"You start to wonder how much you can protest violence when you're making a living from it" – Last House, Vietnam and real-world harm

The Vietnam War often comes up in discussions of The Last House on the Left, and indeed it was very much in the minds of many people in early-1970s America. There was, as Wes Craven notes in Szulkin (p15) a feeling both that the most powerful footage available was in what was coming out of South East Asia and that the full horrors of the situation were being concealed. As Craven goes on to say:

"There was a great amount of feeling that 'It's time we showed things they way they really are.' In Last House we set out to show violence the way we thought it really was, and to show the dark underbelly of the Hollywood genre film."

Szulkin notes in editorial text that the era saw films appearing with levels of graphic violence that had not been seen previously, such as 1971's A Clockwork Orange and Straw Dogs – both of which, like Last House on the Left, received particular criticism for their brutal depictions of sexual violence.

As Szulkin also tells us, the original script for Night of Vengeance contained several direct references to Vietnam – including Krug strongly implying to Mari that Weasel learned how to torture while out there. It wasn't only fiction which was affected by the war: Marc Sheffler, in his early twenties at the time, was of an age where, subject to deferments, the draft lottery might have chosen him to fight.

Contrary to some more recent assertions in horror and wider film media, Craven says (Szulkin, p16) that he does not regret making Last House – but he does acknowledge that a film like that can have real-world effects:

"I think if you spend too long working in that area, you brutalize your soul [...] You start to wonder how much you can protest violence when you're making a living from it."

This tension between the insistence that there are high-minded ideals behind the film's creation and the harsher realities of its actual production also surfaces when producer Sean Cunningham tells Szulkin (p33) that:

"[Wes Craven and I] thought it might be worth doing as a way to turn violence around on itself make people re-evaluate that which they call entertainment."

Szulkin's immediately following editorial drily observes that, "[r]egardless of this lofty rationale", there really isn't any avoiding the fact that Last House on the Left was planned as an exploitation movie first and foremost, violence and shock value being what its financial backers wanted. As I've noted, at least some of the genre's norms survived into production, with significant implications for Sandra Peabody especially.

The real problem here is that Last House only succeeded – to whatever extent you think that it did – in critiquing real-world violence by perpetrating (even if unintentionally) harm of its own. While no actor was actually shot or disemboweled, Craven's apparent belief – again, common in 1970s exploitation but disturbing in retrospect – that only physical danger was a show-stopping problem left the door open for much else.

In Sandra's case, her sometimes extreme fear was at least sometimes mined as a resource by Craven, such as in the torture/rape sequence. The director acknowledges on his commentary track that Sandra was "scared to death", but asserts that this made for "a scene that was absolutely convincing". ¹ The harm caused by letting that fear play out was often little considered in 1970s exploitation cinema.

Sandra was of course threatened with physical violence – Sheffler telling her he'd throw her over a cliff if she didn't improve and Hess's claimed threat of rape. Even though there is no evidence that any of these threats were made with intent to follow through, psychological and emotional damage are now firmly established as real and significant harms, even if the specific question of whether they qualify as violence is still debated.

However, one thing seems clear. You can have all the fine-sounding soundbites in the world about how you wish to make a statement against violence by confronting audiences with what it truly means. But if in the course of illustrating your intention – in this case by making Last House on the Left – one of your cast is herself harmed, then you have fundamentally undermined the argument you claim you wish to make.

The acknowledged facts of Sandra Peabody's real-life suffering on set include being subjected to extreme fear, threatened with physical harm and experiencing misery when acting certain scenes. These severely compromise whatever power Last House may have had to lay claim to a truly progressive justification for its harsh cinéma vérité approach and unflinching representation of violence.

¹ 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.