The normalisation of cruelty – Fred Lincoln's "really pushed it" line and Last House set culture

Quite some time ago, I posted about a line of Fred Lincoln's from the actors' commentary track. This was said by him just after we'd seen the fire escape scene, in which the drugged, gagged and bound Mari is kidnapped and placed in the Cadillac trunk (boot). As the trunk is opened, we can just glimpse the already abducted Phyllis already in there, also tied up.

As the car drives away, and after a mild gripe from David Hess about Marc Sheffler going out of frame in a previous shot, Lincoln observes:

"I thought we really pushed it because we really left 'em in the car till we got to Connecticut. But that was because we didn't have enough money to buy another car. We only had room for that many people."¹

Given the context of the comment, if that line were sincere it could only realistically mean that Sandra Peabody and Lucy Grantham were left in the trunk – perhaps still bound – for the drive to Connecticut. It's twenty miles or so even to the state line. "Left 'em" doesn't seem to imply physical force (as "kept 'em" might) but neither does it suggest even grudging agreement, which "we had to ask 'em to travel in the trunk" might have.

I want to be very clear at this point that I have not changed my view from the older post: I firmly believe Lincoln was not being sincere and was instead making a very dry joke. After all, from a purely practical perspective and even if I misunderstood Jim Hubbard's diary in Appendix III of Szulkin, the idea that the only workable options were one, buy another car or two, keep the actresses confined in the trunk until Connecticut is preposterous. Consider the options:

• The New Haven Line railway. Sandra mentions (Szulkin, p50) using this train at least once
• Taking a bus. I don't know the 1971 situation, but today you can travel that route in two hours (with one change)
• Hiring a cab. Even with out-of-town fees, cheaper and simpler than buying a car
• Renting or borrowing a car
• Making two trips – it's just over an hour to Westport in 1971 traffic
• Rejigging the production schedule, which happened anyway at times

That isn't even an exhaustive list of reasonable possibilities. Given the number of practical options other than Lincoln's "buy[ing] another car", for this actually to have happened in the way he suggests – even allowing for 1971 standards for transport being less comfortable than today – would have required one of two things:

1. A total failure of common sense on the part of everyone with any power on set, including Wes Craven himself. Serious and dangerous incompetence.
2. A desire to make Mari and Phyllis's plight "more authentic" by effectively kidnapping their actresses for real. Serious and dangerous abuse – and potentially a federal felony.

For all the Last House production's alarming failures of ethics and safety, most obviously seen in Marc Sheffler's cliff threat and – if Hess's largely uncorroborated boasts are to be believed – his own sexual threats, they do seem to have drawn the line at extended physical endangerment of Sandra and Lucy. That alone for me rules out the "trunk incident" actually having happened.

There is also no on-track corroboration of Lincoln's line. One of the others (I think Hess) says "Right" after the sentence about being unable to afford another car, but it comes across like a man simply acknowledging a storyteller; elsewhere Hess tends to be enthusiastic and amused when tales of Sandra's mistreatment are brought up.

Of course, it would help if the horror media had ever actually asked Fred Lincoln about this while he was alive, or indeed people like Sheffler. Their consistent failure to challenge Last House personnel in interviews has left us without a simple acknowledgement that it was a joke. That would have settled the issue. But the question needed to be asked. Indeed, it still does.

What is more immediately concerning, however, is what Lincoln's line reveals about the culture on the Last House on the Left shoot, and indeed for decades afterwards. When this commentary track was recorded in the 2000s, Hess, Sheffler and Lincoln were in their fifties and sixties. They had stature, families, fame—but what they didn't seem to have was any notion of acceptable behaviour in public.

As I've pointed out, there appears never to have been any public apology from any surviving and active Last House cast or crew for the unquestioned mistreatment that Sandra was put through. Considering increased understanding of issues of consent and safety on film sets, as well as the willingness to revisit historical ethical failures over half a century, this looks increasingly out of step.

The commentary track shows the most extreme version of the culture: there, David Hess can openly describe threatening to rape Sandra, saying "apropos of what Marc did" to link his abuse to Sheffler's cliff threat story. Sheffler himself also relates the cliff threat elsewhere, such as in Celluloid Crime of the Century, while Marshall Anker can describe Sandra's horror and upset before her screening walk-out as "carrying on".

There is, sadly, a consistent picture here. What the evidence shows is that not just rough treatment but distress or actual abuse can be minimised, trivialised and even – as on the commentary track – laughed about and treated as amusing lore from the filming front. The woman who was seriously harmed and whose decision to live her life in peace and privacy means she deserves someone to speak up for her gets nobody.

Sandra Peabody suffered terribly in making The Last House on the Left. She showed great courage, resilience and professionalism in completing her role at all, never mind providing the film's emotional centrepiece. The least she deserves now is kindness when others speak about her experience. Instead, she has for decades often been shown nothing of the sort. 

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.