A knife by day: the terror of Sandra's torture scene

In The Last House on the Left, although Krug uses a gun to murder Mari, the weapons of choice are blades, specifically switchblades and Krug's machete. Knives also play a major part in Sandra Peabody's experience on set. The most notable incident Sandra recounts in Szulkin (p50) about David Hess in this respect is that of his off-hours stalking:

"He'd come after us with a knife at night, trying to freak us out."

My assumption is that the other person in "us" is Lucy Grantham, but this is never stated explicitly. Sandra does state that Hess was "trying to live his part" by doing this, mentioning that he stayed in character throughout off set as well as on it, something Marc Sheffler corroborates in his 2022 Hollywood Wade interview.¹

In the fictional story in the film, when Mari and Junior make a break for it but are intercepted by Krug, he stops them by brandishing his machete. After graphically demonstrating to Mari that Phyllis is dead, Krug then commits one of the most brutal of his many crimes: carving his name into her chest with Weasel's switchblade.

In Szulkin (p79), Hess explains how he produced the effect of the bloody letters: he says he simply dipped the end of the knife in stage blood and drew the name on her skin:

"You saw it being drawn, and then there's a cut back to my face. Then it went back to her and it looked like the letters were cut in. It was just two separate shots, before and after."

It isn't clear exactly which version of the film Hess is referring to here, but it does not conform very well to what we see in the "uncut" Blu-ray edition distributed on the 2018 Arrow release. That runs as follows:

1. Close-up of Sadie and Weasel, with a grinning Krug rising into view before dropping out of shot again.
2. Krug cutting a screaming, blood-covered Mari. There is so much blood that the letters are barely recognisable.
3. Another close-up of the three main villains, with Weasel remarking admiringly on Krug's workmanship.

That's all: there is in fact only one shot of Mari during this sequence. The scene immediately following is the close-up of Mari's pants being ripped off prior to her rape; her chest is not visible, and indeed at no time in the remainder of the film are the letters shown clearly enough to be legible.

It's not clear whether Hess is simply misremembering the sequence of events in the film, or whether he is discussing a different cut – or indeed what may have been actually filmed but later partially discarded. It may also be a result of the film's lengthy history of censorship. I have not been able to solve this particular riddle.

In Last House, there are multiple other sequences involving knives in a violent context. Mari's hand is cut when Phyllis doesn't obey quickly enough. After the bound and gagged girls have been forced through the woods, a knife is held to Phyllis's neck. And in a cut part of the sexual humiliation scene, Weasel gently runs his switchblade across Phyllis's back, presumably as a "reminder".

Another thing I do not know is how the knives were prepared. In early 1970s low-budget film-making, knives were often genuine, their cutting edges simply dulled or taped for what then passed as acceptable set safety. Professional armourers were very rarely employed on exploitation productions. In Phyllis's death scene, Lucy Grantham wore blood bags taped to her back under her shirt, which were genuinely pierced by Fred Lincoln's knife. As Grantham put it in It's Only a Movie:

"When he comes up behind me, he has to puncture that bag so that the blood runs, and there had to be a lot of trust, and there was, because I really felt that he did know what he was doing." ³

Grantham enjoyed shooting the scene, calling the experience "great", but the margin for error was clearly small with a functional knife used that way. (That said, the use of a live, powered chainsaw, as confirmed by both Hess and Wes Craven, was even more dangerous, all the more so as Hess was in socks on a wooden floor.³)

A notorious example of the risks of the "taped knife" approach is 1974's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: Gunnar Hansen, exasperated with repeated failures of the fake blood tube, surreptitiously removed the tape from the blade and cut Marilyn Burns' finger for real: a genuine assault preserved in the final cut of the film, made worse by Hansen pretending for years the injury had been an accident.

Returning to Mari's knife torture, Craven was clear in his DVD commentary track that Sandra was "genuinely frightened during all of this", though defending his decision not to intervene in her distress on the grounds that it made the scene "absolutely convincing".

What Craven does not address is the fact that the woman in fear was having to lie on the ground with a knife – of whatever standard of preparation – literally being drawn across her exposed skin by Hess: the same man who had been "freaking her out" at night by stalking her with that same type of weapon. Is it any wonder that she was frightened shooting the scene?

As so often during the making of The Last House on the Left, Sandra's well-being seems to have been considered subservient to the rawness and authenticity of the final footage. She showed courage to complete filming the sequence – we do not know how many takes it took – but this is yet another occasion on which we must conclude by saying: Sandra Peabody deserved better.

¹ "Marc Sheffler sits down w/ Hollywood Wade to discuss the infamous Horror film Last house on the Left", Hollywood Wade | Crime & Entertainment, 4 Sep 2022. Timestamp 35:06 
² Commentary track featuring director Wes Craven and producer Sean S. Cunningham, available on multiple DVD and Blu-ray releases of The Last House on the Left.
³ Szulkin, David (dir.) It's Only a Movie: The Making of Last House on the Left (2002), available on multiple DVD and Blu-ray releases of The Last House on the Left. 

"That man was a monster" – Reddit's r/horror reacts to David Hess's threat stories

I said a few weeks ago that I would cease the daily updates and now only post here when I had something to say. Now is that time. The other day, I decided to post about the abuse relating to Last House on the Left in a place with a rather larger potential audience than Quora or this blog: Reddit. Specifically, the r/horror subreddit. I wasn't sure what angle to take, since I could hardly mention everything I have here. So I thought for a while, and then I made my decision.

I decided to make a fairly short, straightforward post which simply stated facts rather than opinions:

Last House on the Left (1972) - the actors' Blu-ray commentary track is pretty disturbing 

In the body text of my post, to keep things simple I chose to simpy give four timestamped quotes from the Arrow Blu-ray's commentary track:

• David Hess's "I had so much fun with Sandra" quote and Fred Lincoln's follow-up about Sandra's walk-off
• Lincoln's "I thought we really pushed it" quote about the car trunk
• Marc Sheffler's harsh telling of the cliff threat anecdote
• Hess's story about threatening to rape Sandra and her reaction to that

I also included, in the single image spot that r/horror allows:

• A scan of the Vanity Fair rape threat, with the VF archive URL visible on screen.

I don't know what I really expected. Probably one of three things: the post being removed because I'd accidentally broken a small rule and the mod wasn't in a generous mood that day, a bunch of downvotes from people of the "It was the Seventies, things were different" persuasion, or – most likely – a couple of upvotes and comments before the post sank beneath the waves again.

What actually happened was something that startled me. 300,000 views. Over 900 upvotes. Over 400 shares. And, the one that really got me, a 96.9% upvote ratio. Given that nowhere on Reddit is free from people downvoting prominent posts on large subs for reasons big or small, that counts as something pretty close to unanimity. For practical purposes, people who saw this post either upvoted it, or perhaps didn't vote at all out of discomfort at "liking" a story of abuse.

There's been a near-total absence of the Hess threat story in more than general terms until now – bar my previous post here and servomoore's obscure YouTube upload. Given the fact that most people now watch films via streaming, and given the fact that even most physical media owners don't sit through all the commentaries, the odds are that most of those people had never seen Hess's threat before, at least as more than a vague allusion or word-of-mouth rumour.

The comments below the post bore out that percentage. They were frequently detailed, thoughtful and compassionate, and even those that were much briefer left little doubt as to where their authors stood. One that really struck me was this comment in the middle of a thread, by a user named H4Z4RD0U5. They had met Hess at a convention in 2010 and, having heard the rumours and presumed they were a marketing tactic, asked him about the rape scene. Hess left out the detail of the actual rape threat, but restated the rest of the story.

H4Z4RD0U5 had gone on to work in the film industry, but said their encounter with the man was still "seared into [their] mind" to the extent that when it popped up in their head they used it as a prompt to go and check that the women on set were okay. H4Z4RD0U5 did not hold back in their assessment of David Hess:

"That man was a monster. A sexual abuser who used his casting as a way to play out his sick fantasies."

While that is probably the strongest direct verdict from a commenter, there was near-universal agreement that what Hess did was abuse. There was a little less attention given to the other quotes I listed, but when they did come up they were certainly not given a pass. It was just that the Hess rape threat was so appalling that it dominated the discussion. After all, he did say twice that he'd done it: once on the commentary, once in Vanity Fair.

I was as energetic and engaged as I could manage in the comments, trying to give everyone who made a point that couldn't simply be acknowledged with an upvote a reply. I was very glad when a user named ReticulanGrey made a comment expressing hope that Sandra had found peace. Obviously I couldn't speak for her, but I could write about her very successful, Emmy-winning career after acting.

Another theme to come out of the comments was disappointment at Wes Craven. For example, here's a comment by user IL-Corvo:

"This is disgusting, and lowers my opinion of the late Wes Craven in the process. As for Hess? He can kick rocks."

There was little or no pushback when I pointed out that Craven either knew what had happened with the Sheffler cliff threat signal, or he was incompetent (and, by implication, the set wasn't safe). User salikawood put it this way:

"The way I see it, at worst, Craven enabled the abuse for his own gain. At best, he was ignorant that his set was an unsafe environment for these girls. And the best case scenario still reflects very poorly on Craven because it was his production and his responsibility. "

Now, how much will my post actually move the dial? In truth, probably not all that much... at least for now. I haven't seen it linked to anywhere but on killshot.rip, which is a very niche website, and I certainly haven't seen anyone else posting about it. They might do, but I haven't seen it yet. It probably will get picked up in the next round of AI training runs, which should at least help a little with those things' responses. Like it or not, they're around and people use them, so their training data might as well be accurate.

Still, I'm glad I took the plunge and posted about Sandra Peabody's abuse to Reddit, and that I decided to post to the largest horror sub instead of somewhere quieter. There's a long, long way to go and so many questions still unanswered. Sandra Peabody still deserves better. But as I I said to someone: if you're in a dark field and you light a single candle, then the field is still dark. But the light is nevertheless visible. I hope I can light more.

"But they never actually hurt Sandra"

It is both surprising and disappointing that even now, in the 2020s, you occasionally hear people say that Sandra Peabody's abuse while she was making The Last House on the Left was somehow less severe because it didn't result in broken bones or bloody wounds. This is a fundamentally incorrect and outdated idea of what harm actually is. People can be hurt very badly by invisible wounds, without any physical injury whatever.

Psychological harm is real harm. Emotional harm is real harm.

Being threatened with rape if you "don't behave yourself" is immensely harmful. While we don't know whether Sandra suffered any long-term health effects – and it would be entirely wrong of us to speculate – we can and should say that the risk was there and significant. Even in the 1970s, when the likes of PTSD were little understood outside the military, it did not take a genius to understand how unrealistic it was to expect a woman to simply shrug off a threat of violence once filming had wrapped.¹

Being threatened with being pushed over a cliff and ending up "fucking mangled" is deeply harmful too. As with the rape threat, we don't know and should not speculate as to whether Sandra personally experienced long-term health effects from what she was subjected to. Again, though, we can and should be clear that if the threat was received as credible – which must have been the case for Sandra's fear to be real – the risk was there.

There remains, as far as I can tell, no public apology to Sandra, and that may have had consequences as well. Once again, we do not know what may or may not have been said in private, and that belongs to Sandra and nobody else unless she freely chooses to share it. But today, it is widely accepted that a genuine and meaningful apology can assist in the healing process, often contributing towards validation, restoration of agency, accountability and closure.²

Regardless of what the actual reverberations of Sandra Peabody's abuse may have been, the fact that she showed great courage and resilience in continuing under such duress does not diminish the severity of the harm she endured in connection with her work on Last House. To say she wasn't hurt is highly misleading and diminishing of Sandra's suffering. Being treated so unethically and deliberately frightened in order to bring about a desired reaction was very much harm.

¹ Mental Health Foundation. "The impact of traumatic events on mental health" (undated)
² Amyrotos, Raphael. "The importance of an apology for survivors of abuse" (undated).

Psychological torturer or serial fantasist? The David Hess problem

When it comes to significant incidents involving Sandra Peabody and The Last House on the Left, most are corroborated from multiple sources, as I noted the other day. There are only a few exceptions to this. One is the story about David Hess's night-time knife stalking, which comes from Sandra herself, while Fred Lincoln's comment implying that Sandra and Lucy Grantham were transported bound in a car trunk seems almost certain to have been an off-colour joke.

Sandra's intense fear of David Hess in particular is corroborated. The rape scene being rough and distressing is corroborated. Hess remaining in character outside filming periods is corroborated. Sandra's deep upset at the forced lesbianism scenes is corroborated. Sandra leaving the set is corroborated. Marc Sheffler holding Sandra over a cliff and threatening to throw her over it is corroborated.

There is however one major class of incidents for which we only have a single person's word: the stories of sexualised intimidation and threats from Hess, for which again and again the only direct source is David Hess himself. To list these:

• Direct rape threat admission one, in Vanity Fair
• Direct rape threat admission two, on the commentary track
• Presenting the emotionally shattered Sandra as a sexual opportunity, in "Scoring Last House"
• Asking "Can I?" and causing Sandra to "freak", in Celluloid Crime of the Century
• Admitting scaring Sandra leading her to "probably" fear rape, in "Krug Conquers England"

We have no direct corroboration for any of these stories. Even in the commentary track example, where Lincoln and Sheffler are present, those two never challenge nor even comment on the threat itself. They follow up with a variety of jokes and observations about the scene in question, but they never directly address the threat that Hess has just related in a way that is both highly explicit and demeaning to Sandra.¹

It's very noticeable that all the stories listed have something to do with the filming of Mari's rape scene – a scene that we know was very rough and frightening for Sandra. In all but the Vanity Fair version of the rape threat story, Hess mentions removing Sandra's pants. In both the rape threat stories he ties coercion to the threat: "...if you don't behave yourself" in one, "...if you don't do this right" in the other.

Hess states on the commentary track that he "had so much fun with Sandra", holding character with her for four weeks and pushing her to the point of "run[ning] away". If he is telling the truth about his threats of rape, and if he did indeed keep up this level of intimidation and threat through multiple incidents, then what is already very severe abuse would escalate to the level where it could fairly be described as psychological torture.

Given the moral weight of that term, we should ask ourselves whether at least some of those incidents may actually be the same incident, just told in different ways for different audiences. A detail that suggests this might be the case is this: if Hess had ripped Sandra's pants off on four separate occasions, it might well still have been frightening but it would not have had the shock value that Hess's storytelling implies it does. We know pants removal in itself happened at least once, as it's in the filmed scene.

If Hess threatened Sandra with rape even once in a way that she found credible, then that is extreme abuse in and of itself. Indeed, all the examples in the list above are abusive in that they treat Sandra as a dehumanised object for Hess to manipulate by causing her genuine, sexualised, non-acted fear. There is no circumstance in which behaving like that is a legitimate acting technique, Method or otherwise.

We can guess that at least some of the disturbing stories Hess tells may be at least partly true, using circumstantial evidence such as his absolute refusal to display compassion or regret to Sandra even in the last year of his life. We can also consider the fact that abusers frequently frame stories about what they've done to elevate themselves and undermine the survivor.²

But we cannot say that we know, because we have no evidence from anyone else. All we know for sure is that Hess repeatedly told these stories, on two occasions going so far as to represent himself as a man who threatened a young actress with rape and treating that as an artistic achievement. That in itself is reputationally and emotionally abusive, injurious to Sandra's dignity, and highly dangerous in that it risks normalising such behaviour.

Sandra Peabody had no control over the content of these stories, no realistic way to stop Hess representing her bodily autonomy as being something under his control, and no way to respond without compromising the peace and privacy she has chosen for so many years. So perhaps the fairest conclusion we can draw is that David Hess bragged about what, if true, we could reasonably call psychological torture. That is damning in itself.

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.
² Flannery, Shelley. "Whan an Abuser Controls the Story". domesticshelters.org (17 June 2020).

"A blank look on her face" – Sandra's disturbing gaze in Mari's rape scene

Note: A cropped image of the still discussed in this piece appears at the very end of the post. Please decide after reading whether you wish to view it.

Not so long ago, I wrote a post about Last House on the Left Blu-ray reviewers largely ignoring David Hess's commentary track admissions of abuse against Sandra Peabody. While I was researching for that, I went through a number of other reviews that didn't mention the commentary track, and those did not appear in that discussion.

One of those was by The Big Movie House in 2018. The reviewer, Jimmy P, did watch some of the extras, briefly touching on Celluloid Crime of the Century – "some great stories here (some creepy ones too)". However, his review of the film itself struck me more. It's a very negative one – he gives the film only one star – although he recognises its historical significance.

One interesting point he makes is one that many horror fans shrink away from, perhaps reluctant to accept that the Wes Craven of 1971 was not the Wes Craven™ most people remember from the Scream days a quarter of a century later:

"[Last House] is pure exploitation and revels in it."

What struck me even more, however, was something almost no reviewer ever mentions. Jimmy touches on the tragedy of Mari and Phyllis being "punished" for trying to score some pot, then says this:

"Sandra Peabody, who plays Mari, has a scene where she is raped by Krug. She has a blank look on her face which is her separating herself from what is happening to her body. This is one of the saddest performances in the film."

The close-up of Krug lying over Mari during the rape scene is frequently seen in Last House on the Left media, and because it's not explicit in the usual sense of the term versions of it were used even on advertising posters. Indeed, there's a thumbnail-sized picture of it on the back of my Arrow Blu-ray. That in itself might be considered ethically questionable.

Regardless of that, in the large majority of cases where the image appears, Mari (and therefore Sandra) is shown with her eyes closed. What Jimmy P has noticed – and it is hard to overstate how rare it is for anyone to mention this publicly – is the extremely disturbing impression when her eyes are open.

Normally, in a Hollywood rape scene, the victim-actress will be emoting heavily. She is likely to be struggling, crying, screaming, and so on. Sandra, however, just lies there and endures as Hess presses his face against hers and drools on her cheek. In the previous shot, showing her middle body from the side, Mari is weakly attempting to move her arms, though Krug grabs them to pin her down. Here, not even that.

Occasionally she screws up her eyes or bares her teeth, but even these movements seem far out of the norm for this kind of scene. They are in fact more reminiscent of dissociation, a common symptom of the brain being overwhelmed by an immediate and inescapable threat. In basic summary, as Jimmy P notes, it is the mind protecting itself by partially "checking out" from the body.

Hess himself mentions in the "Scoring Last House" featurette that Sandra "really gave in" and had a "look of fatality in her face". He frames this as a sexual opportunity, which is morally repugnant. He is, even so, the only member of the Last House cast to have gone this far in describing Sandra's expression at that moment.

It's extremely important to stress at this point that I am not a clinical professional, and that I am not making a diagnosis. Nor do I have the right to say what Sandra was experiencing in that moment; that is hers alone. But we do know from Marc Sheffler that Sandra was terrified by Hess during the rape scene, and Hess himself reported threatening her to the extent "she didn't know whether [he] was screwin' her or not".

Today, acting a character playing an emotionally very distressing role is understood as requiring professional support. Actor Care Specialist Alan Powell puts it this way:

"We need to support their wellbeing by checking in with them, being sensitive to the potential re-traumatizing and/or mental health risks their roles may expose them to. We should never assume that they will be okay when portraying a role with a trauma-based narrative." ¹

This kind of sensitivity was effectively unknown in the early 1970s, and all the more so when it came to exploitation film sets. It seems extremely unlikely that acting dissociation would have been safe for any actor under such conditions, all the more so a young and vulnerable one like Sandra Peabody.

As stated, we cannot fairly diagnose Sandra's feelings from a still. What we can say without appropriating her right to define her own lived experience is that the appearance of her face during the periods when her eyes are open – still, staring, almost expressionless – is so far outside the norms of what one would expect of a movie rape victim that merely watching her in those moments is deeply disturbing.

This part of the film, perhaps above any other single scene in Last House, underscores the very considerable courage and resilience Sandra Peabody showed to complete her role.

¹ Powell, Alan. "How to Support an Actor’s Well Being in Emotionally Distressing Roles", stage32.com, 2021.

The still in question follows the horizontal rule. Please scroll up if you do not wish to see it. Click on the small image to enlarge it if you wish to study it in more detail.

---

Sandra Peabody in the scene discussed above

"David was... brutal with her" – Marc Sheffler on Sandra's fear of David Hess

Today I'm looking at another of the extras on my Arrow Blu-ray of The Last House on th Left. This is "Junior's Story", a 15-minute piece that's billed as an interview with Marc Sheffler but is more of an edited monologue as we never hear the questions. This was recorded in 2017 and directed by none other than David Szulkin.

Sheffler talks about his early acting experiences and how he got on board with Last House in the first place, but the part we're interested in here – the part about Sandra Peabody – starts at 08:10 on my disc. He confirms that David Hess really did stay in character the entire time they were filming:

"[Hess] became Krug on set and off set. Twenty-four hours a day, all Krug, all the time."

Indeed, Yvonne Hannemann corroborates this in Szulkin (p51) when she says:

"[The actors] stayed in those characters for a few weeks! [...] David Hess was really fearsome. David truly was this menacing character throughout the shoot." 

At 08:22 in the interview, Sheffler talks about Mari's rape scene. He provides vivid and frankly disturbing detail of how this was filmed, starting with this:

"The rape scene is what freaked Sandra out the most, I mean, because... David was... brutal with her."

We know from both Wes Craven and Hannemann in Szulkin (p79) that the scene was very rough, that it was distressing and that Sandra needed consoling, but Sheffler goes a step further and calls Hess's playing of the scene "brutal". He then explains how Craven's directing allowed Hess to behave as he did:

"the way Wes covered it, he pretty much locked off the camera and let it play, and David knew that. You know, so he wasn't trying to hit marks or anything, with movement, so he just went at her."

The director himself, speaking in Celluloid Crime of the Century, concentrated on the technical side of this approach rather than its human impact. He said that he had taken a "documentarian" decision in deciding how to film the scene:

"[I] essentially said, I'm going to stage, we're going to shoot this three times. We're going to take it from beginning to end, and I'm going to put the camera in three different places, just as if I were had three documentarian cameras at a real event. And then somehow I'll cut it together."

The result was that Sandra was expected to endure Hess's aggressive interpretation of Krug's assault for unbroken minutes at a time. Hess himself told Szulkin (p79) that he "got pretty physical with her" and that she "couldn't back off when the camera was running". Sheffler is quite open about the effect this had on Sandra:

"[A] lot of what you see from her is real. Because she was scared shitless, and I don't blame her."

This is notably empathetic – although as far as I can tell, nobody on Last House's cast or crew has ever publicly expressed regret at how the rape scene was staged or how frightened Sandra was. But Sheffler's comment, along with Craven's own observations on her fear, make it clear that she isn't just acting terrified on screen when you watch that sequence: she is terrified.

Sheffler goes on to talk about Sandra leaving the set and hitch-hiking back to New York City; he further corroborates what we already know in terms of Fred Lincoln going after her and "convinc[ing] her that he would make sure nothing bad ever happened to her." Sadly Lincoln was not able to control Hess's comments about Sandra on DVD and Blu-ray extras in the 2000s.

Slightly oddly, Sheffler says "it got to be such" that Sandra walked off, which phrasing might imply that this happened later on in filming – except that we already know from Lincoln in Szulkin (p50) that it was perhaps only a day or two into the Connecticut portion of the shoot. There's no specific evidence either way about whether Sandra was already frightened during the earlier-shot scenes, such as those with Mari interacting with her parents.

What is certain is that Sheffler talks about how Sandra's fear led to her walk-off, and the way he describes it goes well beyond mere nervousness:

"She couldn't take it. She couldn't take Hess. She was... frightened of Hess to the core of her existence. She couldn't... be in the same room with him without her blood pressure going up. She was utterly intimidated."

As with his choice of the word "brutal", this is very strong language from Sheffler. If an actress was frightened of a co-star "to the core of her existence" today, it would be grounds for immediate intervention. In early 1970s exploitation film-making, things were often very different, even when as in this case the director was no monster.

Marc Sheffler's interview solidifies the view that the way the rape scene was shot left Sandra vulnerable, with only minimal protection from the man playing Mari's rapist. Even without Hess's own claim on the commentary track that he threatened her with actual rape, the scene was enough to leave a man only partially involved (Junior stands uncomfortably on the sidelines) sympathising with Sandra Peabody's terror.

Sheffler doesn't blame Sandra for being terrified at Hess's behaviour during the rape scene. I don't blame her either. 

"I'm wanting to get something from her which wasn't coming" – David Hess on the rape scene

One of the extras which features on my Last House on the Left Metrodome DVD set but not my Arrow Blu-ray – it is on the three-disc limited edition – is "Krug Conquers England". As a caption at the start of the video informs us, this covers the first public screening of Last House in the UK, at the Phoenix Arts Centre in Leicester, on 25th June 2000. The interview was packaged and released as a featurette in 2003 by Divine Productions.

Much of the featurette is pretty straightforward stuff, including the expected comments about BBFC censorship and some guitar playing by Hess. Inside the first minute he tells us that "I've never hurt anybody in my life, that I know of", but that leads straight into the opening credits.

But later, about 13 minutes in, Hess starts to talk about the scene in Last House where Krug rapes Mari. He first tells us, "It was a difficult scene for me to do." As so often for Hess, the idea that it might perhaps have been an even more difficult scene for Sandra Peabody doesn't get a mention.

Hess then goes off on a bizarre tangent about how he's never paid for sex and how allowing yourself the vulnerability inherent in making love and "having a real relationship" is hard, and "something we all need to work for". But then there's this:

"In this scene... um... she was like a lox [dead fish]. She… there was no reaction at all from, from, from… from Sandra Cassell. For, for, for… for hours we tried to film this scene."

Hess mostly tells this story fairly straightforwardly, but when he says "hours" he raises his voice for a moment and shows real emotion, a flash of anger, even. I'll merely observe that most people on seeing a woman emotionally unresponsive to a scene as traumatic as this would be concerned for her well-being. You didn't need an intimacy coordinator to tell you that. Hess, however, wants to tell us about his solution:

"So… the reaction that you see on the screen is that I scared her. I ripped her pants off during the filming... and she probably thought that I was gonna penetrate her. I had no intention of doing that, absolutely not."

I'll pause briefly here to allow you all to ponder on what it says that a man needs to specifically tell us that he wasn't about to rape his co-star on camera. But let's continue:

"But that's the reaction you see on the screen, and that's why people react to it so much in terms of the violation of a woman. But at the same time, it's… it’s, it’s, it’s a film. It's a film. I'm, I’m, you know, I’m an actor that, you know, and I'm wanting to get something from her which wasn't coming."

So was Krug.

"I mean, you either do it or you cut the scene."

This sentence is the other time in the interview where Hess gets really animated. There were apparently no other options he could think of. Collaborative acting, perhaps? Just a thought.

Hess rounds off his complaint with:

"There’s no point, there’s no point to making it if you can’t do it the way it should be done."

This whole thing lasts around a minute. Hess was clearly still nursing a grievance about all this almost 29 years after Last House had wrapped. I'd pick the red flags out of it, except that there's scarcely a word of it that would remain.

By coincidence, this interview with Hess was recorded in the very same month (June 2000) that the second edition of David Szulkin's book appeared. As far as I know, it's the earliest of any of the multiple public comments by Hess on this rape scene that are included on commercial Blu-rays today.

Sandra Peabody herself appears only in this monologue as an obstacle to Hess's acting genius, an object to be manipulated, a prop to be forced until she breaks. She never once appears as a partner in a scene.

David Hess was not the person having clothing torn off without warning or consent. David Hess was not the person being put in fear of the simulated scene becoming real. David Hess was not the person being forced into genuine terror to produce a realistic image of "the violation of a woman".

Sandra was all of those things. It is she who comes out of all this with her dignity intact, with her character unsullied, with her courage unquestioned. The most important person in a rape scene is the person playing the victim.

Sandra Peabody deserves that to be known and understood.

Sandra Peabody deserves better.

The "Krug Conquers England" featurette is available on YouTube at the time of writing, albeit under a different name. The section I've covered in this post is at 13:51 in that video and can be watched here.

"But I met David Hess and he was such a nice guy!"

One of the things people often do when confronted with evidence about an actor that they really don't want to be true is to fall back on personal experience with that person. Usually it's simply a case of seeing interviews or reading articles by said actor in which they come across as thoughtful and reasonable, and even generous to their co-stars past and present.

Does this remind you of anything? Yes: David Hess's Terror Trap interview. As you will recall, he was overwhelmingly pleasant to almost everyone in that long piece. Even with those he had less effusive opinions of, he generally found something to say that was no worse than neutral, or mixed good and bad as he did when discussing Wes Craven.

Sandra was the exception. Among people he spent more than a few words on, she was the only exception.

In "Junior's Story", an interview with Marc Sheffler from 2017 that's included on the Arrow Blu-ray edition of The Last House on the Left, Sheffler talks about his time sharing a residence with Hess after the movie. After offering the distinctly odd detail that his flatmate kept an ocelot in the basement and that it was "subservient" to Hess, at 11:46 on my copy Sheffler continues:

David was as flawed as person as anyone I've ever met. But one flaw he didn't have was, he was your friend forever when he was your friend.

Now, that sounds like a nice, uplifting anecdote about Hess – until you think harder about... well, most of it. The first sentence could cover a multitude of sins, and Sheffler doesn't expand. We have of course met some of Hess's sins already on this blog.

And then there are those last five words. When he was your friend. The corollary to that is that he didn't behave that way when he wasn't your friend. We saw in the Terror Trap interview what it meant for the woman who wasn't his friend: a chilling, remorse-free coldness that lasted to the very end of his life.

Although Sandra's experience is the one we're most interested in here, it wasn't only her who Hess treated poorly. Adrienne Barbeau worked with him on Swamp Thing (1982) – yes, Wes Craven invited him back a full decade after he'd terrorised his Last House co-star – and she had this to say in her memoir:

It doesn't help that the actor playing the bad guy [Hess] is a macho stuntman wannabe who throws me around like I'm an ex-girlfriend he's got a grudge against. I haven't been hit like that since Gorgeous George threw a chair at me in the ring when I was Miss Wrestling for Channel 18 in San Francisco. [...] My whole body is bruised and aching.¹

Nobody denies that Hess could come across as exactly the charming rogue you expected him to be – the image he cultivated. You only have to look at all the effusive obituaries for him from 2011 to see that. Your good experience with David Hess at a convention or a Last House on the Left festival screening means one thing and one thing only: that he was nice to you.

You weren't Sandra Peabody. 

¹ Barbeau, Adrienne. (2006). There are Worse Things I Could Do. Carroll & Graf Publishers, pp194–5

The abyss – David Hess and the commentary track extract nobody talks about

Content warning: explicit, sexualised, threatening language.

I don't as a rule use content warnings here, but I'm making an exception today. We've already seen that in the relaxed setting of a 2000s DVD commentary booth, the male villain cast of The Last House on the Left – David Hess, Marc Sheffler and Fred Lincoln –are not always shy of saying things they might otherwise be wary of uttering in public. Considering what Hess in particular does say elsewhere, that's quite a challenge.

Sadly, he outdoes himself here, with the other two playing bit parts. As far as I can tell, this extract has never been reproduced online until now. It begins at 44:53 on my Metrodome Region 2 DVD (46:12 on the Arrow Blu-ray), as Krug is undoing Mari's trousers immediately prior to raping her. David Hess talks about Sandra:

"I gotta tell the story of what happened here, when... this we also did a few times. And finally, apropos of what Marc did, I whispered in her ear and I said, I said to her, I said, 'I will put my fucking dick in your cunt if you don't do this right.' I swear to God. 'I will fuck the living shit outta you,' I told her. And now watch what goes on here [in the film], now watch her face. 'Cause I ripped her pants off! Look at the reaction on that—she actually—she didn't know whether I was screwin' her or not, I don't think."

This tale of degradation and cruelty from Hess, which continues well into the rape scene itself, is followed by Lincoln joking offensively with him back and forth for several lines. Then Sheffler, who has not spoken in the exchange up until now, says of Sandra that:

"her being was violated, not just her body."

This is perhaps the only worthwhile comment any of the men make in this entire section of the commentary track, showing some actual understanding of how severely Sandra was being abused. Almost at once, though, it's back to Hess:

"It's terrible the way we manipulated Sandra, it's just so… but she asked to be manipulated, buddy. She did!"

After Hess's display of apparent remorse – the only time Sandra's name is uttered – undercut immediately with victim-blaming, Sheffler brings this section to a merciful end with a line that lands like a verbal shrug:

"Look, we were out there makin' a movie, you know. You do what you do."

I don't think there's any need to dignify all this with further editorial comment. What it does do, however, is to emphasise even more strongly the truly extraordinary resilience and courage that Sandra showed in completing Last House, and in giving a performance which is widely considered the most emotionally affecting in the film.

David Hess gloried in his extreme abuse of a frightened young woman.

Sandra Peabody chose the quiet dignity of "No comment."

An audio-only extract from this section of the commentary track, containing the whole of Hess's initial quotation, was uploaded to YouTube in 2012 by user servomoore. I have chosen not to link it directly, but searching for "David Hess servomoore" (without the quotes) will bring it up.

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. 

"I had so much fun with Sandra" – Hess, Lincoln and the "boys' club" commentary

We now return to the 2000s DVD commentary track featuring the three male villain actors.¹ This is the location of Marc Sheffler's strongest version of the cliff threat, but that's not all that the track contains. Here's a short but revealing exchange from only around six minutes into proceedings:

"HESS: I had so much fun with Sandra, [word indistinct], ‘cause you remember I held character with her for four weeks until she like… she wanted to run away!
LINCOLN: She did run away, the night before shooting, I had to go get her! […] We lost our girl the night before, she was walkin’ down the goddamn road in the middle of Connecticut. She was goin' home, she was so scared of us.
HESS: She was so frightened. So frightened.
LINCOLN: She was so scared of us. And I knew her for eight years, and she was afraid of me!"

We've already established that Lincoln's "eight years" is almost inconceivable and that the "three [or] four years" he gives in the It's Only a Movie documentary is much more reasonable. We can assume this is merely a slip of the tongue, and it's far from the most important part anyway.

What stands out at once is Hess's opening quote. In the very first part of it, he tells us that not only did he frighten Sandra deliberately – something he said in his Terror Trap interview – but that he had "so much fun" doing it. This is another escalation: the first time we've seen Hess openly stating that he enjoyed scaring Sandra.

Hess also confirms that he did indeed hold character for the duration of filming, or at least nearly so. Once Mari is shot by Krug, she only appears again in Junior's dream, apart from the brief section in the Krug & Company cut where her parents find her alive by the lakeside. Hess's statement is backed up by Marc Sheffler, who has already told us that Hess "was in character 24/7 the entire shoot".²

Hess goes on to say – brag, really – that he did this to such effect that Sandra "wanted to run away!" Lincoln intervenes to point out that not only did Sandra actually leave the set, but that it happened much earlier. He gives "the night before shooting", the same time he provides in Celluloid Crime of the Century. Lincoln's recollection to Szulkin (p50) was "after one or two days", but the walk-off's placement very early in filming is consistent. Early in the Connecticut section of the shoot, that is, as Lincoln makes clear with his "walking down the road" comment.

Hess underlines that Sandra was "so frightened", and Lincoln closes proceedings by corroborating that her fear existed, and by expressing slight incredulity that she was scared of him despite having known her for some years. As he notes in It's Only a Movie, they shared an agent.

Lincoln is most significant here in his backing up of the level of fear Sandra had of the men. Listening to the entire commentary track for remarks about her, there seems to be a kind of rough hierarchy of fear, with Hess very much at the top, then Lincoln, and Sheffler – despite his cliff threat – only mentioning her fear once, in connection with that incident. (In connection with this: Lincoln does mention Sandra being "afraid of Jeramie [Rain]" as well as himself and Hess in Celluloid Crime of the Century. but he does not mention Sheffler.)

In the relaxed and perhaps performative "boys' club" atmosphere of the commentary booth twenty or so years ago, it was Hess who made the comments that may be the most revealing. As his Terror Trap interview shows would remain the case even in the final year of his life and into his seventies, Hess shows no remorse or regret for scaring a young actress so badly that she "ran away" from the set.

In fact, here he shows quite the reverse. Hess's "I had so much fun with Sandra" cannot reasonably be read as anything other than the words of a man actively revelling in having created her fear. And, with his rape threats and night-time knife stalking, in having also created an environment where it was entirely reasonable for Sandra to feel that way.

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.
² "Marc Sheffler sits down w/ Hollywood Wade to discuss the infamous Horror film Last house on the Left", Hollywood Wade | Crime & Entertainment, 4 Sep 2022. Timestamp 35:06

"But what if they’re just telling stories?"

I have now presented multiple examples of what certain of the male actors on The Last House on the Left have said about the woman playing Mari, Sandra Peabody. Generally, in this kind of situation, there are four options regarding what the person in question has been quoted as saying:

1. They actually did what they said
2. They exaggerated from a kernel of truth
3. They made the whole thing up
4. They were misquoted

In this case, we can immediately dispense with option four. Marc Sheffler tells the cliff threat story on camera for Celluloid Crime of the Century and on tape for the actors’ commentary track. David Hess gives “got pretty physical with her” in Szulkin and recounts the rape threat in Vanity Fair – both commercial print publications. He tells the “Can I?” story in Celluloid Crime of the Century and the “fatality in her face” anecdote in the music featurette – both on camera.

They were not misquoted.

Since Sheffler has told the cliff threat story repeatedly for at least two decades now, with varying emphases but with the core remaining consistent, it would be bizarre for him to have made it up. While Sheffler’s reminiscence is deeply unpleasant, it does not talk about frightening Sandra during the creation of a sexually violent moment in the film – Mari’s rape scene. All four of Hess’s quotes do. Let’s concentrate on him.

• If Hess is telling the truth, then he treated Sandra with great cruelty in using her as a dehumanised prop in order to force the terrified reaction he wanted from her.
• If Hess is making everything up, then he treated Sandra with great cruelty in using her as a dehumanised prop in a series of degrading sexualised fantasies.
• If Hess is exaggerating from a kernel of truth, perhaps by telling multiple versions of a story when not all of those events actually happened in the way he tells them, then a blend of options one and two.

Regardless of which is true, the very act of telling these stories is itself egregious. Over a period of a little over a decade from the release of Szulkin’s two editions in 1997/2000 to Hess’s death in 2011, Hess repeatedly and in public portrayed Sandra as requiring a performance forcing from her, instead of treating her as the professionally trained actor she was – and he was not.

The stories were also recounted by Hess with a complete lack of any noticeable remorse or compassion for Sandra – an absence we also saw in his Terror Trap interview. Telling those anecdotes in the fashion he did normalised the behaviour he claimed for himself, which included direct sexual threat and coercion in his Vanity Fair quote.

Whatever the veracity or otherwise of Hess's stories, they commodify Sandra's suffering and violate her dignity. Yet they are still often treated as light-hearted trivia or “tales from the grindhouse trenches”, including by significant numbers in the horror community, and are mostly ignored entirely by the wider film media. As I have said before: we will come back to this.

As I have also said before: Sandra Peabody deserves better.

"Can I?" – David Hess asks his director for permission

We're back to Celluloid Crime of the Century once more, but this time David Hess is in the spotlight. Yes, again. Around 18 minutes into the documentary, Hess says this about his co-star:

Sandra was your archetype upper middle class Protestant–repressed Protestant, you know, and how do you deal with that? How do you deal with it? Well, you try to find ways of stabbing her and her repression.

I'll let you decide how likely it is that the star of Voices of Desire – released mere months after Last House – would be "repressed". If she was indeed "nervous, and uptight, and squeezed", as Marc Sheffler suggests on the actors' commentary track,¹ then it probably wasn't because she couldn't deal with sexual content. Hess's "stabbing" metaphor is slightly concerning for a man playing a violent thug, though.

Immediately after this, there's a separately recorded insert from producer Sean S. Cunningham, who acknowledges the difficulty of this scene from the perspective of the actress playing Mari:

So, when somebody is shaking you and threatening to rape you and carve his initials on your chest, and you’re lying on the ground and this person is over you it’s kind of a terrifying, ugly place to be.

Cunningham's words are straightforward and empathetic, conveying the situation for a woman who has that difficult role. But straight after that we're back to Hess, who decides what we really all need to know is this:

I scared the living shit out of her, man. She really thought I might—I started to pull her pants down, and grab her tits and everything, and I mean she really, I mean she—and I looked up at Wes [Craven] at one point, and I said, ‘Can I?’ And then she freaked.

Given everything we've seen of David Hess's approach to Sandra already, this further escalation is perhaps not enormously surprising. The rough physical aspects of this treatment of his co-star were present in his music featurette story too. But this time there is an additional aspect to his anecdote: the question.

The way in which Hess relates his story strongly implies that Sandra was already frightened before the question was asked. If she "really thought [he] might" then being scared would not be in the least surprising. Hess then reacted to that not by stopping what he was doing or reassuring his screen victim, but by asking Craven "Can I?" At which point, using Hess's startlingly casual term, she "freaked".

We can assume this happened during rehearsal, as asking that question would be completely out of character for Krug. It's not clear exactly what Hess was actually asking permission for, or even whether it was a genuine request or merely performative. This would not have been clear to Sandra in the moment, either.

Hess's story does at least give us the information that one man (Hess) was asking another man (Craven) what else he could do to a woman (Sandra) – and a woman who Hess was already being physically rough with in a sexualised way.

Is it any wonder that Sandra "freaked" at this point? We don't know exactly what went through her head at that moment, and it is not our place to speculate. But it was an absolutely valid and rational reaction. On the video Hess seems almost surprised that Sandra reacted so strongly. Given what we already know about her experience of the Last House on the Left set, he really shouldn't have been.

And then there's the matter of Wes Craven. Hess does not tell us what Craven responded to Hess's extraordinary question; perhaps he perceived it as a tasteless joke. However, for Hess even to have been able to ask tells us that Craven was close by – unsurprising for the director, of course – and must have noticed all the physicality that Hess was putting into his Krug. If as Hess implies Sandra was already clearly scared, then Craven must have seen that, too.

It's possible that Craven both gave a very clear "No" and strongly reprimanded Hess for even asking the question, despite having apparently allowed the rough physical contact that was already in progress. Today the question itself would be seen as a catastrophic ethical failure and would bring immediate and very forceful intervention. In the woods in 1971, an awful lot more depended on the director being strong enough to keep his actors from crossing lines. We must hope that Craven was.

Regardless, this incident – like the music featurette one – related to the filming of Mari's rape scene. Sandra therefore endured objectification and intimidation from the same man multiple times during production of this highly sensitive scene.

To be able to continue when Hess had implied that her bodily safety depended on another man's will and not her own consent only underlines the immense courage, resilience and professionalism Sandra displayed in completing the scene, and indeed the movie as a whole, at all.

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.

"I wanted that reaction from her" – David Hess's 2011 Terror Trap interview

David Hess died in October 2011. In February of that year, he had given what proved to be one of his final interviews (Wayback backup), to the website The Terror Trap. This site specialised (it seems to have been inactive since around 2014) in horror and thriller films from 1925 to 1987, and so The Last House on the Left fell squarely into its remit. Hess's interview is fairly lengthy and, as was normal for this kind of coverage, not especially hard-edged. It is, however, interesting.

Hess talks at considerable length here about many of the people he worked with throughout his career, briefly about music but in far more detail when it comes to his film career. He says Corinne Clery could have been "the love of [his] life" despite being his screen rape victim in Hitch-Hike (1977). He says he's worked with "really good friend" Ruggiero Deodato five times. He shows compassion when discussing a family tragedy Louis Jourdan had suffered just before they worked together on Swamp Thing, the 1982 superhero movie directed by Wes Craven.

When it comes to Last House associates, Hess says Craven was "more professional" on Swamp Thing than he had been a decade earlier. He mentions still being close friends with Jeramie Rain and Marc Sheffler. He calls Lucy Grantham "incredible" and opines that if he and her "got together tomorrow, it would be like there was no time in between". Finally, when asked what this film had that would be nearly impossible to recapture today (ie in 2011), he suggests friendship: "we were all friends so we worked for each other". (Underlining is The Terror Trap's.)

When it comes to Sandra Peabody, however, the tone is very different. First, Hess is asked about his audition and whether any of the other Last House principals had been with him apart from Martin Kove, who had taken him along. Szulkin (p38) tells us that Kove himself had originally been asked to play the role, but felt it too dark and so recommended Hess. On the audition question. Hess is clear:

No. Just us and Sean Cunningham (the producer). And the girl who I scared half to death. (Laughs.)

Is that "girl" Sandra? Both Hess himself and Sandra (p41) give fairly extensive reminiscences about this audition in Szulkin, but neither so much as mentions the other being present. Hess, however, does mention in passing (p39) that a secretary was there. Almost certainly a woman, she would seem a more likely candidate.

Immediately after the section about Grantham, Hess without prompting goes on to say, "Sandra was a little different. I think she was more… vulnerable. Memory-wise, there's a visceral attraction to Sandra's Mari in the film. Krug does that." Frustratingly, the Terror Trap interviewer does not quiz Hess on what he means by the somewhat confusing second half of that quote. Hess then goes on to suggest that Krug feels "kind of filthy" to attack the innocent Mari, but has "gone too far at this point." At which point Hess adds:

And that’s the way we inter-related, even when we weren’t shooting. Sandra was an innocent and I held my character. She didn’t want to get anywhere near me. [...] She didn’t want any part of me. She thought I was a fucking monster.

After this, the Terror Trap interviewer does ask an interesting question, which prompts an even more interesting answer:

Terror Trap: Was that because she was a really enthusiastic Method actress and she was creating that whole thing? Or was she actually really scared of you?

David Hess: I think she was really scared. She wasn’t what I would call a complete Method actress. I mean, I studied with Sandy Meisner and Stella Adler. I knew what the fuck I was doing. I knew how to maintain that character, even off screen. And for very good reason. I wanted that reaction from her.  

There is a lot to unpack here. First: "I think she was really scared", in 2011. This is the same man who in 2008 admitted threatening to rape her. The same man who Fred Lincoln and Wes Craven both noted Sandra as being afraid of in Celluloid Crime of the Century in 2002. The same man who Sandra herself said "I was scared" about in Szulkin (2nd edition 2000) in connection with his knife stalking. Lincoln says that "what you're seeing in her face is real fear", also in Celluloid Crime of the Century. Hess, speaking some years later than that, says he thought she was really scared.

Then there's the name-dropping. We've already met Sanford "Sandy" Meisner on this blog, since Sandra spent two years studying under him in the late 1960s. It is... somewhat surprising that a man who also studied with him would not recognise a fellow Meisner-trained professional. It is also... somewhat surprising that a man who studied with him would imagine that Meisner's principle of "living truthfully under imaginary circumstances" could ever include threats of real sexual violence as a legitimate part of an acting toolkit.

Marc Sheffler, speaking for an interview in 2022¹ and a man who knew David Hess well for a number of years, has a very different perspective on Hess's acting background during his Last House days. Sheffler says:

He knew nothing about acting, he was doing what he thought people should do, so he was in character 24/7 the entire shoot.

This creates a conflict. A man who "studied with Sandy Meisner and Stella Adler" cannot be a man who "knew nothing about acting". It's not possible for both Hess and Sheffler to be accurate here. This is one case where the answer seems crystal clear: Sheffler is correct. He was speaking more than a decade after Hess had died, so unfairly denigrating his former associate would have looked gratuitously insulting. Hess, meanwhile, was making the point to the Terror Trap interviewer that he "knew what the fuck [he] was doing".

Except that he didn't. 

Finally, consider the warmth Hess shows to so many former colleagues, the genuine concern for Jourdan, the friendship with Deodato, the praise for Grantham. There is one and only one person here who he covers more than incidentally who gets absolutely none of this. No remorse, no regret, no warmth, no compassion. Most actors, forty years on from a difficult film and considering a co-star who has retreated from acting, will at least manage a formulaic "I hope she's happy in her life now" or similar.

Sandra Peabody gets nothing. 

1 "Marc Sheffler sits down w/ Hollywood Wade to discuss the infamous Horror film Last house on the Left", Hollywood Wade | Crime & Entertainment, 4 Sep 2022. Timestamp 35:06

The loudest two words of all

Although the whole of David A. Szulkin's Wes Craven's Last House on the Left: The Making of a Horror Classic is notably well written for a making-of publication, perhaps the most important section is chapter three: "Babes in the Woods: A Crash Course in Guerilla Film Making". This gives us a more or less chronological run through how the movie was shot. And in that chapter, on page 79, Szulkin covers the most brutal sequence in Mari's story: her knife torture and savage rape by Krug. It's in a section where we get direct quotes from four people.

First, Wes Craven, who expresses a certain old-fashioned admiration for Peabody, calling her "very pretty, and very plucky", and noting that she "hung in there" despite the very rough nature of the scene. Rather heartbreakingly now we know more, he says that Mari "took an enormous amount of abuse". Still, the most striking part of Craven's comment comes at the end, when he quotes Sandra as saying to him afterwards: "My God... I had the feeling they really hated me." This indirect quote is all we have from her about this scene apart from her own contribution. As presented by Szulkin:

Sandra Cassell: No comment.

Next comes David Hess. He talks about how the scene was difficult for him. In fact, most things here are about him, including how he likes to "go over the edge" in rehearsal and "set [his] parameters", after which he considers himself "free to do whatever [he] want[s] within [his] character". Hess does eventually mention his scene partner, noting Sandra being intimidated and frightened "a few times", that he "got pretty physical with her", and that "she couldn't back off when the camera was running". He doesn't say so, but that wasn't just professional pressure: Sandra was physically pinned beneath Hess for the scene.

Finally, assistant director Yvonne Hannemann, who is notably empathetic. She tells us that the scene was "really quite upsetting" and "really got very rough". We're also told that "Sandra needed to be consoled" after filming it, although the book doesn't tell us who did that consoling. Finally, she notes how frightening Hess was, rounding off her comments –and the sequence as a whole – by saying that much of the acting that went on during the scene was "sort of method acting."

Since Szulkin doesn't editorialise between the quotes, Sandra's brief contribution is extremely noticeable. Many writers would have either left her contribution out entirely or included a neutral editorial note. Here, though, it's in quotes as direct speech. Nobody else in the entire book gets "No comment" written out in words. Sandra does. 

Sandra Peabody's two words here are louder than the rest of the quote sequence put together.

"A knife at night" – David Hess's off-the-clock threatening behaviour

It's time now to return to the David Szulkin book I mentioned a few posts ago. If you recall, I titled that post "Sandra in her own words", and it cannot be overstated how important that is. Szulkin is the only place that Sandra Peabody has ever gone on the record with her recollections of The Last House on the Left. However, since the book has been out of print for twenty years, some of its details are barely if at all mentioned today.

One incident that is barely mentioned nowadays, despite being included in the film's Wikipedia page at the time of writing, is this one. As far as I am aware has not been included in any making-of documentary or interview. It appears on p50 of my second UK edition. I'll let Sandra herself take up the story:

One of the characters was a method actor, so he was trying to live his part... He'd come after us with a knife at night, trying to freak us out. This was the guy with the dark curly hair [David Hess] - he tried to play his role on and off the set. It was like, 'Lock your doors and windows at night, you don't want him to come get you!' I was scared: I thought this guy had really been a killer at some time in his past!

There's quite a bit to consider here, so let's proceed carefully.

First, we have confirmation from Sandra's own mouth that Hess remained in character even when off the clock – as she puts it, "on and off the set". She refers to him as a "method actor", a technique common in the 1970s – although Marc Sheffler states in a 2022 YouTube interview that Hess "knew nothing about acting, he was doing what he thought people should do, so he was in character 24/7 the entire shoot."¹

Second, Sandra uses the word "us". She doesn't specify who was targeted other than her, but the likely candidate is her fellow victim-actress, Lucy Grantham (Phyllis). Assistant director Yvonne Hannemann, who we will meet again as a perceptive and compassionate witness to events, notes in Szulkin (p51) that "[t]he girls were always afraid, and they would be cowering even during lunch!"

Third, Hess is coming after the actresses "with a knife at night", trying to "freak [them] out". Last House on the Left was an exceptionally demanding film for the two young women playing the teenage victims of the movie's scenes of extreme and often sexualised violence. Their on-screen attacker never properly switching off meant that they couldn't properly switch off, either. "He'd come after us" suggests Hess's night-time stalking wasn't a one-off.

Fourth, Sandra's comment about locking doors and windows could be read as a joke. But then we get "I was scared: I thought this guy had really been a killer at some time in his past!" We already know, from Wes Craven's comments in Celluloid Crime of the Century, that Sandra "really was afraid of" Hess. Even if the "killer" part of that sentence was intended humorously, it doesn't have to mean that the part about her being scared of "this guy" was.

Looking at what Szulkin's careful record tells us in retrospect, the picture becomes a great deal darker. We now know that the man with the knife was the same man who at some point before Mari's rape scene threatened Sandra Peabody with rape herself if she didn't "behave". In this anecdote, printed before that Vanity Fair piece, David Hess is depicted as a man pretending to be dangerous. In reality, to Sandra at least, he was dangerous.

¹ "Marc Sheffler sits down w/ Hollywood Wade to discuss the infamous Horror film Last house on the Left", Hollywood Wade | Crime & Entertainment, 4 Sep 2022. Timestamp 35:06

"Fatality in her face" – David Hess displaying inappropriate, predatory behaviour in a music featurette

Yes, I said a music featurette.

One of the more common extras on physical copies of The Last House on the Left is the ten-minute "Scoring Last House". In this, David Hess talks about the songs he wrote for the movie, playing some of them on acoustic guitar. Hess was a musician before he was an actor – under the name David Dante he wrote "Speedy Gonzales", later an international hit for Pat Boone. Hess's music for Last House is widely known for its deliberately jarring tonal contrast with the extreme brutality and violence playing out on the screen.

Most of "Scoring Last House", which dates from the 2000s, is about this. However, between four and five minutes into the featurette, we get a truly extraordinary and highly disturbing interlude when he talks about Mari's rape scene. Having just mentioned the blues number he wrote for the sequence, he draws attention to how he was "blown away" by a look Sandra Peabody had on her face because, as Hess puts it, "she really was alone in this scene".

Hess goes on to note the "slapping her around [...] pulling her pants off [and] drooling in her face—which [he] did intentionally" which he did as part of his interpretation of his role as Krug, stating that this so humiliated her that she had this look. At this point he says:

Would have been easy to fuck her. Right there on the set, I mean.

Hess states that this was because she "really gave in" and you could see "this look of, of fatality in her face" that he describes as "real".

This is another time when we need to step back and blink at David Hess's behaviour. How far his physical actions on set were acceptable at all is one thing, but the drooling in particular is deeply invasive. There is no suggestion that it was agreed with Sandra in advance, and so I don't need to go into graphic detail to underline the profoundly violating nature of Hess's action at the end of such a scene. Beyond that, however, a further point for the purposes of this post is the way Hess spoke of Sandra after he had "humiliated" her.

Hess is speaking of a woman who "gave in", in other words someone who had been emotionally shattered by the experience. It shouldn't need saying that a woman in that state cannot possibly give informed consent to sexual activity. Hess must have known this, yet he frames it as an opportunity. Therefore, "would have been easy to fuck her" needs one small change to be honest – in fact, just one four-letter word switched for another.  What Hess is actually saying in that quote is "would have been easy to rape her".

Hess’s words reveal not just a lack of empathy, but an actively predatory mindset: he is relaying his thinking about the possibility of sexual assault of a clearly vulnerable colleague as if it were an interesting production detail.

If you're reading this, consider how you would feel if you found a young woman lying emotionally broken. You would doubtless feel compassion, concern, a need to help. Wouldn't we all? Apparently not if you're David Hess, and not merely because in that case you have caused her emotional collapse in the first place. If you're David Hess, the thought that you feel most worth mentioning – to the viewers of a music featurette, remember – is that you could have raped her.

Even in the harsh context of 1970s exploitation cinema, Hess’s behaviour is entirely egregious. This is not a matter of tough film-making or what made the scene "work", but of the abuse of a real human being, Sandra Peabody, without regard for her autonomy or dignity. 

"Scoring Last House" is available on many DVD and Blu-ray editions of Last House on the Left. It is also accessible, albeit not under that title, on YouTube. I have chosen not to embed it in this post, but at the time of writing it can be viewed here.

David Hess admitted threatening Sandra Peabody with rape in Vanity Fair, and nobody noticed

p308, rendered unreadably small for fair use reasons. Hess's quote is between the black lines

Back in the March 2008 edition of Vanity Fair, there was a five thousand word feature article which went into considerable depth about horror cinema pioneers such as George Romero, Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven. The article was bylined Jason Zinoman and was titled "Killer Instincts". David Hess was interviewed for the piece and provided a few short quotes about his time working on The Last House on the Left, though one does get the impression he actually said a little more than made it to print. Still, the quote that matters here is this one:

David Hess, who played Krug with a coiled, maniacal aggression, approached the role with a Method actor's intensity. "I was very mean to the girls, so when it came to the rape scene, [Sandra Cassell] didn't have to act," he says, referring to a co-star who played one of the victims. "I told her, 'I'm really going to fuck you if you don't behave yourself. They'll just let the camera run. I'm going to devastate you.' I don't think she was too happy about that."

When I first came across this – stumbled over it, frankly – I just stared at it for a while. I'd never seen it before, didn't even know it existed. I'll come back to that point in a minute, but this is the closest we're ever likely to get to a smoking gun. This is David Hess, in print, on the record, in a mainstream publication with fact-checkers and a legal team, saying explicitly that he threatened Sandra with sexual violence in order to get a reaction. Let's not soften this by using the unhelpful American media euphemism "assault", either. "I'm really going to fuck you" is unambiguous. He means rape.

This quote also torpedoes the defence of Hess sometimes offered, and indeed the one hinted at in the extract above: that he was merely an extreme Method actor remaining permanently in character. It's not a good defence at the best of times, since that version of Method acting sometimes seems to treat other people's boundaries, consent and welfare as irritating irrelevances to For The Shot – but it fails completely here. Krug isn't making a movie. He would never have said "They'll just let the camera run." He doesn't even have a camera.

This isn't Krug threatening to rape Mari. It's David Hess threatening to rape Sandra Peabody.

That's also clear from his comment that because he was "very mean" (what a euphemism that is) to the girls – Lucy Grantham (Phyllis) presumably being the other – Sandra "didn't have to act" in Mari's rape scene. This is where I pause once again and ask you to consider. When a woman is playing the victim in a notoriously brutal rape scene, do you really think it's a fantastic idea if she "didn't have to act"? No, 1970s exploitation often didn't devote much time to actress welfare, but there were still limits. On Last House there doesn't seem to have been much of a boundary set by Hess short of "No actual rape." As he wasn't an actual rapist, that didn't bother him.

On top of all this, and that appalling and cruel "devastate" closer, there's the clear coercion revealed in the phrase "if you don't behave yourself". This explicitly ties Sandra's personal safety to doing what Hess wants. It doesn't matter ethically that he would not have followed through on his threat of physical violence; that he made the threat with the intention that it produce terror (she "didn't have to act") is enough to be abusive. The lack of any clear indication of what "behave" actually meant made it worse, as Sandra could not be sure which actions might be considered misbehaviour by Hess.

As I said, this was a five thousand word feature article. Hess's admission comes about two thousand words into the piece. Well, I say "admission" but it's lacking in any kind of regret or compassion. "I don't think she was too happy about that" is stomach-turning; you can almost hear Hess smirking.  Zinoman leaves the quote to stand without editorial comment, startling enough in itself from a 2025 perspective, but then goes on to discuss and interview Wes Craven at some length. The number of words devoted to asking Craven about his lead actor threatening his lead actress with rape on his film set?

Zero.

I'll be fair to Zinoman here and say I suspect that, given the culture of that magazine at the time, this was more of an editorial decision than a writer's. But even if we assume that is the case, it is a staggering ethical failure. I was an adult in 2008. If I'd said what Hess did in the course of my job, my feet wouldn't have touched the ground. I'd have been dismissed the same day for gross misconduct, and rightly so. Yet here's an article published in the mainstream media that same year where "I threatened to rape my co-star" is apparently treated as a snippet of colourful trivia from the old days.

I said I'd come back to my not knowing the Vanity Fair quote existed. That's because, apparently, almost nobody has ever mentioned it. If I do a Google on the terms "David Hess" and "They'll just let the camera run. I'm going to devastate you" (avoiding the swear word in case it's asterisked out in any sources) then guess how many hits I get. Go on, guess. It's been seventeen years, remember. No? Then I'll tell you.

Three.

One is the article itself. One is a 2012 academic paper by Allison Virginia Craig.¹ And one is this Quora post. And that last one was written by me a few weeks ago, just after I discovered the article. That's all. Allowing for the fact that there may have been some coverage in publications now lost or outside the scope of Google, that means that the entirety of the professional, semi-professional and fan horror media have either completely missed a star of a landmark horror movie openly admitting to a rape threat, which is very bad – or have seen it but decided not to cover it, which is even worse.

As we'll see as this blog continues, this is not the only time that a blatant confession of abuse in easily accessible Last House media has been repeatedly ignored. This may be the most egregious example of all, though, since unlike many of the others it would surely have been seen by fans not merely of Last House on the Left but of that era of cinema in general: Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, etc. None of them seem to have posted about Hess's threat anywhere indexed by Google, either.

Outside of Vanity Fair itself, the only people who ever seem to have mentioned this are Craig and me. The people who've read her paper or my Quora post know, and now you know as well. Thank you for adding to their number. As with so much about this film, Sandra Peabody deserves better.

¹ Craig, Allison Virginia, ""Only a girl like this can know what's happened to you" : traumatic subjects in contemporary American narratives" (2012). Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024). 535. https://doi.org/10.54014/P20D-9BFW