"She was not into any of that stuff" – Sandra as odd woman out

Sandra Peabody's Last House on the Left experience included abuse and mistreatment, with even director Wes Craven later acknowledging that the production "put her through hell". One of the factors sometimes mentioned as having contributed to her broader unhappy experience was her isolation from the rest of the cast – not in terms of being deliberately kept apart, but more in terms of personality.

David Szulkin's book, Wes Craven's Last House on the Left: The Making of a Cult Classic, provides some vivid examples of this – and, as so often, we find passages that are perhaps more revealing now than they appeared to readers when the book was new more than a quarter of a century ago.

We have of course covered Mari's rape scene extensively on this blog, and we should always remember and respect Sandra's absolute refusal to talk about it: although there is the "My God... I had the feeling they really hated me" that Wes Craven reported she had said after the scene had been filmed, Sandra's only direct quote – anywhere – is simply "No comment". This stands apart from how anyone else has spoken about the scene.

A striking piece of editorial text by Szulkin comes on p45, very near the start of the chapter "Babes in the Woods: A Crash Course in Guerilla Film Making", which covers the filming of the movie. He says:

"Despite the demanding nature of the project and its often gruesome subject matter, most of the cast report having fun on the set."

At first sight, that reads as a reassuring note that the actors generally enjoyed making even this harsh story. At another glance, however, that "most" really stands out. When you realise that the person who was held over a cliff, the person whose fear was deliberately not calmed by her director, the person who was terrified by the rape scene and the person who walked off the set were all one and the same – Sandra Peabody – the word takes on a much darker and more troubling appearance.

Sandra has been described by several members of the Last House team in terms such as "sweet", and her fellow victim-actress Lucy Grantham says (p42) that they were very different, with Sandra being "ladylike and shy" as opposed to Grantham's rebellious personality. On p51 Grantham says:

"We were living, for the most part, in Sean's house [...] There was a lot of partying and a lot of fun."

This is backed up in the actors' commentary track. While I'm not here going to give what seem like gratuitous specifics about people's private lives, it's clear that at times the partying and fun went considerably beyond simple socialising.¹ This is nothing especially shocking for the 1970s, but it does add to the picture of a production where many personnel played hard as well as worked hard.

We don't know exactly what Sandra's own arrangements were, although she does mention (p50) travelling by train from New York to Westport at least once, presumably via the still-operational New Haven Line. However, her comment (also p50) that Hess "would come after us" (plural) "with a knife at night" shows that she can't simply have travelled home every evening of the shoot.

Steve Dwork provides an example of Sandra's attitude to Last House's material not being the same as most of her colleagues' on pp53–54 of Szulkin:

"Nobody was politically correct about [the violence]. Even with some of the sexual scenes, I don't think anybody on the set was really put off, except Sandra, who was involved in doing it. She was not into any of that stuff, professionally or otherwise—"

Here I'll pause to comment on that apparently odd "or otherwise". There are several ways it could be interpreted, but those would simply be speculation, so let's continue with Dwork's quote:

"—which was an understandable reaction on her part... I mean, if I was being stripped naked and slashed about with fifteen strangers standing around watching, I don't think I would deal with it too well!"

Fifteen is probably intended as exaggeration for effect; Craven and Sean Cunningham, on their own commentary track, come to the conclusion that even ten would likely be on the high side.²

More significantly, Dwork singles out Sandra as the only person who was "put off" by the sexual scenes – which in her case involved not only the forced lesbianism scene which made her cry, but also playing Krug's victim in a rape scene which Anne Paul described as "really graphic, bloody, nasty, horrible" and which Yvonne Hannemann described as "really quite upsetting" and "very rough".

Since Phyllis's earlier rape was off-screen, Sandra Peabody is the only person who had to portray a rape victim in real time – in a scene that as filmed was, as Marc Sheffler makes clear, both longer and harsher than the edited version we see in the final movie. She is the only person among the core cast who has never spoken on camera about the film. She is the only person who is explicitly noted as being "ladylike and shy".

Sandra is also the only person who we know was threatened with physical injury; and the only person who David Hess repeatedly and publicly talked about in sexualised, humiliating and sometimes violent ways. Not a single one of those stories was challenged or even contextualised in the same material, either at the time or on the Arrow Blu-ray release.

Of all the people who worked on Last House on the Left, Sandra Peabody stands out, not merely for her feelings about the material but for the fact that over half a century on she has still not been granted the public recognition and apology she should long ago have received for what she went through. As I say so often, because it is the truth: Sandra Peabody deserves better.

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 Commentary track featuring director Wes Craven and producer Sean S. Cunningham, available on multiple DVD and Blu-ray releases of The Last House on the Left.