Surgeons of Horror is a long-running blog which advertises itself as "dissecting horror films". One of its earliest posts – in fact only the second, made in May 2016 – is about Last House on the Left. The post itself does not say all that much beyond the obvious, but at the end are links to a podcast. The ones there are now dead, but the episode remains available on Spotify.
As might perhaps be expected of a recording from so early in a series' life and so long ago – notably, before #MeToo took root – the episode has at times very poor sound quality, which makes it difficult to reliably pick out who of the three participants (Paul Farrell, Ben Skinner and Miles Davies) is speaking. As such, I will not identify individual speakers here; apologies to the personnel in question.
The episode lasts 79 minutes and ranges widely, covering subjects as different as VHS video cover designs and how censors can sometimes be more lenient with non-sexual violence than with consensual sex. However, here I shall concentrate on what they say about Sandra Peabody's experience.
This is not Road to Nowhere – the word "abuse" is never uttered and that podcast's strong moral tone in terms of Sandra's treatment is largely absent. However, nor are the Surgeons of Horror team members purely celebratory. After a while, they go through the movie's plot points in roughly chronological order, and when they get to the forced oral sex scene one says:
"It is kind of quite gratuitous in the way it's handled. Sandra [...] was actually genuinely quite scared and there's a bit where Lucy who plays Phyllis [...] is talking her through it saying, "It's okay, there's no one else around here." All of that was actually improvised [...] Which makes you kind of really start to think it was quite a harrowing thing going on. "
This reference to Lucy Grantham's compassionate response to Sandra's distress is quite often mentioned, but it's unusual to see it specifically noted as suggesting that the scene was "harrowing" for Sandra, despite this being a matter of record thanks to her telling Szulkin (p73) that she found this part of the movie very upsetting to film.
Very shortly afterwards, the podcasters note the looseness of the script and the level of improvisation, pointing out how much a situation like this requires actors to trust their director:
"Wes [Craven] is [...] not the skilled director that he went on to become, and [...] just allowing the actors to improvise [and if you do that] it can easily swing in the wrong direction. [...] I'm sure [Sandra] was just like, just praying he would call cut [...] at any point."
Since the improvisational nature of the script is quite often framed positively by horror writers, this is a notably empathetic reading, and one which recognises the power imbalance present on set. It should however be emphasised that Sandra herself has never confirmed or denied that she was "praying [Craven] would call cut".
A little later, we reach the scene where Mari is attempting to get Junior to release her, which thanks to Marc Sheffler's repeated stories we know was when the cliff threat occurred. The speaker says:
"When you learn this stuff, I'm seriously watching this thinking, 'Uh, what's going on here?'"
As often in shows that run through the chronology quickly, however, there's no dwelling on something has clearly disconcerted the podcaster. We soon arrive at Mari's rape scene, and given its pivotal nature unsurprisingly this gets attention from the Surgeons of Horror team:
"David Hess even said that [...] he could sense that she was really, really genuinely scared in that moment, you know, and it's not, she's not acting by that point. Hmm. She was really, really scared"
This is a sanitised version of the various things Hess actually said about Sandra in that scene, perhaps sourced from a listicle, though I don't know for sure. There's then a brief comment about Krug's drooling, though the coverage doesn't go into its real-life effects on Sandra beyond noting that "the act alone is invasive" and acknowledging that it makes the effect more shocking.
After the chronological run through the fictional story has ended, the podcasters discuss the characters, beginning with Mari. Unusually, they cover her role in Teenage Hitchhikers before moving on to Last House itself. Sandra's fear is again mentioned:
"Sandra was scared [...] of the guys in the movie, the three [villains] and actually, she actually walked off set before they were ready to shoot, only to be persuaded to come back."
There then follows the common and depressingly minimising description of Hess's behaviour as "a bit method", but then we get a more interesting and insightful comment from the same speaker:
"[Sandra] was really intimidated by [Hess] in particular [and] when you kind of watch this stuff and read about it, you just start to question the logic behind it."
It's not often you get a podcaster – other, of course, than Jara on Road to Nowhere – who openly questions whether this approach was acceptable. After a brief diversion, he goes on to say that, although his own approach to acting and directing has generally been aligned with letting the actors "roll with it":
"you kind of are a bit awakened to the impact that that could necessarily have [and] I wonder how damaging being in this movie was for her [Sandra]. I mean, [she] has never spoken on any of the commentary stuff and come out and spoken about the impact it's had on her."
Sandra has of course spoken to Szulkin, whose book is mentioned in another context elsewhere in the podcast, but it is certainly true that she's never spoken on camera or tape about Last House on the Left. This last extract is considerably more thoughtful than a lot of informal (and even formal) media coverage of this film in terms of considering the human impact of the way it was made. Most of all, it centres Sandra.
Sadly, once again there's no pause for a more detailed examination of this point – Road to Nowhere really does stand out in this regard – and the rest of the podcast is a fairly straightforward mixture of analysis and silly humour.
In 2022, Surgeons of Horror like many other sources noted the 50th anniversary of the film's release with a retrospective post. The piece by Saul Muerte runs to nearly 600 words, but despite #MeToo by then having had considerable effect on discourse elsewhere, there's almost no coverage of the ethics of Last House's production. All we get is this oblique sentence:
"It should also be noted that some scenes were questionably pushed beyond the limits of decency; a sign of creative freedom at the risk of the players involved."
It's jarring to see a piece include a mention of "risk of the players involved" but then move immediately on to the link between the names of Krug and Freddy Krueger. Given that the podcast at least considered Sandra Peabody's experience on set, if sometimes frustratingly superficially, the lack of any further comment in a relatively lengthy blog post feels like a missed opportunity.
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