was this sweet, rather naive "good girl", and I was much more rebellious in my personality [...] Sandra and I were really going in two very different directions [so] there was no sense of competition between us. In fact, Sandra was very much like the character she played in the movie, and so was I.

We don't get a quote from Sandra about Lucy, but it was Grantham who, in the scene where the gang force the girls to strip and perform sexually for their amusement, recognised that Sandra's distress went beyond her character's and took the initiative. As Wes Craven put it in his DVD commentary track,¹ Grantham who was "more experienced just in the world in general" than Sandra:

improvised, on the spot, and [it] was I think completely real because Sandra was scared shitless here and it was Lucy just saying, just, we’ll get through this scene, um, it’s just the two of us you know, stripped naked.

This refers to the moment where, shortly after the girls have been stripped, Phyllis holds Mari and says quietly to her, "It's just you and me here, nobody else." This already poignant moment becomes deeply moving when you know that it was ad-libbed by one actress to help another get through a very difficult scene – one which Szulkin (p74) notes had more material filmed than was eventually released.

Steve Miner, who went on to become a notable horror director but was a lowly 20-year-old production assistant on Last House, praised Sandra in the It's Only a Movie documentary as being "a real trooper" despite her being "freaked out" by the scene where Mari walks into the lake. He adds a human touch by noting that Sandra took "a long shower" afterwards.

Miner is notable as being someone from this film who Sandra would work with again. Just before she left exploitation for good and foreshadowing her long and successful career behind the camera, she was script supervisor on the sexploitation comedy Video Vixens, for which Miner was assistant editor.

Returning to Last House on the Left: with David Hess holding character for weeks on end and apparently enjoying the fear he engendered in Sandra, it is a relief to know that most people on this scrappy exploitation set in the woods got through the Last House shoot without resorting to threats and intimidation towards her.

Sandra Peabody deserved these displays of respect and kindness. But they should have been universal.

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. 

"I had so much fun with Sandra" – Hess, Lincoln and the "boys' club" commentary

We now return to the 2000s DVD commentary track featuring the three male villain actors.¹ This is the location of Marc Sheffler's strongest version of the cliff threat, but that's not all that the track contains. Here's a short but revealing exchange from only around six minutes into proceedings:

"HESS: I had so much fun with Sandra, [word indistinct], ‘cause you remember I held character with her for four weeks until she like… she wanted to run away!
LINCOLN: She did run away, the night before shooting, I had to go get her! […] We lost our girl the night before, she was walkin’ down the goddamn road in the middle of Connecticut. She was goin' home, she was so scared of us.
HESS: She was so frightened. So frightened.
LINCOLN: She was so scared of us. And I knew her for eight years, and she was afraid of me!"

We've already established that Lincoln's "eight years" is almost inconceivable and that the "three [or] four years" he gives in the It's Only a Movie documentary is much more reasonable. We can assume this is merely a slip of the tongue, and it's far from the most important part anyway.

What stands out at once is Hess's opening quote. In the very first part of it, he tells us that not only did he frighten Sandra deliberately – something he said in his Terror Trap interview – but that he had "so much fun" doing it. This is another escalation: the first time we've seen Hess openly stating that he enjoyed scaring Sandra.

Hess also confirms that he did indeed hold character for the duration of filming, or at least nearly so. Once Mari is shot by Krug, she only appears again in Junior's dream, apart from the brief section in the Krug & Company cut where her parents find her alive by the lakeside. Hess's statement is backed up by Marc Sheffler, who has already told us that Hess "was in character 24/7 the entire shoot".²

Hess goes on to say – brag, really – that he did this to such effect that Sandra "wanted to run away!" Lincoln intervenes to point out that not only did Sandra actually leave the set, but that it happened much earlier. He gives "the night before shooting", the same time he provides in Celluloid Crime of the Century. Lincoln's recollection to Szulkin (p50) was "after one or two days", but the walk-off's placement very early in filming is consistent. Early in the Connecticut section of the shoot, that is, as Lincoln makes clear with his "walking down the road" comment.

Hess underlines that Sandra was "so frightened", and Lincoln closes proceedings by corroborating that her fear existed, and by expressing slight incredulity that she was scared of him despite having known her for some years. As he notes in It's Only a Movie, they shared an agent.

Lincoln is most significant here in his backing up of the level of fear Sandra had of the men. Listening to the entire commentary track for remarks about her, there seems to be a kind of rough hierarchy of fear, with Hess very much at the top, then Lincoln, and Sheffler – despite his cliff threat – only mentioning her fear once, in connection with that incident. (In connection with this: Lincoln does mention Sandra being "afraid of Jeramie [Rain]" as well as himself and Hess in Celluloid Crime of the Century. but he does not mention Sheffler.)

In the relaxed and perhaps performative "boys' club" atmosphere of the commentary booth twenty or so years ago, it was Hess who made the comments that may be the most revealing. As his Terror Trap interview shows would remain the case even in the final year of his life and into his seventies, Hess shows no remorse or regret for scaring a young actress so badly that she "ran away" from the set.

In fact, here he shows quite the reverse. Hess's "I had so much fun with Sandra" cannot reasonably be read as anything other than the words of a man actively revelling in having created her fear. And, with his rape threats and night-time knife stalking, in having also created an environment where it was entirely reasonable for Sandra to feel that way.

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 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

"But what if they’re just telling stories?"

I have now presented multiple examples of what certain of the male actors on The Last House on the Left have said about the woman playing Mari, Sandra Peabody. Generally, in this kind of situation, there are four options regarding what the person in question has been quoted as saying:

1. They actually did what they said
2. They exaggerated from a kernel of truth
3. They made the whole thing up
4. They were misquoted

In this case, we can immediately dispense with option four. Marc Sheffler tells the cliff threat story on camera for Celluloid Crime of the Century and on tape for the actors’ commentary track. David Hess gives “got pretty physical with her” in Szulkin and recounts the rape threat in Vanity Fair – both commercial print publications. He tells the “Can I?” story in Celluloid Crime of the Century and the “fatality in her face” anecdote in the music featurette – both on camera.

They were not misquoted.

Since Sheffler has told the cliff threat story repeatedly for at least two decades now, with varying emphases but with the core remaining consistent, it would be bizarre for him to have made it up. While Sheffler’s reminiscence is deeply unpleasant, it does not talk about frightening Sandra during the creation of a sexually violent moment in the film – Mari’s rape scene. All four of Hess’s quotes do. Let’s concentrate on him.

• If Hess is telling the truth, then he treated Sandra with great cruelty in using her as a dehumanised prop in order to force the terrified reaction he wanted from her.
• If Hess is making everything up, then he treated Sandra with great cruelty in using her as a dehumanised prop in a series of degrading sexualised fantasies.
• If Hess is exaggerating from a kernel of truth, perhaps by telling multiple versions of a story when not all of those events actually happened in the way he tells them, then a blend of options one and two.

Regardless of which is true, the very act of telling these stories is itself egregious. Over a period of a little over a decade from the release of Szulkin’s two editions in 1997/2000 to Hess’s death in 2011, Hess repeatedly and in public portrayed Sandra as requiring a performance forcing from her, instead of treating her as the professionally trained actor she was – and he was not.

The stories were also recounted by Hess with a complete lack of any noticeable remorse or compassion for Sandra – an absence we also saw in his Terror Trap interview. Telling those anecdotes in the fashion he did normalised the behaviour he claimed for himself, which included direct sexual threat and coercion in his Vanity Fair quote.

Whatever the veracity or otherwise of Hess's stories, they commodify Sandra's suffering and violate her dignity. Yet they are still often treated as light-hearted trivia or “tales from the grindhouse trenches”, including by significant numbers in the horror community, and are mostly ignored entirely by the wider film media. As I have said before: we will come back to this.

As I have also said before: Sandra Peabody deserves better.

"Can I?" – David Hess asks his director for permission

We're back to Celluloid Crime of the Century once more, but this time David Hess is in the spotlight. Yes, again. Around 18 minutes into the documentary, Hess says this about his co-star:

Sandra was your archetype upper middle class Protestant–repressed Protestant, you know, and how do you deal with that? How do you deal with it? Well, you try to find ways of stabbing her and her repression.

I'll let you decide how likely it is that the star of Voices of Desire – released mere months after Last House – would be "repressed". If she was indeed "nervous, and uptight, and squeezed", as Marc Sheffler suggests on the actors' commentary track,¹ then it probably wasn't because she couldn't deal with sexual content. Hess's "stabbing" metaphor is slightly concerning for a man playing a violent thug, though.

Immediately after this, there's a separately recorded insert from producer Sean S. Cunningham, who acknowledges the difficulty of this scene from the perspective of the actress playing Mari:

So, when somebody is shaking you and threatening to rape you and carve his initials on your chest, and you’re lying on the ground and this person is over you it’s kind of a terrifying, ugly place to be.

Cunningham's words are straightforward and empathetic, conveying the situation for a woman who has that difficult role. But straight after that we're back to Hess, who decides what we really all need to know is this:

I scared the living shit out of her, man. She really thought I might—I started to pull her pants down, and grab her tits and everything, and I mean she really, I mean she—and I looked up at Wes [Craven] at one point, and I said, ‘Can I?’ And then she freaked.

Given everything we've seen of David Hess's approach to Sandra already, this further escalation is perhaps not enormously surprising. The rough physical aspects of this treatment of his co-star were present in his music featurette story too. But this time there is an additional aspect to his anecdote: the question.

The way in which Hess relates his story strongly implies that Sandra was already frightened before the question was asked. If she "really thought [he] might" then being scared would not be in the least surprising. Hess then reacted to that not by stopping what he was doing or reassuring his screen victim, but by asking Craven "Can I?" At which point, using Hess's startlingly casual term, she "freaked".

We can assume this happened during rehearsal, as asking that question would be completely out of character for Krug. It's not clear exactly what Hess was actually asking permission for, or even whether it was a genuine request or merely performative. This would not have been clear to Sandra in the moment, either.

Hess's story does at least give us the information that one man (Hess) was asking another man (Craven) what else he could do to a woman (Sandra) – and a woman who Hess was already being physically rough with in a sexualised way.

Is it any wonder that Sandra "freaked" at this point? We don't know exactly what went through her head at that moment, and it is not our place to speculate. But it was an absolutely valid and rational reaction. On the video Hess seems almost surprised that Sandra reacted so strongly. Given what we already know about her experience of the Last House on the Left set, he really shouldn't have been.

And then there's the matter of Wes Craven. Hess does not tell us what Craven responded to Hess's extraordinary question; perhaps he perceived it as a tasteless joke. However, for Hess even to have been able to ask tells us that Craven was close by – unsurprising for the director, of course – and must have noticed all the physicality that Hess was putting into his Krug. If as Hess implies Sandra was already clearly scared, then Craven must have seen that, too.

It's possible that Craven both gave a very clear "No" and strongly reprimanded Hess for even asking the question, despite having apparently allowed the rough physical contact that was already in progress. Today the question itself would be seen as a catastrophic ethical failure and would bring immediate and very forceful intervention. In the woods in 1971, an awful lot more depended on the director being strong enough to keep his actors from crossing lines. We must hope that Craven was.

Regardless, this incident – like the music featurette one – related to the filming of Mari's rape scene. Sandra therefore endured objectification and intimidation from the same man multiple times during production of this highly sensitive scene.

To be able to continue when Hess had implied that her bodily safety depended on another man's will and not her own consent only underlines the immense courage, resilience and professionalism Sandra displayed in completing the scene, and indeed the movie as a whole, at all.

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.

On the road with Sandra – Teenage Hitchhikers, her final film role

Note she's credited under her own name in this movie

Sandra Peabody's screen acting career lasted only a decade, from her debut in Misfit in 1965 through The Last House on the Left to... this. Teenage Hitchhikers was her farewell to this branch of the arts, being filmed in September 1973 and hitting drive-ins the following year with a general release in 1975. In 1977 a significantly cut version was classified X in the UK. I said in an earlier post that I'd never seen this title, but I've rectified that now. The movie is relatively easy to get hold of, as it was released on region-free Blu-ray by Dark Force Entertainment in 2020.

Despite its almost clichéd exploitation movie title this is a more interesting film than might be supposed, and not just because it features Margaret Whitton in a supporting role. The setup is pretty simple: Mouse (Kathie Christopher) and Bird (Peabody) are two young women hitching across America and paying for their rides with... well, it's sexploitation. You guess. So far, so 1970s. What's unusual here is the fact that the ladies are – mostly – in control of all this. It's kind of a road movie/sexploitation/comedy mash-up, and sometimes as awkward as that sounds.

Considering the microscopic $15,000 budget and one-week production time, the film is surprisingly well put together; it doesn't look like a student movie. Pacing is uneven, admittedly: an orgy scene late on in the story – clearly there as a draw to the drive-in crowd – drags on for more than a tenth of the film's eighty-minute runtime and eventually becomes tedious even if you're into that kind of thing. A couple of the comedic set pieces are more in the mould of a rather overlong Benny Hill Show sketch than anything, too. Still moderately funny if you're in the mood, though.

Using rape as a source of humour wasn't a hard no back then – Blazing Saddles also came out in 1974 – but it does firmly place movies that do it as "of their time". That said, at least this time Mouse and Bird have one over the somewhat bumbling rapist (Ric Mancini) who our heroines have to save Jenny (Nikki Lynn) from and who appears in a couple of scenes. A sequence involving a nude Peabody, playing an inmate of the "State Farm for Wayward Girls", calmly criticising his "technique" while eating an enormous, not-at-all-symbolic red apple, is memorable if nothing else. (By this point Jenny has been rescued; the rapist is alone.)

The supplementary material for the Teenage Hitchhikers Blu-ray includes an interview with the director, Gerri Sedley (a pseudonym for Jerome S. Kaufmann). Notably, he praises Sandra for being the "smartest" of the cast, and we discover that they kept in touch via mail after the film wrapped. Both he and cinematographer Bill La Mond, who provides a commentary track, note that weather conditions did not help the production. The opening scene was filmed in driving rain, and temperatures were not always on their side either. The crew numbered around six, tiny even by the standards of similar movies.

Sandra also shows a side to her acting in this film that many of its (and her) fans might have enjoyed seeing more of had she remained in movies. She has good chemistry with Christopher, and her comic timing is a good match for Christopher's own. Unsurprisingly for this kind of movie, her clothes aren't always on, but as long as the quips keep flowing you can believe reasonably well that these two young women are making the choices in their lives – and, later on, allowing Jenny to join their little gang as well.

Teenage Hitchhikers isn't quite the lost classic some reviews make it out to be. It is, however, something a little bit different from the average mid-70s flick in this genre that its female leads are – by 1974 sexploitation standards, so calibrate your expectations – generally more empowered. Indeed, the film is generally more successful when it's sending up exploitation conventions and less appealing when it's simply following them.

One final thought. End credits aside, the very last time we see ever Sandra on a movie screen, she's with Mouse and Jenny in their dubiously acquired car, grinning hugely and flipping off the camera as they drive away. I can't help but cheer. 

The cliff threat redux – Marc Sheffler's commentary track version

I've already noted Marc Sheffler's story about threatening Sandra Peabody with being thrown off a cliff – as a technique for jolting her into hitting her marks – in my post about Celluloid Crime of the Century. As I noted there, Sheffler has told this story more than once, and today we'll look at one version he recounted at around the same time (early 2000s) as that documentary: the DVD commentary track he shares with David Hess and Fred Lincoln.

Again, this concerns the woods scene where Mari is attempting to convince Junior to let her go. On the commentary, Marc Sheffler says:

Ugh, I remember this scene. What a freaking pain. Do you remember what happened? With her not getting it and I had to hold her over the cliff?

After a brief and unrelated digression by the actors, Sheffler tells us that Sandra "wasn't at the anxiety level that she needed to be" for the scene, and that after multiple takes "everybody was getting annoyed". He adds that he asked Wes Craven to "give me a minute with her". Sheffler then notes they were over a cliff and says:

I took her and I put her over the cliff, I just grabbed her and I went like this. And I said, 'If you don't get this fucking scene right now, I'm gonna drop you, I'm gonna fucking drop you, right now. And Wes'll shoot it, and Vic [Hurwitz]'ll shoot it, and we'll have a different scene, but it'll work 'cause you'll be fucking mangled.' And I said, 'You better fucking get this.'

Given that this is necessarily an audio-only track, we don't know what "went like this" refers to. Vic Hurwitz was the cinematographer, a man who Sandra describes in Szulkin (p47) as "great" and "fatherly". There's no suggestion in either version of Sheffler's story that Hurwitz was involved in the threat or its setup.

Sheffler concludes his anecdote by saying that he signalled to Craven to roll the film, and that Sandra was "so nervous and so scared" when he brought her back up that she hit her marks.

David Hess adds a corroborating note immediately afterwards, saying they were all on the rock at the same time. Hess tells Sheffler that:

One of the things you said that I remember, ‘And the film will keep going. And the film will keep going!’

Hess adds of Sandra in connection with the above that "she al—" but he is then cut off by the others moving on to the next topic of discussion.

It's only fair to note that this is the harshest-edged version of the cliff threat story I have found; there are also versions of it couched in significantly milder language, and I shall certainly return to those. The "boys' club" atmosphere of a commentary track like this can sometimes result in its participants exaggerating details for effect; Sheffler does not usually swear to this extent in interviews, for example.

As with the Celluloid Crime of the Century version, Sheffler shows that he saw this as a way forward born of frustration, not malice. What it does add to our knowledge, though, is that Sheffler felt Sandra's anxiety level was insufficient for the scene, instead of the vaguer "she wasn't getting it" the documentary version included. He is also explicit that Sandra was "nervous and scared" when brought back up. Hess's addition to the story isn't in Celluloid Crime of the Century, either.

Both versions of Sheffler's story contain the details that he asked Craven for a short time with Sandra, and that this was when he took her to the cliff. However, the director himself says on his commentary track that he was the one whose pushing led to the scene working. For Craven to state that suggests that he did not enquire particularly closely about exactly what Sheffler had been doing during his "minute with her".

Looking at Szulkin to see whether this incident is recorded there, we find that it seems to be, albeit quite briefly (pp 75–76). Sheffler and Sandra both refer to the scene, but with different emphases. Sheffler tells us that "a lot of that [scene] was improvised" and that:

For some reason, for her that scene was a struggle, and I kind of bullied her a little bit to get a performance out of her.

He notes that the scene "required a lot of takes" – so the basics here match both the documentary and commentary versions Sheffler gives. "Kind of bullied her a little bit" is one of the milder wordings of this incident that I've mentioned already. Assistant director Yvonne Hannemann also reminisces:

I remember that Sandra was really very worked up about that scene. Quite enormously worked up.

Szulkin does however note that Hannemann's memories may be at least partly confusing this event with Phyllis's death scene, as she goes on to mention a detail that doesn't apply to Sandra's scene. Still, she does use Sandra's name, so perhaps she was conflating the two scenes, not especially surprising given she spoke to Szulkin a quarter of a century after the Last House shoot.

 We'll give the final word to Sandra herself, who provides only a short quote. In full:

I thought I was quite wretched in that scene.

"Wretched" is an ambiguous word. It can mean both "very unhappy" and "of poor quality". As such, we can't tell whether Sandra felt distressed or whether she was criticising her performance. All that can be ascertained from the movie itself is that Mari's desperation – entirely appropriate to the character's situation – seems highly convincing to this viewer.

An audio-only extract from this section of the commentary track, including the part beginning with Sheffler's "I took her and I put her over the cliff" above, was uploaded to YouTube in 2012 by user servomoore. At the time of posting, it can be listened to here.

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, Dr 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 (Wayback backup), 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.)

Is that "girl" Sandra? 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. Hess, however, does mention in passing (p39) that a secretary was there. Almost certainly a woman, she would seem a more likely candidate.

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. Lincoln says that "what you're seeing in her face is real fear", also in Celluloid Crime of the Century. 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. Spoiler: this time there's a happy ending.

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.) "That guy" in this case is David Hess, as can be seen from the finished movie. Sandra doesn't expand on what "mean" refers to in this context. 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?

The answer, fortunately, is almost certainly no. Szulkin comes to the rescue with his Appendix III on pages 208 and 209. This provides us with Last House on the Left's shooting schedule, both the original plan for Night of Vengeance (the movie's shooting title) and, crucially, sound man Jim Hubbard's own diary of what actually happened during those few weeks in autumn 1971.

And if that diary is accurate, and there's no reason to suspect it isn't, then what Lincoln says could not have been true. Both planned and actual schedules are very clear that the Connecticut woods sequences were shot before the New York City apartment filming that included the fire escape scene. In fact, those particular New York scenes were done right at the end of shooting, with the exception of a "make-up day" in Westport.

It's not as if it would have been likely anyway. Transporting two bound women in a car trunk across state lines would be a ridiculous risk to run: quite apart from the physical dangers there were the enormous personal consequences of a patrol stop. A suspected federal kidnapping investigation could have brought the FBI down on the entire exploitation, underground and adult film industry – an industry that was trying very hard to avoid official attention, and was the place Fred Lincoln earned his living.

The obvious answer is that Lincoln was telling a very dry and, judging by the lack of laughter from Hess and Sheffler, not especially effective joke. The world in which Lincoln operated would certainly have seen gallows humour as routine, even if joking about this seems deeply uncomfortable to us today, especially when he had known Sandra for years.

What we can take from this is twofold. First, that not everything we see or hear is necessarily what actually happened, a point I will come back to. And second, that DVD commentary tracks of the early-mid 2000s were often performative "locker room" style spaces where the rules were loose and laddish behaviour was not merely tolerated but expected.

The most important point, however, is that Sandra and Lucy were not in fact endangered in the way that taking Fred Lincoln's words literally would have suggested.

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). 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". In the DVD Region 1 documentary It's Only a Movie: The Making of Last House on the Left, he is even clearer:

We had the same agent. We met. We'd gone on auditions together for different parts, different jobs. I had gotten her work.

My own searching hasn't turned up a film on which both actors worked, but not everything in that era would have been as clearly recorded as it is today. Besides, Lincoln doesn't actually say they'd both won the auditions for any one film.

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), that seems a likely misremembering. Indeed, in the It's Only a Movie documentary Lincoln offers the much more reasonable "maybe three, four years".

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. Upset and fear are not quite the same thing, and Sandra does not touch on her walk-off, but she 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! Not mentioned in Szulkin, but released in the same year as Last House on the Left, was the erotic horror film Voices of Desire.

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 evidence regarding Sandra Peabody's treatment 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.