As we've seen, coverage of Sandra Peabody's experience when filming The Last House on the Left in legacy media is extremely thin. While there is rather more mention of on-set events in online sources, these often treat Sandra's mistreatment lightly, framing it in terms of "Did you know?" pieces or even as trivia. We will return to look at that in more depth in a future post. Today, though, I want to highlight an exception.
Horror-themed podcasts are common, and inevitably I haven't been able to listen to all those that have covered Last House. The only podcast I have personally heard that covers what happened to Sandra in any depth at all is the four-part Road to Nowhere series, produced by the Anatomy of a Scream Pod Squad in summer 2021. This is available on both Amazon and Apple platforms:
Amazon episodes: one, two, three, four.
Apple episodes: one, two, three, four.
The overall running time well exceeds two hours, and many aspects of Last House on the Left are covered, ranging from Wes Craven's early life to a look at postmodernism in horror. However, just over a minute into episode one there is a sign that Road to Nowhere will be covering Sandra:
"I will be covering the harrowing accounts by crew members of when pantomime violence turned into actual assault."
("Pantomime" here is used in the US English sense. ) Still, only near the end of episode two, "The Swingin’ ‘60s & Horror Nihilism", do we see that Road to Nowhere will break from the pack in covering Last House's making. At 30:16 comes a note by the podcaster that they are themselves a sexual assault survivor, and that transgressive horror can be cathartic, followed by:
"But it would be irresponsible of me to only throw praise at and study the film without exploring how dangerous a set this was for the people working on it, particularly the women. The film, no matter how loud a statement against violence it may be, still ended up inflicting real violence on at least one of its leads."
The host notes that Sandra walked out of a screening of the movie, something confirmed by the actress herself in Szulkin (p117). This we will also return to in a future post. The Road to Nowhere podcaster finishes by noting the difficulty of finding Sandra talking about Last House – though not explicitly that Szulkin is the only source – but adds that "given what she went through, it's not surprising".
Episode three is titled simply "Sandra Peabody", a rare centring of Sandra in horror media coverage. The first half of the 23-minute episode is devoted entirely to her, with Jara drawing on David Szulkin's book. There is the odd error, such as saying that Yvonne Hannemann needed consoling during production when in fact she had said Sandra needed consoling after the rape scene, but mostly things are solid.
Jara offers a biographical introduction to Sandra Peabody, including her early low-budget films and her study under Sanford Meisner, as well as her "fateful" decision to respond to a casting call for what was then called Night of Vengeance. Jara's statement that "from the beginning, the dark energy surrounding the film created an oppressive work environment" is a stretch, but after Jeramie Rain's comment on how Phyllis's death scene put her off eating meat, at 03:53 the podcaster says:
"This blurring of reality and fiction caught Sandra off-guard, despite her American Playhouse training. [...] It is a gross exaggeration, however, to blame her for any of the film's missteps, especially since she was being asked to act her way through real instances of abuse."
There follows a fairly lengthy extract from Celluloid Crime of the Century, disappointingly uncredited and with its speakers unnamed. It's from the middle part of the documentary which contains a dense series of Sandra-related events, including David Hess's "Can I?" anecdote, Wes Craven and Fred Lincoln talking about Sandra's fear, and the base version of Marc Sheffler's cliff threat.
Jara returns to editorial comment at 06:53, saying:
"Learning about Sandra's on-set abuse makes it all the more heartbreaking to watch her character walk numbingly into the lake [...] where she is then shot."
We're then told briefly of Sandra's move from acting to children's TV production, followed by her roles as talent agent and acting coach. Jara does however suggests that her role in Voices of Desire, released only slightly after Last House on the Left, "struck a haunting note" during research. We're played a short extract of a scene where Sandra's character is running through an apparently haunted house, to which the podcaster says:
"What is unnerving about the film is just how closely it follows the narrative of a woman attempting to recover from a long period of abuse. It is difficult not to see parallels between her experience on the set of The Last House on the Left and this nightmarish sequence."
After this, Jara makes a striking comment, drawing on personal experience as a survivor:
"The difficulty [...] has always been reconciling this film's significance to me and to a breadth of works in the horror genre with Sandra Peabody's abuse."
This is a profoundly important point, and it's a bit of a shame that it's not explored in any real depth thereafter, even in the near-hour-long fourth episode in which the podcaster talks to writer and musician Ten Backe as the latter gives her own perspective on the film. Still, the segment's closing words are clear and direct:
"My final thoughts on Sandra rest with the hope that she and anyone else who was impacted by the abuse on this set was able to find peace in the 50 years since. No amount of criticism can absolve the production as a site of real-life abuse, however, and I reject the kind of film-making which endangers cast members to a point of inflicting trauma. I do not see putting your cast and crew in harm's way as aspirational in the slightest."
Whether or not her Last House experience "inflict[ed] trauma" on Sandra Peabody is not for me to say, and of course the filming did see multiple people show empathy and kindness to her. Nonetheless, Jara's expressed wish that Sandra has been able to find peace is strong and compassionate, and Road to Nowhere shows a rare and significant concern for her not merely as Mari's actress but as a person.
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