The normalisation of cruelty – Fred Lincoln's "really pushed it" line and Last House set culture

Quite some time ago, I posted about a line of Fred Lincoln's from the actors' commentary track. This was said by him just after we'd seen the fire escape scene, in which the drugged, gagged and bound Mari is kidnapped and placed in the Cadillac trunk (boot). As the trunk is opened, we can just glimpse the already abducted Phyllis already in there, also tied up.

As the car drives away, and after a mild gripe from David Hess about Marc Sheffler going out of frame in a previous shot, Lincoln observes:

"I thought we really pushed it because we really left 'em in the car till we got to Connecticut. But that was because we didn't have enough money to buy another car. We only had room for that many people."¹

Given the context of the comment, if that line were sincere it could only realistically mean that Sandra Peabody and Lucy Grantham were left in the trunk – perhaps still bound – for the drive to Connecticut. It's twenty miles or so even to the state line. "Left 'em" doesn't seem to imply physical force (as "kept 'em" might) but neither does it suggest even grudging agreement, which "we had to ask 'em to travel in the trunk" might have.

I want to be very clear at this point that I have not changed my view from the older post: I firmly believe Lincoln was not being sincere and was instead making a very dry joke. After all, from a purely practical perspective and even if I misunderstood Jim Hubbard's diary in Appendix III of Szulkin, the idea that the only workable options were one, buy another car or two, keep the actresses confined in the trunk until Connecticut is preposterous. Consider the options:

• The New Haven Line railway. Sandra mentions (Szulkin, p50) using this train at least once
• Taking a bus. I don't know the 1971 situation, but today you can travel that route in two hours (with one change)
• Hiring a cab. Even with out-of-town fees, cheaper and simpler than buying a car
• Renting or borrowing a car
• Making two trips – it's just over an hour to Westport in 1971 traffic
• Rejigging the production schedule, which happened anyway at times

That isn't even an exhaustive list of reasonable possibilities. Given the number of practical options other than Lincoln's "buy[ing] another car", for this actually to have happened in the way he suggests – even allowing for 1971 standards for transport being less comfortable than today – would have required one of two things:

1. A total failure of common sense on the part of everyone with any power on set, including Wes Craven himself. Serious and dangerous incompetence.
2. A desire to make Mari and Phyllis's plight "more authentic" by effectively kidnapping their actresses for real. Serious and dangerous abuse – and potentially a federal felony.

For all the Last House production's alarming failures of ethics and safety, most obviously seen in Marc Sheffler's cliff threat and – if Hess's largely uncorroborated boasts are to be believed – his own sexual threats, they do seem to have drawn the line at extended physical endangerment of Sandra and Lucy. That alone for me rules out the "trunk incident" actually having happened.

There is also no on-track corroboration of Lincoln's line. One of the others (I think Hess) says "Right" after the sentence about being unable to afford another car, but it comes across like a man simply acknowledging a storyteller; elsewhere Hess tends to be enthusiastic and amused when tales of Sandra's mistreatment are brought up.

Of course, it would help if the horror media had ever actually asked Fred Lincoln about this while he was alive, or indeed people like Sheffler. Their consistent failure to challenge Last House personnel in interviews has left us without a simple acknowledgement that it was a joke. That would have settled the issue. But the question needed to be asked. Indeed, it still does.

What is more immediately concerning, however, is what Lincoln's line reveals about the culture on the Last House on the Left shoot, and indeed for decades afterwards. When this commentary track was recorded in the 2000s, Hess, Sheffler and Lincoln were in their fifties and sixties. They had stature, families, fame—but what they didn't seem to have was any notion of acceptable behaviour in public.

As I've pointed out, there appears never to have been any public apology from any surviving and active Last House cast or crew for the unquestioned mistreatment that Sandra was put through. Considering increased understanding of issues of consent and safety on film sets, as well as the willingness to revisit historical ethical failures over half a century, this looks increasingly out of step.

The commentary track shows the most extreme version of the culture: there, David Hess can openly describe threatening to rape Sandra, saying "apropos of what Marc did" to link his abuse to Sheffler's cliff threat story. Sheffler himself also relates the cliff threat elsewhere, such as in Celluloid Crime of the Century, while Marshall Anker can describe Sandra's horror and upset before her screening walk-out as "carrying on".

There is, sadly, a consistent picture here. What the evidence shows is that not just rough treatment but distress or actual abuse can be minimised, trivialised and even – as on the commentary track – laughed about and treated as amusing lore from the filming front. The woman who was seriously harmed and whose decision to live her life in peace and privacy means she deserves someone to speak up for her gets nobody.

Sandra Peabody suffered terribly in making The Last House on the Left. She showed great courage, resilience and professionalism in completing her role at all, never mind providing the film's emotional centrepiece. The least she deserves now is kindness when others speak about her experience. Instead, she has for decades often been shown nothing of the sort. 

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. 

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.

"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

"I thought we really pushed it" – Fred Lincoln's strangely unnoticed commentary track line

A commentary track for The Last House on the Left featuring the three actors of the male gang members – David Hess, Marc Sheffler and Fred Lincoln – appeared more than twenty years ago, I believe for the Region 2 Anchor Bay release of the DVD. It's a notable track, both for its content and for how little that content has been examined by DVD and Blu-ray reviewers.

I will be returning to that point in the future, but for now here's an example of what is on that track. Spoiler: this time there's a happy ending.

First, some background. About twenty minutes into the film, we see the drugged, bound and gagged Mari being kidnapped. She is carried over the shoulder of Krug, who runs to the waiting Cadillac and places her into the car's spacious trunk (boot if you're British like me) to join the already confined Phyllis. Krug does this reasonably carefully, after Sadie tells him not to hurt them. The trunk is closed, then the gang get quickly into the car and drive off towards the woods.

Sandra Peabody remembered that scene as part of her interview with Szulkin (p60) and had this to say about it:

One serious scene was where that guy put me over his shoulder, ran down a couple of flights of stairs and threw me into a car. Those guys were kind of mean to me when they did that... especially that method actor [Hess] who was trying to be mean all of the time.

(The clarification is Szulkin's.) "That guy" in this case is David Hess, as can be seen from the finished movie. Sandra doesn't expand on what "mean" refers to in this context. The term "serious scene" is also slightly odd given that pretty much all of Last House after the first few minutes is serious for Mari, but again Sandra doesn't expand.

David Hess also provides his recollections of the same scene:

I sprained my ankle going down that fire escape. [...] The scene was shot in downtown New York, not too far from the Fulton fish market. The fire escape itself was [...] really rickety and dangerous. When I think about the stuff I did, it's unbelievable! I could have been killed... but one didn't think about that.

The way Hess frames that comment, given what and who the scene involved, is very noticeable. As far as the movie itself goes, though, that would pretty much be that. What adds a new angle to it is Fred Lincoln's line on the commentary track, delivered as the car is driving away:

I thought we really pushed it because we really left 'em in the car till we got to Connecticut. But that was because we didn't have enough money to buy another car. We only had room for that many people.

On the face of it, this is an extraordinary comment by Lincoln. From the filming location, helpfully supplied by Hess, it is around twenty miles even to the Connecticut state line, let alone any of the woods locations within that state. Is he really saying that Sandra and Lucy Grantham were confined in a car trunk, bound and gagged, for an extended journey?

The answer, fortunately, is almost certainly no. Szulkin comes to the rescue with his Appendix III on pages 208 and 209. This provides us with Last House on the Left's shooting schedule, both the original plan for Night of Vengeance (the movie's shooting title) and, crucially, sound man Jim Hubbard's own diary of what actually happened during those few weeks in autumn 1971.

And if that diary is accurate, and there's no reason to suspect it isn't, then what Lincoln says could not have been true. Both planned and actual schedules are very clear that the Connecticut woods sequences were shot before the New York City apartment filming that included the fire escape scene. In fact, those particular New York scenes were done right at the end of shooting, with the exception of a "make-up day" in Westport.

It's not as if it would have been likely anyway. Transporting two bound women in a car trunk across state lines would be a ridiculous risk to run: quite apart from the physical dangers there were the enormous personal consequences of a patrol stop. A suspected federal kidnapping investigation could have brought the FBI down on the entire exploitation, underground and adult film industry – an industry that was trying very hard to avoid official attention, and was the place Fred Lincoln earned his living.

The obvious answer is that Lincoln was telling a very dry and, judging by the lack of laughter from Hess and Sheffler, not especially effective joke. The world in which Lincoln operated would certainly have seen gallows humour as routine, even if joking about this seems deeply uncomfortable to us today, especially when he had known Sandra for years.

What we can take from this is twofold. First, that not everything we see or hear is necessarily what actually happened, a point I will come back to. And second, that DVD commentary tracks of the early-mid 2000s were often performative "locker room" style spaces where the rules were loose and laddish behaviour was not merely tolerated but expected.

The most important point, however, is that Sandra and Lucy were not in fact endangered in the way that taking Fred Lincoln's words literally would have suggested.

Fred Lincoln and Sandra's set walk-off

We've so far met two of the three male members of Krug's gang, David Hess and Marc Sheffler. The third was Fred Lincoln. He was different from the others for two reasons. One, he had significant film acting experience, much of it in the New York adult movie scene – although Szulkin (p37) tells us that he had also worked as a stunt man on The French Connection (1971).

And two, he already knew Sandra Peabody. He notes in Celluloid Crime of the Century that "she was somebody that I knew from legitimate movies too. We had done things together". In the DVD Region 1 documentary It's Only a Movie: The Making of Last House on the Left, he is even clearer:

We had the same agent. We met. We'd gone on auditions together for different parts, different jobs. I had gotten her work.

My own searching hasn't turned up a film on which both actors worked, but not everything in that era would have been as clearly recorded as it is today. Besides, Lincoln doesn't actually say they'd both won the auditions for any one film.

On the DVD commentary track Lincoln shares with Hess and Sheffler,¹ he says he'd known her "for eight years". Since that timescale would make Sandra a fifteen-year-old high-school student, two years before her known movie debut in Misfit (1965), that seems a likely misremembering. Indeed, in the It's Only a Movie documentary Lincoln offers the much more reasonable "maybe three, four years".

One thing he did not misremember, however, was that early in the filming process Sandra left the set temporarily. In Szulkin (p50) Lincoln explicitly ties this action to her fear:

[The film] was really a fun thing... except, for some reason, Sandra was afraid. Sometimes, she was scared to death... in fact, she left the production after one or two days, and we had to talk her into coming back!

Szulkin immediately asks Sandra herself if she was upset during the shoot. Upset and fear are not quite the same thing, and Sandra does not touch on her walk-off, but she does say:

I was upset because I'm an emotional person, and I reacted to what was going on as if it were real. [...] I ended up doing a horrible job in the film. I was very upset, and I felt like I should have channeled that, but I couldn't... I was a young actress and I was still learning to balance any emotions I had from outside of the film into my scene work.

Sandra does not expand on what those emotions "outside the film" might have been, but her self-assessment as having done "a horrible job" is not shared by the majority of Last House fans. Indeed, her performance as Mari is often considered the emotional heart of the movie.

Lincoln again notes the earliness of Sandra's walk-off in Celluloid Crime of the Century, where he says it was "the night before shooting". Meanwhile, Marc Sheffler corroborates Lincoln's story in a 2018 interview.² He says:

I recall she walked out at one point, she she left the set, she ran away and was hitchhiking back to New York. And Freddie [Lincoln] knew her so I think Sean [Cunningham] and Wes [Craven] sent Freddie to go find her.

The "hitchhiking" detail is also mentioned by Sheffler in the 2022 interview with Hollywood Wade that I mentioned in my post about David Hess's night-time knife stalking. In that interview Sheffler goes on to call Sandra a "sweet, kind, harmless girl" and say he could "see very clearly" how Hess remaining in character 24/7 would "scare the shit out of her".³

Sandra's walk-off has been on the public record for many years, at least since Szulkin published Wes Craven's Last House on the Left a quarter of a century ago. It's generally been framed as, to put it bluntly, an overwhelmed girl running away from material she couldn't deal with. I'm not so sure.

For a start, we now know that it wasn't only the on-screen events of Last House that were frightening. Sheffler tells us that David Hess was in character round the clock and severely scared Sandra. Sheffler knew that Hess scared her at the time, just as Craven knew. What he didn't know, of course, was a far more serious reason for Sandra's fear: that Hess was also the man who stalked her with a knife and threatened to rape her.

Sheffler also provides another important note: Sandra was hitchhiking "back to New York" – in other words, she didn't walk off set in the urban settings where the early parts of the movie are set, but in the Connecticut woods. That's a bigger deal. And in fact, it's an even bigger deal than it at first appears.

1970s exploitation was a small world. Most of its practitioners knew each other and word got around. Even regular society was pervaded by misogyny – at the time Last House on the Left appeared, no US state criminalised marital rape. The same was true of acting: women who asserted boundaries were often branded "difficult", replaced by other, more malleable performers, and found it hard to get future exploitation acting gigs. While the Last House production team was not sexist in this way, as a young actress Sandra Peabody would hope to be working for others in the future, not all of whom would share the relatively liberal outlook of Craven and Cunningham.

She wasn't as new to low-budget acting as is often made out, either. Sandra herself says (Szulkin, p197) that after her debut in Misfit, she "started getting roles in low-budget drive-in movies that were being shot in Florida". One of these was the mystery thriller The Horse Killer (1970), also now lost. Szulkin notes that after Last House she went on to act in a movie filmed in New York then called The Seven Deadly Sins but which then changed title to something Sandra couldn't remember; this became Massage Parlor Murders! Not mentioned in Szulkin, but released in the same year as Last House on the Left, was the erotic horror film Voices of Desire.

Put all that together and the walk-off picture becomes considerably more nuanced. While her fear doubtless played a part, Sandra was also taking a rather radical step: asserting her boundaries. This show of agency doesn't surprise us today, but for a young and still relatively inexperienced actress in exploitation, that was not a low-risk manoeuvre. She could have ended up in that "difficult" box and struggled to find work in the future. Sandra Peabody was potentially risking her career rather than endure.

Lincoln, whom she knew already, persuaded her back with lengthy ("I talked to her and talked to her") and quiet reassurance ("It’s only a movie, nobody’s going to hurt you") as he remembers telling her in Celluloid Crime of the Century. Lincoln was sadly wrong about the second part of that. But even if Sandra's walk-off was temporary, the fact that it happened at all in that era and genre is remarkable.

Sandra stood up for herself when it would have been easier to say nothing – another example of the moral courage that would serve her so well in later life. 

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 of Wes Craven's Last House on the Left interview". withoutyourhead, 4 Apr 2018. Timestamp 28:55
³ "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 35:43