Psychological torturer or serial fantasist? The David Hess problem

When it comes to significant incidents involving Sandra Peabody and The Last House on the Left, most are corroborated from multiple sources, as I noted the other day. There are only a few exceptions to this. One is the story about David Hess's night-time knife stalking, which comes from Sandra herself, while Fred Lincoln's comment implying that Sandra and Lucy Grantham were transported bound in a car trunk seems almost certain to have been an off-colour joke.

Sandra's intense fear of David Hess in particular is corroborated. The rape scene being rough and distressing is corroborated. Hess remaining in character outside filming periods is corroborated. Sandra's deep upset at the forced lesbianism scenes is corroborated. Sandra leaving the set is corroborated. Marc Sheffler holding Sandra over a cliff and threatening to throw her over it is corroborated.

There is however one major class of incidents for which we only have a single person's word: the stories of sexualised intimidation and threats from Hess, for which again and again the only direct source is David Hess himself. To list these:

• Direct rape threat admission one, in Vanity Fair
• Direct rape threat admission two, on the commentary track
• Presenting the emotionally shattered Sandra as a sexual opportunity, in "Scoring Last House"
• Asking "Can I?" and causing Sandra to "freak", in Celluloid Crime of the Century
• Admitting scaring Sandra leading her to "probably" fear rape, in "Krug Conquers England"

We have no direct corroboration for any of these stories. Even in the commentary track example, where Lincoln and Sheffler are present, those two never challenge nor even comment on the threat itself. They follow up with a variety of jokes and observations about the scene in question, but they never directly address the threat that Hess has just related in a way that is both highly explicit and demeaning to Sandra.¹

It's very noticeable that all the stories listed have something to do with the filming of Mari's rape scene – a scene that we know was very rough and frightening for Sandra. In all but the Vanity Fair version of the rape threat story, Hess mentions removing Sandra's pants. In both the rape threat stories he ties coercion to the threat: "...if you don't behave yourself" in one, "...if you don't do this right" in the other.

Hess states on the commentary track that he "had so much fun with Sandra", holding character with her for four weeks and pushing her to the point of "run[ning] away". If he is telling the truth about his threats of rape, and if he did indeed keep up this level of intimidation and threat through multiple incidents, then what is already very severe abuse would escalate to the level where it could fairly be described as psychological torture.

Given the moral weight of that term, we should ask ourselves whether at least some of those incidents may actually be the same incident, just told in different ways for different audiences. A detail that suggests this might be the case is this: if Hess had ripped Sandra's pants off on four separate occasions, it might well still have been frightening but it would not have had the shock value that Hess's storytelling implies it does. We know pants removal in itself happened at least once, as it's in the filmed scene.

If Hess threatened Sandra with rape even once in a way that she found credible, then that is extreme abuse in and of itself. Indeed, all the examples in the list above are abusive in that they treat Sandra as a dehumanised object for Hess to manipulate by causing her genuine, sexualised, non-acted fear. There is no circumstance in which behaving like that is a legitimate acting technique, Method or otherwise.

We can guess that at least some of the disturbing stories Hess tells may be at least partly true, using circumstantial evidence such as his absolute refusal to display compassion or regret to Sandra even in the last year of his life. We can also consider the fact that abusers frequently frame stories about what they've done to elevate themselves and undermine the survivor.²

But we cannot say that we know, because we have no evidence from anyone else. All we know for sure is that Hess repeatedly told these stories, on two occasions going so far as to represent himself as a man who threatened a young actress with rape and treating that as an artistic achievement. That in itself is reputationally and emotionally abusive, injurious to Sandra's dignity, and highly dangerous in that it risks normalising such behaviour.

Sandra Peabody had no control over the content of these stories, no realistic way to stop Hess representing her bodily autonomy as being something under his control, and no way to respond without compromising the peace and privacy she has chosen for so many years. So perhaps the fairest conclusion we can draw is that David Hess bragged about what, if true, we could reasonably call psychological torture. That is damning in itself.

¹ Commentary track featuring actors David Hess, Marc Sheffler and Fred Lincoln, available on multiple DVD and Blu-ray releases of The Last House on the Left.
² Flannery, Shelley. "Whan an Abuser Controls the Story". domesticshelters.org (17 June 2020).