Given how rarely Sandra Peabody's mistreatment in connection with The Last House on the Left is mentioned in the media, I try to keep an eye out. Or indeed an ear, as was the case in December when I found the Road to Nowhere podcast, which treated the abuse seriously. As its host made clear:
"The film, no matter how loud a statement against violence it may be, still ended up inflicting real violence on at least one of its leads."
Until very recently, this was the only podcast I was aware of which discussed Sandra's abuse. That changed the other day, and this time I was an unwitting catalyst. I commented on this review of Last House by a fellow British Letterboxd user who goes by the name of Chindilani, and in the comments you can read the exchange we had on that site. (She had not previously been aware of what happened behind the scenes, so the review itself does not mention that.)
Chindilani1 publishes a podcast called That Final Girl Life. This is hosted on Patreon, but the core episodes are free and – excellently – include full text transcripts. She takes an unusual and intriguing approach in that she looks at how various final girls in horror films might be affected by their trauma in their lives after the movies end. I listened to the episode about Sarah from The Descent2 and found it a very interesting listen.
The episode about Mari in Last House on the Left is, unsurprisingly, primarily about the 2009 version of the character, given that she survives the film and 1972 Mari does not. Again, it is well worth listening to, and it made me think in ways I had not before. But of course on this site it is 1972 Mari, and especially the real woman who played her, with which we are most concerned.
Chindilani does not pull her punches where David Hess in particular is concerned. For example, fairly early in the episode, we get:
"Some of the things that David Hess (a) says about Sandra Peabody and (b) admits to in interviews is like… are just horrific"
She also notes the "repressed Protestant" comment that Hess used in the two-part quote in Celluloid Crime of the Century. Perhaps because there is so much else alarming in Hess's various comments, few people stop to remark on his attack on Sandra's background. We do at least get the sympathetic Lucy Grantham telling Szulkin (p42) that:
"Sandra was this sweet, rather naive 'good girl' [...] more ladylike and shy [than me, and] very much like the character she played in the movie"
Chindilani then turns to an extensive look at the remake's Mari, ending by noting Sara Paxton's reassurance that she "felt safe" with Garret Dillahunt, who played Krug in the remake. From there on in, the final quarter of the episode largely concentrates on Sandra Peabody and her far less reassuring experience. The host lays her cards on the table straight away, saying that the things she had learnt made her "so fucking furious".
She then looks in detail at David Hess's behaviour in paticular. Concentrating on Hess makes sense given the extreme nature of his public statements, and the fact that if she had also discussed the likes of Marc Sheffler's cliff threat or Wes Craven's mining of Sandra's fear in any detail, the episode would have risked becoming unmanageably long and diverted attention from its central theme: 2009 Mari's trauma.
Chindilani covers a good deal of ground here. She covers most of the rape-threat commentary track extract, Sandra's set walk-off, and the "Can I?" incident. She contrasts what happened with A Serbian Film. I've never seen it and almost certainly never will, but I grasp her central point: that that was a film with extreme content but one where nobody actually got hurt on set.
The host goes on to touch briefly on a later rape-and-violence Hess vehicle, Ruggero Deodato's The House on the Edge of the Park (1980). Chindilani deliberately avoids looking too deeply into how the women on that film were treated, and I don't know either. However, in the 2011 Terror Trap interview, Hess spoke about a similar film, Hitch-Hike (1977), and said of his screen victim Eve, played by Corinne Cléry:
"If you look at the scene again, the question is whether it was rape or not. It may be rape and perhaps in her mind, she wanted to be raped. But she sure was enjoying it. So is that rape?"
I think Hess's comment speaks for itself.
Chindilani states that she does not want to rewatch Last House 1972 for a very straightforward reason:
"I don't want to see a woman actually get sexually assaulted."
She then goes on to say that "David Hess should have gone to prison" for the simple reason that sexual assault is a crime. In spite of the often sad and misogynistic reality of the era, especially in low-budget exploitation cinema, it was a crime in 1971 Connecticut too – although the American approach to statutes of limitations meant that Hess was safe from prosecution by the time he made his various comments in the DVD era.
I think it interesting to note that the hosts of both the podcasts which I have seen seriously covering Sandra's abuse – Road to Nowhere and That Final Girl Life – are real-life survivors, as both mention occasionally in their pieces. In the case of the latter, you can listen to or read Chindilani's brief explanation of her background near the beginning of her first podcast, which went on to cover Dani from Midsommar.
Sandra Peabody is also in that company. Regardless of to what extent Hess's most extreme claims are true or fantasy, there is little serious doubt that she was abused. Podcasts like That Final Girl Life offer Sandra something she has too often been denied: validation and respect as a survivor.
1 She does not use the name explicitly in the podcast, so I am using her Letterboxd handle for convenience instead of writing out "the That Final Girl Life host" each time.
2 She based her episode on the US cut, not the original UK version. If you've seen The Descent, you'll know why that matters for her purposes.
