Wes Craven's old-school attitude to actress fear

Wes Craven is sometimes referred to as an "old-school director". Indeed, John Carpenter of Halloween fame used that exact phrase when paying tribute to Craven after the latter had died in 2015. For the most part, people who say this are doing so as a compliment. This plays into the overwhelmingly positive reputation that Craven has these days – so much so that any serious criticism at all of him is fairly unusual. Blogger AntBit in Projected Figures did use the word "hagiography" in 2020 in their negative assessment of The Hills Have Eyes Part II, but wording that strong is definitely not the norm.

One of the things that's often mentioned about Craven is his "gentlemanly" approach to his actors. Biographies and retrospectives often contrast him with directors like Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) who could push their actors beyond reasonable limits – Marilyn Burns may later have leaned into her experience making that film, but Leatherface actor Gunnar Hansen's insider account Chain Saw Confidential makes it clear that Hooper's approach sometimes extended far beyond anything that would be considered ethical today.

But to return to Craven, let's look at his comments on a commentary track he recorded (along with producer Sean S. Cunningham) for DVDs of The Last House on the Left.¹ This is included on my Metrodrome Region 2 edition (copyrighted 2007 and released in 2008) but I believe it dates from a few years earlier than that. Commentary tracks are frequently revealing, with the informal setting often encouraging cast or crew to speak more freely than they would in a more structured interview. That is the case with Craven. Here, for example, he talks about the scene where Mari is attempting to get Junior to let her go:

I remember doing this scene over and over and over with Sandra, just pushing her and pushing her and pushing her until she got frantic enough, you know. I remember her looking at me like [she was thinking] ‘Just leave me alone, you monster.’ [laughs, pauses until end of scene] And so, like, there’s the take. Just made that moment work.

This particular memory is somewhat troubling by 2025 ethical standards, but it would probably be given a pass by audiences two decades earlier watching a movie three decades older even than that... were it not for the fact that this is the very same scene where Marc Sheffler made his threat to drop Sandra Peabody off a cliff if she did not get it right, as he admitted on Celluloid Crime of the Century.

What's perhaps more striking in its own right is when Craven acknowledges severe fear on Sandra's part. One of the most disturbing parts of Last House is the scene where Krug's gang force Phyllis and Mari to strip and perform sexual acts on each other. Szulkin (p73) calls this sequence "stark and ugly" and "especially creepy". Here's an extract from what Craven has to say about that scene on his commentary track:

David [Hess] was quite scary, especially to Sandra. [...] he wasn’t a nice guy between takes or anything like that, he kept to himself with [Sandra and Lucy Grantham]. I always told her that, you know, he’s an actor and he’ll be responsible, but [...] this all had a very real sense to her [...] Sandra was scared shitless here.

"Scared shitless" is strong language from a director who rarely swears during this commentary. There's no real acknowledgement of Sandra's fear being something requiring intervention, at least beyond Craven's assurances about Hess – which we now know were mistaken.

Finally, and surely most strikingly from the perspective of a modern listener, there's Craven's comment on the sequence where Mari's knife torture leads into her rape. He says about this:

Sandra was, I know, scared to death in this film, but it made for a scene that was absolutely convincing. Because she was genuinely frightened during all of this and as a director sometimes you just stand back and let something play out, you know, the actor’s not really in danger, but it took on a terrible reality. 

This is a startling passage to encounter now. Craven's attitude of non-intervention, of letting an actress's real fear be used to enhance a scene's realism, has far more in common with other exploitation horror directors of the 1970s than it does with the thoughtful and sympathetic elder statesman of horror that he later became. Craven also uses the old-fashioned definition of "danger" as meaning only physical danger. That would not be tolerated on a film set today, not now we know so much more about the importance of psychological and emotional health.

But back in those Connecticut woods in autumn 1971, and even thirty years later when talking about those times, Wes Craven's attitude to a very scared young actress's fear was not quite what many of Craven's modern biographers, assessors – and yes, hagiographers – tend to make it out to be.

¹ Commentary track featuring director Wes Craven and producer Sean S. Cunningham, available on multiple DVD and Blu-ray releases of The Last House on the Left.