The cliff threat – Celluloid Crime of the Century

After having been denied a certificate for home media distribution in the UK for many years, The Last House on the Left was granted an 18 certificate (albeit with some cuts) by the BBFC in 2002. This was at the heart of the DVD era, and unsurprisingly Region 2 discs and collector's edition box sets appeared quickly. As part of the UK release, Blue Underground made a forty-minute documentary about the making of Last House which has become one of the most commonly included extras on the movie's physical media. This was Celluloid Crime of the Century.

The documentary includes contributions from nearly all the major cast and crew who worked on the film, from Wes Craven to Fred Lincoln. There are two notable absentees. One is Lucy Grantham, although she does appear on a Region 1 documentary called It's Only a Movie. The other is, unsurprisingly, Sandra Peabody. (She is sometimes credited in listings, but that's due to the inclusion of some footage featuring her from the film.) Some people talk about her, but she herself doesn't appear.

Celluloid Crime of the Century, a reference to one of Last House's rejected titles, Sex Crime of the Century, contains plenty of standard making-of anecdotes, such as Jeramie Rain lamenting the "scummy and dirty" state of a pool she was required to fall into after her character was attacked. It contains comments that would have passed unnoticed in the 1970s and to an extent still in 2002, but raise far more eyebrows today, such as Craven's comment that Sandra "very often wasn't acting" her fear and "really was afraid of" Hess.

But one thing that went well beyond these is a segment from Marc Sheffler, who played Junior in the film. Recalling the scene where Mari is trying to persuade Junior to let her go, the two of them sitting on a ledge above water, Sheffler says that he was getting "really upset" because they'd needed multiple takes and he "was hitting it all the time and, you know, [Sandra] wasn't getting it." He then continues:

So, I recall turning to Wes [Craven] and saying, "Uh, uh, shut... give me two minutes with her." And, uh, what happened was I grabbed her and I put her head over the cliff and I said, "If you don't get it right the next time, I'm going to throw you over here and like Wes will shoot it and it'll be great footage and you'll get hurt and you know, they'll take— call an ambulance and that'll be that. But you really need to do this cuz I will throw you over." And she got it on the next take.

That's the end of the story, after which Sheffler ends the segment with a smile and a little chuckle. "She got it on the next take" tells us that the scene we see in the movie – where Mari certainly looks frantic and anxious – was filmed almost immediately after Sandra Peabody had been threatened with being dropped off a cliff. And the way Sheffler tells the story ("give me two minutes with her") tells us that the threat was made away from Craven.

Several things now need to be mentioned. First: there is no suggestion of malicious intent and no reason to doubt Sheffler's statement that he did this out of frustration. Second, and something that differentiates him very clearly from Hess: this was a single incident, not part of a campaign of intimidation. Sheffler doesn't always speak of Sandra kindly (on a DVD commentary track he calls her "a pain in the ass")¹ but that's not the same thing.

Third: Marc Sheffler has told the story in his own words multiple times, whether in a documentary as here, on a commentary track, or in interviews available online. The details do vary somewhat, which is a subject we shall return to, but the broad strokes are consistent: he felt Sandra was not getting the scene right, he threatened her with being dropped over a cliff of some kind, then on the next take she hit her marks and he framed that as successful problem-solving.

This is where the problem comes in. While, again, there was no malice involved, there didn't need to be for this to be deeply problematic. As an analogy: if I produce a gun and threaten to shoot you in the leg unless you obey me, and only later reveal it was a dummy and I'd never have hurt you, that's still wrong. A threat which is received as at least potentially credible by Sandra, which it must have been or it would have had no effect, is in itself unethical.

This is a different kind of incident from those we have looked at concerning David Hess. Most notably, it is not sexualised or predatory abuse. It is also situational: the threat was confined to a single moment. Nevertheless, it was a significant one – mention of an ambulance in Sheffler's wording shows us that the effect on Sandra was not intended to be trivial. That alone adds to the picture of a set which for her was a frightening and unsafe place to be.

Celluloid Crime of the Century is available on many DVD and Blu-ray editions of Last House on the Left. It is also accessible on YouTube. I have chosen not to embed it in this post, but at the time of writing it can be viewed here.

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.