"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.