The incident when Sandra Peabody walked off the set of The Last House on the Left has already been covered here What's less often mentioned – although the Road to Nowhere podcast did – is Sandra's walk-out from a cast, crew and backers screening of the film before its August 1972 public release.
In March of that year, such a screening was held in Manhattan, and Szulkin informs us (p117) that Sandra attended with her mother. It's not stated what form the film was in at the time, but it seems likely that it was almost complete and included sequences that are no longer found in modern cuts, such as the extended version of Phyllis's disembowelment.
The screening did not go well for Sandra, who was quite open to Szulkin about her unhappiness with the film at that time:
"I was horrified and upset. It was not at all what I thought it would be. I think the most upsetting scene for me was the one in the woods... but I don't think I ever saw the whole thing. When I went and viewed it, I walked out."
"The one in the woods" is not further described, but we also know from Szulkin (p73) that Sandra found one of the woods-set sections, which before cuts included forced oral sex on Mari by Phyllis and then Sadie, "very upsetting" to film and cried a lot while making it. Wes Craven acknowledged that Sandra was "scared shitless here". She says she didn't "know how it came off, probably horribly" – which suggests she'd never seen that sequence in its final form.
Marshall Anker, who played the incompetent sheriff, was also at the same screening and was sitting next to Sandra. His comment on the occasion (p117) is somewhat unsympathetic:
"She was very upset by what she was seeing [...] Sandra was carrying on, 'Oh my God! Oh, it's so horrible! All that blood!' I thought to myself, 'Doesn't she know what she did? What did she think this movie was going to be, a comedy?'"
This is perhaps a little unfair, and not only because the parts Anker appeared in were largely comedic. Sound man Jim Hubbard points out (Szulkin, pp190–91) that people involved in shooting a film can be concentrating on what they have to do in the moment, and that it's "therefore sometimes shocking" when they see the final results after editing. Hubbard says:
"[T]his was definitely the case with Last House. It was so much more gruesome and appalling than my impressions of its making that I was amazed."
Other Last House personnel have considerably more positive memories of the screening. Sean Cunningham says, "We had a great time" – which rather ignores the fact that Sandra clearly did not – while David Hess states that he went to all of the pre-release screenings in spring and summer 1972 and "the reactions were amazing!"
When she was interviewed in the 1990s for Szulkin's book, Sandra told him (p189) that:
"I have not seen this film in a long time, so to recollect it is hard."
Indeed, already by the mid-1980s newspapers covering her work on Popcorn were omitting her film acting career from her career summary altogether. Probably few people then even knew of the existence of Voices of Desire or Teenage Hitchhikers, but by that time The Last House on the Left had already acquired a cult following. It seems likely that Sandra herself left it out of the career highlights she provided for publication.
To this day, in her biography on the website of the institution where she still coaches, Sandra Peabody does not mention the film that "horrified and upset" her as soon as she saw it on screen. For a major star of a movie to make negative feelings known at a private screening like this really gets noticed, as Anker's comment shows. Sandra took the courageous option and walked out rather than endure more.
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