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.
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