Today I'm introducing David A. Szulkin's Wes Craven's Last House on the Left: The Making of a Cult Classic. The one in the photo above is my own copy, which as you can see could do with cleaning the fingerprints off. This is an exceptionally important resource, because it is – as far as I am aware – the one and only time that Sandra Peabody has gone on the record with her thoughts about making The Last House on the Left. It's a quarter of a century now since it appeared, but it remains essential reading.
The book was first published in 1997, but an expanded edition appeared in 2000 and that is the one I own. Unfortunately it's not absolutely clear exactly what was added for that edition. The book has been out of print for many years now, so I was very lucky to track down an ex-library copy on AbeBooks for around £25 a few months ago. The book seems to have been published simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic – the price on the back is in both pounds and dollars. My own copy is the UK second edition, published by FAB Press (ISBN: 9781903254011).
Of course, many other people than Sandra (who is mostly referred to here as Sandra Cassell, as she was credited for the movie) are interviewed for the book, and there are times when this is important for alternate perspectives of a particular scene or event. Still, most of those have spoken publicly on multiple occasions over the years, including in published interviews or documentaries. Sandra has not. As such, this is the only place where you can find what she actually said, rather than what people believe she may have thought. That matters.
To look at it from the outside you'd think this would be the usual cheap cash-in making-of book: it's a little smaller than A4 size and has the infamous "It's Only a Movie" logo on the front and a photo of the looming Krug, Weasel and Sadie on the back. That preconception would, however, be unfair to Szulkin, who clearly knows his subject very well indeed. For our purposes on this blog, the third and longest chapter, "Babes in the Woods: A Crash Course in Guerilla Film Making" is by far the most important, and I will be referring to it frequently.
Wes Craven's Last House on the Left seems to have been well received on its publication. Of course publishers generally select the review quotes that make them look best for their back covers, but for example Empire said it "[b]rilliantly reassesse[d] the film's position in the annals of horror", while the short-lived Neon called it "fascinating, professional, and very funny". Obviously from the point of view of this blog, "very funny" might feel inappropriate, but that is no reflection on Szulkin himself.
One vitally important point to bear in mind is that, when this book appeared, we did not have the collection of published sources we do now. David Hess's Vanity Fair confession was still years away, and neither Celluloid Crime of the Century – an important making-of documentary which I will cover in due course – nor key DVD commentary tracks had yet appeared. As we will see, reading Szulkin with knowledge of those later sources can sometimes bring extra understanding (and in places extra concern) about some comments.
This is the only book by David Szulkin that I own, and as far as I know he's never published another one about Last House. As such, if I refer to "Szulkin" as a source without further qualification in the blog, then this is the book I will mean.
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