Quiet, dignified, understated – Mari's walk to the lake

Mari walking to the lake

In The Last House on the Left, Mari's torture and rape scene is often described as the most harrowing part of the film to watch. As Marc Sheffler tells us, it was also extremely frightening for Sandra Peabody to film, thanks to David Hess's unethically aggressive interpretation of Krug. Hess himself admits on the actors' commentary track that he abused Sandra while this was being filmed, and the effects are visible in the finished movie.

This makes it all the more remarkable that the scene immediately following the atrocity is perhaps the most emotionally powerful in the film. As Krug, Sadie and Weasel stand and look at each other, Mari shakily gets to her feet and walks painfully away, looking back at the villains with an expression of disgust and accusation. In that moment, Mari shows that Krug's violation of her body has failed to destroy her essence. This is followed by even Krug briefly looking shocked by what he has done.

Hess's "Now You're All Alone" plays, a song of genuine emotional force that sadly happens to have been written by an abuser. In the background, Mari kneels and vomits into the grass, before quietly saying a prayer. In spite of what Szulkin (p81) says, this is not the Lord's Prayer, but "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep", which in the version used here has these lyrics:

"Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my Soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my Soul to take."

This is traditionally a children's prayer, presumably chosen for this scene to emphasise the teenage Mari's youth and stolen innocence. It also shows a world the villains cannot reach. After the villains pick bloodied blades of grass off their clothes, we focus again on Mari, this time in the foreground. She looks quietly round at her tormentors, then gets to her feet and walks away. The attackers say nothing, but simply follow her.

Mari walks down to the lake, and for a few moments we see a close-up of her face – the one at the head of this post – always slightly out of focus, but clearly showing the blood on her face. More importantly, however, it shows her expression. She is clearly beyond the reach now of anything in this world, and focused only on the lake in front of her. Though the shot lasts only seconds, you can't take your eyes off it.

At this point, Mari walks down into the lake itself, wades out until she is chest deep... and stops, unmoving and looking away from the camera and therefore her attackers. There she remains until Krug uses Weasel's gun to shoot her dead. From this point on in the film, the criminals lose their power; the tragedy is that both teenagers have been brutalised and killed before that happens.

Sandra spoke to Szulkin (p81) about needing several takes of her death scene:

"The part when I walked into the water and he shot me had to be done over and over again. Initially I went in the wrong direction from the bullet, and it didn't look real enough. I was jumping in the opposite direction from where I was supposedly shot. Finally they showed me which direction to go in and we redid it."

Quite why Sandra hadn't been told the right direction the first, or at worst the second, time is a good question, especially as she apparently wasn't especially comfortable in the water as Wes Craven notes in his commentary track:

"I can't remember what Sandra was saying, but something basically like, 'I can't swim. How deep is this?' [Craven laughs] 'How long do I have to stay here?'"¹

Still, the key point is that after the fear and discomfort of the rape scene, which would doubtless have been very difficult for Sandra even had it been filmed in a remotely respectful manner, by the time this sequence was filmed the worst was over – and she was once again being allowed to do her job and act.

Sandra's quiet, dignified, understated interpretation of the traumatised Mari is entirely convincing; at last her Meisner training is being allowed to come into play and she can show emotion under imaginary circumstances, instead of a forced response to real threat and terror. Indeed, Mari and Sandra share a significant quality: despite dehumanising abuse, both retain their essential humanity.

In the "Krug & Company" version of Last House, we see a scene dropped from the main cut in which Mari is discovered by her parents by the lakeside while still alive and is able to pass on basic information about Krug's gang before she dies in their arms. As Sandra notes in Szulkin (p89) however, it had to be filmed in something of a hurry:

"They wanted to put makeup on me to have me look more 'dead' for that scene. But while we were shooting, the sun was going down, and we didn't have enough time for that."

Restoring this scene to Last House on the Left does make the Collingwoods' later deduction of who their house guests are a little less of a logical leap, but in itself it is not quite as moving as it ought to be, probably because of that pressure of time. This may be why it has not been added back into the standard cut.

The main point, however, is that the sequence that does survive has real power. It also seems to be one where Sandra Peabody was allowed to be the professional actress she was. I am very much convinced that these two things are related. Imagine what Last House could have been if Sandra had been allowed to act Mari's trauma elsewhere as well. 

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.