David Hess, welcome convention guest... after publicly admitting threatening rape

In April 2009, the horror world descended on the Los Angeles Convention Centre for Fangoria's Weekend of Horrors. As its name suggests, this was sponsored by Fangoria, which today describes itself as "The World's Best Horror and Cult Film Magazine". A correspondent for The Bedlam Files provided a detailed report on their experiences of the event, which stretched across three days.

For our purposes, the significant section comes near the end, in the section dealing with Sunday's events. One of these was a Last House on the Left reunion, with David Hess, Marc Sheffler and Fred Lincoln all in attendance, as well as David Szulkin. The book author was already known to the actors – in fact, they discuss his work about 57 minutes into their DVD commentary track, roughly during Junior's dream sequence.¹

The short report is a now eye-opening insight into horror fandom culture in the late 2000s, as this extract demonstrates:

Once it got going the proceedings were pretty raucous, with moderator Shannon Lark, a pretty gal chosen as Fango’s 2009 “Spooksmodel,” fighting to keep the unruly panelists on track—and more often than not losing.

Since there is no more detailed report or recording of this panel that I've been able to find, there were doubtless many comments from the participants that are not recorded here. One the Bedlam Files writer does record, though, will be immediately familiar:

Sheffler discussed how that in a pivotal emotional scene one of the lead actresses wasn’t giving it her all; he claims he supplied the needed motivation by threatening to throw the girl off a cliff. 

This is clearly the cliff threat, with the actress who was actually threatened – Sandra Peabody – reduced (at least in the report's retelling) to merely "the girl", something that reads very poorly to a modern eye. There's no reflection on the ethics of Sheffler's actions from the Bedlam Files writer; the report simply continues with a few highlights of the more conventionally uncensored kind that these events often produce.

A perhaps larger question is why David Hess in particular was invited in the first place. By the time of the 2009 Weekend of Horrors, all the sources I have shown so far – with the single exception of the 2011 Terror Trap interview – had been published.

The Fangoria convention was not the only event this question could be asked of. In fact, Hess continued to be invited to horror and cult film events until he became too ill to attend near the end of his life in 2011. Many web pages from a decade and a half ago are understandably no longer in existence, so this is a selection rather than a comprehensive list, but Hess was certainly at or invited to:

• Filmfour (or Film4) Frightfest, August 2009 – Hess's name appears in a long list of names scheduled to appear at the Empire Cinema in Leicester Square, London.
• HorrorHound Weekend, March 2010 – Hess is listed as appearing at a screening of Smash Cut (in which he starred) as part of the convention's Film Festival.
• Chiller Theatre Convention, 2009 or 2010 – a blogger's later interview with a fellow horror fan reveals that the latter met Hess at this con. Since they discussed watching the remake of Last House (2009) it cannot have been earlier.
• Rock and Shock, 2011 – another blog report shows that Hess attended this shortly before his death; he's pictured sitting at a table with a microphone.

Every one of the events I've listed here took place in a world where Hess's Vanity Fair rape threat admission, his predatory music featurette comments, his gleeful commentary track boasts of how much he'd scared Sandra and his "Can I?" anecdote were all either in mainstream print or easily accessible on DVD sets such as my 2007/08 Metrodome edition.

That means that either these convention organisers didn't check up on Hess's background thoroughly enough to find these things – or they did check but didn't think they mattered sufficiently to withdraw the invitation for Hess to appear.

Sandra Peabody deserved better than this. She still does.

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. 

Sandra in her own words: the David A. Szulkin book

Today I'm introducing David A. Szulkin's Wes Craven's Last House on the Left: The Making of a Cult Classic. The one in the photo above is my own copy, which as you can see could do with cleaning the fingerprints off. This is an exceptionally important resource, because it is – as far as I am aware – the one and only time that Sandra Peabody has gone on the record with her thoughts about making The Last House on the Left. It's a quarter of a century now since it appeared, but it remains essential reading.

The book was first published in 1997, but an expanded edition appeared in 2000 and that is the one I own. Unfortunately it's not absolutely clear exactly what was added for that edition. The book has been out of print for many years now, so I was very lucky to track down an ex-library copy on AbeBooks for around £25 a few months ago. The book seems to have been published simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic – the price on the back is in both pounds and dollars. My own copy is the UK second edition, published by FAB Press (ISBN: 9781903254011).

Of course, many other people than Sandra (who is mostly referred to here as Sandra Cassell, as she was credited for the movie) are interviewed for the book, and there are times when this is important for alternate perspectives of a particular scene or event. Still, most of those have spoken publicly on multiple occasions over the years, including in published interviews or documentaries. Sandra has not. As such, this is the only place where you can find what she actually said, rather than what people believe she may have thought. That matters.

To look at it from the outside you'd think this would be the usual cheap cash-in making-of book: it's a little smaller than A4 size and has the infamous "It's Only a Movie" logo on the front and a photo of the looming Krug, Weasel and Sadie on the back. That preconception would, however, be unfair to Szulkin, who clearly knows his subject very well indeed. For our purposes on this blog, the third and longest chapter, "Babes in the Woods: A Crash Course in Guerilla Film Making" is by far the most important, and I will be referring to it frequently.

Wes Craven's Last House on the Left seems to have been well received on its publication. Of course publishers generally select the review quotes that make them look best for their back covers, but for example Empire said it "[b]rilliantly reassesse[d] the film's position in the annals of horror", while the short-lived Neon called it "fascinating, professional, and very funny". Obviously from the point of view of this blog, "very funny" might feel inappropriate, but that is no reflection on Szulkin himself.

One vitally important point to bear in mind is that, when this book appeared, we did not have the collection of published sources we do now. David Hess's Vanity Fair confession was still years away, and neither Celluloid Crime of the Century – an important making-of documentary which I will cover in due course – nor key DVD commentary tracks had yet appeared. As we will see, reading Szulkin with knowledge of those later sources can sometimes bring extra understanding (and in places extra concern) about some comments.

This is the only book by David Szulkin that I own, and as far as I know he's never published another one about Last House. As such, if I refer to "Szulkin" as a source without further qualification in the blog, then this is the book I will mean.