Today I'm looking at another of the extras on my Arrow Blu-ray of The Last House on th Left. This is "Junior's Story", a 15-minute piece that's billed as an interview with Marc Sheffler but is more of an edited monologue as we never hear the questions. This was recorded in 2017 and directed by none other than David Szulkin.
Sheffler talks about his early acting experiences and how he got on board with Last House in the first place, but the part we're interested in here – the part about Sandra Peabody – starts at 08:10 on my disc. He confirms that David Hess really did stay in character the entire time they were filming:
"[Hess] became Krug on set and off set. Twenty-four hours a day, all Krug, all the time."
Indeed, Yvonne Hannemann corroborates this in Szulkin (p51) when she says:
"[The actors] stayed in those characters for a few weeks! [...] David Hess was really fearsome. David truly was this menacing character throughout the shoot."
At 08:22 in the interview, Sheffler talks about Mari's rape scene. He provides vivid and frankly disturbing detail of how this was filmed, starting with this:
"The rape scene is what freaked Sandra out the most, I mean, because... David was... brutal with her."
We know from both Wes Craven and Hannemann in Szulkin (p79) that the scene was very rough, that it was distressing and that Sandra needed consoling, but Sheffler goes a step further and calls Hess's playing of the scene "brutal". He then explains how Craven's directing allowed Hess to behave as he did:
"the way Wes covered it, he pretty much locked off the camera and let it play, and David knew that. You know, so he wasn't trying to hit marks or anything, with movement, so he just went at her."
The director himself, speaking in Celluloid Crime of the Century, concentrated on the technical side of this approach rather than its human impact. He said that he had taken a "documentarian" decision in deciding how to film the scene:
"[I] essentially said, I'm going to stage, we're going to shoot this three times. We're going to take it from beginning to end, and I'm going to put the camera in three different places, just as if I were had three documentarian cameras at a real event. And then somehow I'll cut it together."
The result was that Sandra was expected to endure Hess's aggressive interpretation of Krug's assault for unbroken minutes at a time. Hess himself told Szulkin (p79) that he "got pretty physical with her" and that she "couldn't back off when the camera was running". Sheffler is quite open about the effect this had on Sandra:
"[A] lot of what you see from her is real. Because she was scared shitless, and I don't blame her."
This is notably empathetic – although as far as I can tell, nobody on Last House's cast or crew has ever publicly expressed regret at how the rape scene was staged or how frightened Sandra was. But Sheffler's comment, along with Craven's own observations on her fear, make it clear that she isn't just acting terrified on screen when you watch that sequence: she is terrified.
Sheffler goes on to talk about Sandra leaving the set and hitch-hiking back to New York City; he further corroborates what we already know in terms of Fred Lincoln going after her and "convinc[ing] her that he would make sure nothing bad ever happened to her." Sadly Lincoln was not able to control Hess's comments about Sandra on DVD and Blu-ray extras in the 2000s.
Slightly oddly, Sheffler says "it got to be such" that Sandra walked off, which phrasing might imply that this happened later on in filming – except that we already know from Lincoln in Szulkin (p50) that it was perhaps only a day or two into the Connecticut portion of the shoot. There's no specific evidence either way about whether Sandra was already frightened during the earlier-shot scenes, such as those with Mari interacting with her parents.
What is certain is that Sheffler talks about how Sandra's fear led to her walk-off, and the way he describes it goes well beyond mere nervousness:
"She couldn't take it. She couldn't take Hess. She was... frightened of Hess to the core of her existence. She couldn't... be in the same room with him without her blood pressure going up. She was utterly intimidated."
As with his choice of the word "brutal", this is very strong language from Sheffler. If an actress was frightened of a co-star "to the core of her existence" today, it would be grounds for immediate intervention. In early 1970s exploitation film-making, things were often very different, even when as in this case the director was no monster.
Marc Sheffler's interview solidifies the view that the way the rape scene was shot left Sandra vulnerable, with only minimal protection from the man playing Mari's rapist. Even without Hess's own claim on the commentary track that he threatened her with actual rape, the scene was enough to leave a man only partially involved (Junior stands uncomfortably on the sidelines) sympathising with Sandra Peabody's terror.
Sheffler doesn't blame Sandra for being terrified at Hess's behaviour during the rape scene. I don't blame her either.
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