"To this day they will not speak to us" – Jeramie Rain on Sandra and Lucy

On 6 October 2022, the interestingly named Still Toking Productions channel on YouTube streamed a video call with Marc Sheffler and Jeramie Rain, two of the villain actors from The Last House on the Left. It was titled Still Toking with Marc Sheffler & Jeramie Rain-Dreyfuss, using the latter's name from when she was married to fellow actor Richard Dreyfuss between 1983 and 1995. Three members of the podcast team interviewed the two actors in a Zoom-like format.

The interview was re-uploaded in audio-only on 5 March 2025, minus a short introductory section. In this post, I will be using the original 2022 version for timestamps, but take off around three minutes if you're using the 2025 re-upload. It's not well known, with both uploads combined having under 400 views at the time of writing.

A lot of the video is the usual general stuff you get on such occasions, but unsurprisingly I'm concentrating here on anything that seems to touch on Sandra Peabody's experience on set. The first is a segment beginning at 38:09. First we get Rain:

"It wasn't scary! Nothing was scary about it!"

Then Sheffler interjects:

"Nah, not for us."

It's impossible to tell whether or not Sheffler is intending to contrast the villains' experience with that of any of their colleagues. After Rain reassures everyone that "it was all fake!" – meaning the stage violence, but not sitting well with Sandra's set walk-off – there comes a part where Sheffler says:

"The four of us [baddies] had a tremendous fun time with each other. It remains one of my most loving experiences in show business, making this movie."

This is conventional retrospective comment and nothing new. But immediately after this, at 38:34, we get a startling comment from Rain:

"Do you know, the girls [whose characters] we killed, they don't like us, and wanted nothing to do with us. I had to hang with the bad—the baddies hung together, and the victims, they wanted—they clung to Wes [Craven] and Sean Cunningham. They wanted nothing to do with us; they hated us."

Rain laughs as she says this, but her recollection of what might now be considered a distinctly unhealthy set environment ties in disturbingly well with Yvonne Hannemann's comment in Szulkin (p51) that:

"The girls sort of huddled together [and] were always afraid, and would be cowering even during lunch!"

Most of the evidence we've seen about fear in this blog is centred on Sandra, but Rain's comment in the Still Toking interview suggests that even the generally more confident Lucy Grantham may have been uncomfortable with the way the villain actors were behaving towards her and Sandra.

Rain then tells us something truly remarkable about the victim actresses' relationship with the villain actors:

"To this day. To this day they will not speak to us." 

This revelation that Sandra and Lucy remained (at least in 2022) still unwilling to speak to their screen tormentors even half a century on from production is truly extraordinary, and it it is a moment when Rain's usually easy laughter dies away and she comes across as completely sincere. However, Sheffler immediately moves in, saying:

"They treated us like the trash we were."

This brings back Rain's laugh, and she responds that:

"And we played the trash that we were!"

That brings the segment to an end, and the discussion moves to conventional matters like the film's inclusion in an exhibition at MoMA. As is the frustratingly invariable pattern with Last House cast interviews, there is no attempt by the hosts to follow up on Rain's startling comment that Sandra and Lucy have not been willing to make up with the villain actors even fifty years after filming wrapped.

There is one other short segment of the interview worth mentioning.  At 42:00, just after Sheffler has made a light-hearted comment about he and David Hess having "terrorised people" while sharing a place after Last House ended, Rain offers this. The audio is intermittent, but lip-reading makes it obvious that she says:

"And the nicest guy in the world is David Hess—was David Hess."

This line is astonishing to anyone who has encountered this same David Hess – among other things – openly stating on the DVD commentary track that he threatened to rape Sandra, repeating the claim to Vanity Fair, recollecting her emotional collapse as a sexual opportunity, and (via Marc Sheffler's 2017 interview) being "brutal with her" while filming Mari's rape scene.

I have no evidence that Jeramie Rain knew about any of these comments from Hess when she gave the Still Toking interview. But whatever a man who does all that to one young woman might be, it's very hard to call him "the nicest guy in the world".