It's very rare for the treatment of Sandra Peabody, or even her role as Mari in The Last House on the Left, to gain any coverage in what's often now called "legacy media". For example, searching for her name – including both "Sandra Cassell" and "Sandra Cassel" – in Google brings no hits at all on the New York Times website other than an uncomplimentary review of a 1970 play she acted in. 1
Meanwhile, doing similar for Britain's The Guardian brings up this 2015 piece by Noah Berlatsky, who makes no mention of Sandra's distressing experience but instead solemnly informs us that:
"The whole film is a hyperbolic, moral panic middle-class paranoid fever dream." 2
More recently, we've seen a 50th anniversary piece by Scott Tobias in 2022, which again says nothing about the off-camera events. The ending does however read rather differently to those of us who have learned more about what David Hess in particular said:
"Craven’s seeming artlessness results in a pervasive feeling of helplessness. We might wish it were only a movie, but it’s not so easily shaken." 3
Finally, there's this, by prominent film critic Mark Kermode. This 2024 article is a more general piece about Wes Craven, whom he interviewed many times, written to mark the 40th birthday of A Nightmare on Elm Street. The last couple of paragraphs, however, do cover Last House, with Kermode's own part in its story being mentioned:
"When a British distributor appealed against the 16 seconds of cuts applied by the BBFC in 2002 to the previously banned film, I was asked to submit a report establishing the film’s historical stature – after which the BBFC doubled the length of the cuts." 4
There is no suggestion that Kermode knew in 2002 about what David Hess in particular was about to claim on multiple DVD and then Blu-ray extras, nor that he knew about Hess's comments when he wrote that article last year. Even so, these three articles mention concerns over Last House on the Left's production precisely zero times, which is perhaps notable for a newspaper with The Guardian's strong ethical stance.
These two publications' lack of coverage of Sandra's experience rather sets the pattern. While I don't have access to the enormous newspapers.com library and so can only mention what I can see via Google or archive.org, for the most part I've found very little in the mainstream press. I've looked at the USA's Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, Britain's Independent and Daily Telegraph, Australia's Sydney Morning Herald, Canada's Globe and Mail and more besides. Even where Last House is covered at all, the off-camera concerns get nary a mention.
In fact, I've only found two articles that cover Sandra Peabody beyond simply discussing Mari's fictional torment. The first is a Daily Mail piece from 2023 about "video nasties", the name given in the UK to films that were released to video in Britain before the Video Recordings Act 1984 banned the home distribution of movies which had not obtained a BBFC certificate. For many years, Last House could not be legally sold on video for this reason. Mail writer Matt Drake says:
"Sandra Peabody who starred in the movie said she regretted appearing in the movie due to a constantly changing script and suffering abuse from her male co-stars." 5
Sandra does indeed tell Szulkin (p50) of feeling unsure about how the script was going to be changed, but she doesn't use the word "abuse" in the entire book. The closest she comes is in her description of Hess's night-time knife stalking, and even then she limits herself to "I was scared". She's never said explicitly that she regretted appearing in the film, either.
As a reminder: if it's not in the Szulkin book, then it's not an official Sandra Peabody quote. In half a century, she has not spoken on the record to anyone else about Last House on the Left.
More recently, and again in the British media, Metro – a free-sheet widely distributed in railway stations, on buses and the like – in March 2025 featured an article by Brooke Ivey Johnson talking about the need for intimacy co-ordinators in Hollywood. The article is very bitty, as is Metro's style, but deep in the body text we get:
"Sandra Peabody in The Last House on the Left endured equally vile treatment, with her co-star David Hess allegedly threatening to actually violate her in a rape scene they were about to film. Many people involved in the film later stated how the actress was scared he might actually hurt her and how all her reactions to the 'simulated' assault were real." 6
This isn't bad at all, certainly compared with the slew of often barely coherent Last House listicle entries out there. Hess did claim he'd threatened Sandra with rape, and that she hadn't been sure whether he'd go through with it. "Many people" might be a bit of an exaggeration for the "hurt her" claim, but we certainly hear that Sandra was scared of Hess from both Wes Craven and Fred Lincoln in Celluloid Crime of the Century, and from Marc Sheffler in a 2022 YouTube interview. 7
Still, these are isolated pinpricks of light in a "legacy media" landscape that on the whole seems deeply uninterested in what happened to a young actress on an exploitation film set over fifty years ago. Even Wes Craven's name doesn't seem to be enough to bring mainstream attention back to Sandra and what she went through while making this highly influential film.
As I keep on saying: Sandra Peabody deserves better.
1 "Stage: A Musical by The Rubber Duck". The New York Times (13 December 1970). p84.
2 Berlatsky, Noah. "Wes Craven's brutal truths about sex, death and childhood". theguardian.com (1 September 2015).
3 Tobias, Scott. "The Last House on the Left at 50: Wes Craven’s shock horror retains its power to shock". theguardian.com (30 August 2022).
4 Kermode, Mark. "Mark Kermode on… director Wes Craven, who made horror ‘a positive force in a world filled with fear". theguardian.com (3 March 2024).
5 Drake, Matt. "The original 'Video Nasties': The low budget horror films released using a loophole straight to VHS - so how many have YOU seen?", dailymail.co.uk (6 August 2003).
6 Ivey Johnson, Brooke. "Gwyneth Paltrow’s creepy comments about sex scenes are why intimacy coordinators are needed". metro.co.uk (19 March 2025).
7 "Marc Sheffler sits down w/ Hollywood Wade to discuss the infamous Horror film Last house on the Left", Hollywood Wade | Crime & Entertainment, 4 Sep 2022. Timestamp 36:30
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