"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.