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
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