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| p308, rendered unreadably small for fair use reasons. Hess's quote is between the black lines |
Back in the March 2008 edition of Vanity Fair, there was a five thousand word feature article which went into considerable depth about horror cinema pioneers such as George Romero, Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven. The article was bylined Jason Zinoman and was titled "Killer Instincts". David Hess was interviewed for the piece and provided a few short quotes about his time working on The Last House on the Left, though one does get the impression he actually said a little more than made it to print. Still, the quote that matters here is this one:
David Hess, who played Krug with a coiled, maniacal aggression, approached the role with a Method actor's intensity. "I was very mean to the girls, so when it came to the rape scene, [Sandra Cassell] didn't have to act," he says, referring to a co-star who played one of the victims. "I told her, 'I'm really going to fuck you if you don't behave yourself. They'll just let the camera run. I'm going to devastate you.' I don't think she was too happy about that."
When I first came across this – stumbled over it, frankly – I just stared at it for a while. I'd never seen it before, didn't even know it existed. I'll come back to that point in a minute, but this is the closest we're ever likely to get to a smoking gun. This is David Hess, in print, on the record, in a mainstream publication with fact-checkers and a legal team, saying explicitly that he threatened Sandra with sexual violence in order to get a reaction. Let's not soften this by using the unhelpful American media euphemism "assault", either. "I'm really going to fuck you" is unambiguous. He means rape.
This quote also torpedoes the defence of Hess sometimes offered, and indeed the one hinted at in the extract above: that he was merely an extreme Method actor remaining permanently in character. It's not a good defence at the best of times, since that version of Method acting sometimes seems to treat other people's boundaries, consent and welfare as irritating irrelevances to For The Shot – but it fails completely here. Krug isn't making a movie. He would never have said "They'll just let the camera run." He doesn't even have a camera.
This isn't Krug threatening to rape Mari. It's David Hess threatening to rape Sandra Peabody.
That's also clear from his comment that because he was "very mean" (what a euphemism that is) to the girls – Lucy Grantham (Phyllis) presumably being the other – Sandra "didn't have to act" in Mari's rape scene. This is where I pause once again and ask you to consider. When a woman is playing the victim in a notoriously brutal rape scene, do you really think it's a fantastic idea if she "didn't have to act"? No, 1970s exploitation often didn't devote much time to actress welfare, but there were still limits. On Last House there doesn't seem to have been much of a boundary set by Hess short of "No actual rape." As he wasn't an actual rapist, that didn't bother him.
On top of all this, and that appalling and cruel "devastate" closer, there's the clear coercion revealed in the phrase "if you don't behave yourself". This explicitly ties Sandra's personal safety to doing what Hess wants. It doesn't matter ethically that he would not have followed through on his threat of physical violence; that he made the threat with the intention that it produce terror (she "didn't have to act") is enough to be abusive. The lack of any clear indication of what "behave" actually meant made it worse, as Sandra could not be sure which actions might be considered misbehaviour by Hess.
As I said, this was a five thousand word feature article. Hess's admission comes about two thousand words into the piece. Well, I say "admission" but it's lacking in any kind of regret or compassion. "I don't think she was too happy about that" is stomach-turning; you can almost hear Hess smirking. Zinoman leaves the quote to stand without editorial comment, startling enough in itself from a 2025 perspective, but then goes on to discuss and interview Wes Craven at some length. The number of words devoted to asking Craven about his lead actor threatening his lead actress with rape on his film set?
Zero.
I'll be fair to Zinoman here and say I suspect that, given the culture of that magazine at the time, this was more of an editorial decision than a writer's. But even if we assume that is the case, it is a staggering ethical failure. I was an adult in 2008. If I'd said what Hess did in the course of my job, my feet wouldn't have touched the ground. I'd have been dismissed the same day for gross misconduct, and rightly so. Yet here's an article published in the mainstream media that same year where "I threatened to rape my co-star" is apparently treated as a snippet of colourful trivia from the old days.
I said I'd come back to my not knowing the Vanity Fair quote existed. That's because, apparently, almost nobody has ever mentioned it. If I do a Google on the terms "David Hess" and "They'll just let the camera run. I'm going to devastate you" (avoiding the swear word in case it's asterisked out in any sources) then guess how many hits I get. Go on, guess. It's been seventeen years, remember. No? Then I'll tell you.
Three.
One is the article itself. One is a 2012 academic paper by Allison Virginia Craig.¹ And one is this Quora post. And that last one was written by me a few weeks ago, just after I discovered the article. That's all. Allowing for the fact that there may have been some coverage in publications now lost or outside the scope of Google, that means that the entirety of the professional, semi-professional and fan horror media have either completely missed a star of a landmark horror movie openly admitting to a rape threat, which is very bad – or have seen it but decided not to cover it, which is even worse.
As we'll see as this blog continues, this is not the only time that a blatant confession of abuse in easily accessible Last House media has been repeatedly ignored. This may be the most egregious example of all, though, since unlike many of the others it would surely have been seen by fans not merely of Last House on the Left but of that era of cinema in general: Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, etc. None of them seem to have posted about Hess's threat anywhere indexed by Google, either.
Outside of Vanity Fair itself, the only people who ever seem to have mentioned this are Craig and me. The people who've read her paper or my Quora post know, and now you know as well. Thank you for adding to their number. As with so much about this film, Sandra Peabody deserves better.
¹ Craig, Allison Virginia, ""Only a girl like this can know what's happened to you" : traumatic subjects in contemporary American narratives" (2012). Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024). 535. https://doi.org/10.54014/P20D-9BFW
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