Cine-Excess is a long-running UK-based website for, as it advertises itself on its About page:
"an annual international film festival and conference, which is [sic] attracts global filmmakers, scholars, distributors and exhibitors to an event which features filmmaker discussions, a themed three day conference and exclusive screenings"
Cine-Excess was founded in 2007 and is still online, although its on-site search tool was broken when I tried it. While the site covers a wide range of subjects, I am here interested in a pair of long-form articles about The Last House on the Left, published in Issue One of its eJournal in August 2013. This issue was called Subverting the Senses: The Politics and Aesthetics of Excess.
First, we have Claire Henry's The Last House on the Left: The Redemption of the Remake, which across more than 6,000 words suggests that the 2009 remake of Last House operates fundamentally differently to the 1972 original, for example in that it prioritises "spectacle horror" over Wes Craven's original subversive, "raw and unflinching" condemnation of violence, and thereby in certain ways celebrates violence instead of standing against it.
This post is not intended as a full analysis of Henry's piece. I will however note that she makes a common error of chronology regarding the 1972 film:
"The Stillo gang [...] kidnap the girls, and then, when their car breaks down by the woods near Mari’s home, they continue to intimidate, humiliate, and rape Phyllis and Mari, and finally murder them."
This is not quite right: Phyllis is raped in the New York apartment, before the girls are bundled into the Cadillac trunk and driven away. Although that attack is largely off-screen and conveyed through Mari's horrified reaction, it means that the sexual violence of Last House begins before the actual kidnap, not in the woods. Henry's article therefore slightly misrepresents the build-up of violence that climaxes in Mari's killing.
Still, my focus here is on Marc Sheffler's follow-up, itself not far short of 5,000 words in length: The Last House(s) On The Left: A Response To Claire Henry’s Article. He praises Henry's article for being "brilliantly written", but then he says that Henry:
"makes her points precisely and logically, and articulates them deftly, but with the luxury of intellectual hindsight."
He unsurprisingly draws on his first-hand experience making the film. He notes that the production was "shot in a guerilla film making, semi-documentary style by semi-amateur film makers", and follows up by saying:
"Nobody told us what we couldn’t do, so we did what we wanted."
Sheffler does not mention in this piece that, according to his own repeated accounts, what he did on that set included threatening to throw Sandra Peabody over a cliff in order to produce realistic fear from her for the camera.
Many people are named in the article. Although these include the likes of Ruggerio Deodato and David DeFalco, I will concentrate only on seven core personnel of Last House: director, producer, the three villain actors (not including Sheffler, the article's author) and the two victim actresses. Looking at how often each is mentioned, including image captions but not the page footer, brings striking results. In the format name / character: person mentions / character mentions we find this:
Wes Craven: 16 / N/A
Sean Cunningham: 4 / N/A
David Hess / Krug¹: 42 / 16
Fred Lincoln / Weasel: 4 / 1
Jeramie Rain / Sadie: 2 / 0
Lucy Grantham / Phyllis: 0 / 1
Sandra Peabody² / Mari¹: 0 / 5
¹ Excluding mentions of the 2009 remake's character
² Including any mentions of "Sandra Cassel" or "Sandra Cassell"
The very large number of mentions of Hess is clearly connected with Sheffler's memories of and grief for his long-time friend and flatmate David Hess, who at the time the article was published had been dead for less than two years. Mourning someone who has been close to you for decades is not something anyone can reasonably criticise a person for, and I do not. My concern is different.
Look at the gender splits in the table above. Fred Lincoln on his own gets four mentions. All three core female personnel get two between them – and the victim actresses get none. Most noticeably of all, Mari is mentioned five times, but the woman who played her is not mentioned once. Not by first name, not by her real or stage surnames, not at all. Sandra as a person is entirely missing from the narrative.
This becomes even more striking given the "Horrific Scenes Go Hollywood" subsection, which opens with a detailed look at Mari's rape scene. We are shown a still from that scene – albeit with Sandra's eyes closed, which as I've noted before is significant. That image is captioned:
"Celluloid controversies: Last House on the Left and the notorious scene of violation"
Neither of the actors shown in close-up in one of the movie's most important scenes is credited. It's true that Hess is not named either, but by this point we have already been introduced to the fact of what Sheffler is discussing:
"For instance, the Mari rape scene (circa 1971) has often been described as one of the most brutal, unrelenting, debasing ever-captured [sic] on film."
Quite why Sheffler says "circa" when he surely knows that his own movie was shot in autumn 1971 is a conundrum, albeit a minor one. After the image, he continues by noting:
"Because the camera held on Mari’s face for what seemed like unending moments of anguish, only cutting away to tighter shots of Krug’s (portrayed brilliantly by David Hess’) face pressing down on Mari’s cheek"
And now the differentiation becomes unavoidable. Mention of Krug is followed immediately by parenthetical praise of his performance, as well as a visceral description (which directly follows the extract I have quoted) of what Krug does to Mari in that scene. Mention of his screen victim is covered entirely in terms of the character: neither there nor anywhere else in the article is there any praise of, or even acknowledgement for, Sandra and what she endured filming that scene.
This has not always been Sheffler's way. Back in 2002, he had participated without noticeable discomfort in the commentary track section wherein Hess had openly spoken of threatening Sandra with rape on set. And in the "Junior's Story" interview in 2017, Sheffler took a more empathetic line, acknowledging that "David was... brutal with her" during the rape scene and saying "I don't blame her" when describing Sandra being "scared shitless".
The presence of these other examples, before and after the Cine-Excess piece, argue against Sheffler's failure to name Sandra in 2013 being simply a case of consideration for a woman who by then had long ceased to engage with Last House at all, her only interview (for Szulkin) being by then well over a decade in the past. In any case, Sheffler chose to include a still from the rape scene, something which puts Sandra's face in the article for the only time.
That David Hess is mentioned so often in Marc Sheffler's article is unsurprising given the identity of its author. That Sandra Peabody, a woman even Sheffler was later to acknowledge was treated "brutal[ly]" by Hess when he "just went at her" and who had by 2013 been the target of repeated abusive public statements by him, is not mentioned at all is quite another matter.
Sandra Peabody has always deserved better – and part of that is actually giving her her due as an actress and human being, not merely as a violated character. Even if we accept that it was not Sheffler's intention to erase her, by 2013 he was an experienced writer. Given the focus on Mari's rape scene, this does raise a legitimate question about how Sandra is represented and acknowledged in the Cine-Excess piece.
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