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. 

Summing up for now

Over the past sixty-odd posts, I have explored what happened to Sandra Peabody while she was filming her part as Mari in The Last House on the Left. The movie was made in autumn 1971 and released in 1972, but over half a century on there is still startlingly little where evidence and thoughts about Sandra's experience and the abuse she was subjected to are brought together in one place.

Today is Sandra's 78th birthday. At this point, I am drawing my regular updates on "Not Only a Movie" to a close. I will continue to maintain the blog, and to read and where appropriate respond to comments. I will post again if and when there is a reason to do so, but I feel there is little point or respect to Sandra in posting just for the sake of posting. She deserves better than that.

Sandra, over all these posts, I have learned that not only were you subjected to an ordeal which nobody should ever have to experience, but that you responded to it with extraordinary courage and the determination to support and protect other vulnerable people. For half a century you have done exactly that, and I promise never to forget your humanity and dignity. Happy Birthday. 

"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).

The great betrayal – Sandra's ability turned against her

By the time she arrived on the Last House on the Left set, Sandra Peabody had a high quality acting education. Not only had she obtained a BA after studying drama at the highly regarded Carnegie Mellon University, but she had graduated from two years at the Neighborhood Playhouse. There, she had studied under Sanford Meisner, one of the great acting teachers of the twentieth century.

Meisner's technique rejects the older "method" approach of drawing from real-life past events to inform traumatic scenes, as "Sandy" felt that was too dangerous to an actor's wellbeing. Instead, he promoted what he called "living truthfully under imaginary circumstances", in which actors learn to remain emotionally present and responsive so that they can respond to stimuli on an instinctual rather than intellectual level.

When done properly, this results in a highly believable performance – and because the emotions and impulses are authentic, even micro-reactions visible on an actor's face convince. This is extremely important in film acting, where the camera often captures fine details that can be missed or glossed over when looking at a distant performer on a theatre stage.

Because a Meisner actor has to "drop their emotional guard" in order to respond authentically and spontaneously, they deliberately make themselves highly vulnerable. This means that it is absolutely crucial that scene partners maintain absolute trust in each other. The bargain is: "I will allow myself to fall – you will always be there to catch me." A true Meisner actor like Sandra will place the safety of their scene partner above everything else.

The tragedy of Sandra's experience on Last House was that the simulated threats and harm she had prepared for and dropped her defences to respond to were not all she received. On occasion, as with Marc Sheffler's threat to push her off a cliff or David Hess's horrifying threat to rape her for real, the stimuli forced on her were not safe, rehearsed, imaginary dangers but real ones. That the actors did not intend to follow through and actually cause her physical injury is irrelevant: the body responds to imagined threats of harm very similarly to sincere ones. ¹

The combination of a credible threat of serious bodily harm and the emotional vulnerability required of a Meisner actor is a devastating one. It means that when such a threat does arrive, the recipient has no "shield" to protect herself from the worst, no way of telling herself, "It's only make-believe and he probably doesn't mean it." Fear would have been instant and overwhelming. Indeed, both Sheffler and Hess note how frightened Sandra was after their threats. This is not coincidental.

I am not an actor, but I am assured that to someone who genuinely practises that craft in a controlled and safe manner, what those men did to Sandra goes far beyond mere unethical behaviour and into the realm of absolute betrayal. One way I've seen it described is as a kind of vertigo: the actor hearing about what Sandra experienced feels the floor drop out from under them, because the very bedrock of what acting is has been ripped away, leaving only a terrifying void.

Sheffler openly notes in his 2020 statement about the cliff threat that "the fear you see in her face is real". Hess on the commentary track sounds amused when he says he thinks she was so overwhelmed by terror that she could no longer be sure whether the rape scene was simulated or had crossed into real assault. Sandra's elite professional training – a far cry from Hess, who "knew nothing about acting" – was a major asset in actual acting, but left her defenceless when it was weaponised against her.

Sandra's forced and genuine emotional reaction was used in the film you watch on streaming or Blu-ray today. When you watch those scenes, you are not watching controlled acting; you are watching a young woman forced into extreme fear. She allowed herself to fall, but Sheffler and Hess did not catch her, instead pushing her down harder. Even if Sheffler, at least, was not malicious, the result was similar. It was the absolute antithesis of what acting should be about.

That Sandra not only survived this abuse but remained to finish her role and went on to spend so many years working to protect young people, giving them the support she was denied on the Last House set, is a profound illustration of the remarkable courage she showed both while on the shoot and in later years. In her late seventies, Sandra Peabody still passes on ethical, safe Meisner technique the way her great teacher practised it. That is moral heroism.

¹ Segal, Jeanned, PhD, et al. "Stress Symptoms, Signs, and Causes", helpguide.org (undated).

Quiet, dignified, understated – Mari's walk to the lake

Mari walking to the lake

In The Last House on the Left, Mari's torture and rape scene is often described as the most harrowing part of the film to watch. As Marc Sheffler tells us, it was also extremely frightening for Sandra Peabody to film, thanks to David Hess's unethically aggressive interpretation of Krug. Hess himself admits on the actors' commentary track that he abused Sandra while this was being filmed, and the effects are visible in the finished movie.

This makes it all the more remarkable that the scene immediately following the atrocity is perhaps the most emotionally powerful in the film. As Krug, Sadie and Weasel stand and look at each other, Mari shakily gets to her feet and walks painfully away, looking back at the villains with an expression of disgust and accusation. In that moment, Mari shows that Krug's violation of her body has failed to destroy her essence. This is followed by even Krug briefly looking shocked by what he has done.

Hess's "Now You're All Alone" plays, a song of genuine emotional force that sadly happens to have been written by an abuser. In the background, Mari kneels and vomits into the grass, before quietly saying a prayer. In spite of what Szulkin (p81) says, this is not the Lord's Prayer, but "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep", which in the version used here has these lyrics:

"Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my Soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my Soul to take."

This is traditionally a children's prayer, presumably chosen for this scene to emphasise the teenage Mari's youth and stolen innocence. It also shows a world the villains cannot reach. After the villains pick bloodied blades of grass off their clothes, we focus again on Mari, this time in the foreground. She looks quietly round at her tormentors, then gets to her feet and walks away. The attackers say nothing, but simply follow her.

Mari walks down to the lake, and for a few moments we see a close-up of her face – the one at the head of this post – always slightly out of focus, but clearly showing the blood on her face. More importantly, however, it shows her expression. She is clearly beyond the reach now of anything in this world, and focused only on the lake in front of her. Though the shot lasts only seconds, you can't take your eyes off it.

At this point, Mari walks down into the lake itself, wades out until she is chest deep... and stops, unmoving and looking away from the camera and therefore her attackers. There she remains until Krug uses Weasel's gun to shoot her dead. From this point on in the film, the criminals lose their power; the tragedy is that both teenagers have been brutalised and killed before that happens.

Sandra spoke to Szulkin (p81) about needing several takes of her death scene:

"The part when I walked into the water and he shot me had to be done over and over again. Initially I went in the wrong direction from the bullet, and it didn't look real enough. I was jumping in the opposite direction from where I was supposedly shot. Finally they showed me which direction to go in and we redid it."

Quite why Sandra hadn't been told the right direction the first, or at worst the second, time is a good question, especially as she apparently wasn't especially comfortable in the water as Wes Craven notes in his commentary track:

"I can't remember what Sandra was saying, but something basically like, 'I can't swim. How deep is this?' [Craven laughs] 'How long do I have to stay here?'"¹

Still, the key point is that after the fear and discomfort of the rape scene, which would doubtless have been very difficult for Sandra even had it been filmed in a remotely respectful manner, by the time this sequence was filmed the worst was over – and she was once again being allowed to do her job and act.

Sandra's quiet, dignified, understated interpretation of the traumatised Mari is entirely convincing; at last her Meisner training is being allowed to come into play and she can show emotion under imaginary circumstances, instead of a forced response to real threat and terror. Indeed, Mari and Sandra share a significant quality: despite dehumanising abuse, both retain their essential humanity.

In the "Krug & Company" version of Last House, we see a scene dropped from the main cut in which Mari is discovered by her parents by the lakeside while still alive and is able to pass on basic information about Krug's gang before she dies in their arms. As Sandra notes in Szulkin (p89) however, it had to be filmed in something of a hurry:

"They wanted to put makeup on me to have me look more 'dead' for that scene. But while we were shooting, the sun was going down, and we didn't have enough time for that."

Restoring this scene to Last House on the Left does make the Collingwoods' later deduction of who their house guests are a little less of a logical leap, but in itself it is not quite as moving as it ought to be, probably because of that pressure of time. This may be why it has not been added back into the standard cut.

The main point, however, is that the sequence that does survive has real power. It also seems to be one where Sandra Peabody was allowed to be the professional actress she was. I am very much convinced that these two things are related. Imagine what Last House could have been if Sandra had been allowed to act Mari's trauma elsewhere as well. 

¹ 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.

The faces of courage

We know that Sandra Peabody was frightened, especially of David Hess, during her time filming The Last House on the Left. That is attested by multiple people, including Wes Craven, Marc Sheffler, Fred Lincoln and Hess himself. But her being frightened does not mean she was not courageous. Indeed, Mark Twain once wrote:

"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear"¹

Sandra showed exactly these qualities while working. She was not as naive as she is sometimes painted; she signed up for a movie she knew at the time would contain significant violence, as she acknowledges on p41 of Szulkin:

"[B]y the time I came in, they had decided to do it as just a violent film, without all the sex [...] they promised that all of that [porn] was totally out... and they did take it out."

So, Sandra knew what she was getting into in that sense. She knew the role of Mari would be challenging, thanks to the nature of the part; that much was clear even allowing for the looseness of the script. That, of course, is very different to knowing that Hess would be, as Marc Sheffler later stated, "brutal with her" during filming of the rape scene to the extent of terrifying her.

Yet despite this mistreatment, and her fear being – as Sheffler also said – visible on screen in the final film, she remained to complete her role. Not only that, but her performance ensured that Mari is often today seen as the emotional centrepiece of the film. Indeed, her tragic story is often represented on Last House material such as the front cover of my Metrodome DVD set.

Sandra's courage showed itself in another way, too. Quite early in the Connecticut portion of the shoot – the exact time is difficult to pinpoint – she walked off set. It's often missed today how radical an act of boundary-setting that was for a young actress on a 1970s exploitation movie. Sandra was potentially risking her career rather than stay, and she only returned to the set once Fred Lincoln had reassured her that nobody would hurt her.

Having completed her role, Sandra once again put her principles ahead of easy compliance when she walked out of a pre-release screening of Last House. This was of course highly visible and brought comment from others, with Marshall Anker recalling open surprise as he told Szulkin (p117) about the screening, recalling that he had wondered, "Didn't she know what she did?"

Fast forward a few years and we see Last House on the Left begin to acquire a reputation as a cult classic. In the UK, where the film had been denied a certificate by the BBFC in 1974, it was released on home video in the early 1980s until being banned as a "video nasty" under the 1984 Video Recordings Act. By the time the film was legally released on DVD almost two decades later, it had become eagerly anticipated among fans.

The 2000s also saw a boom in horror conventions and similar events. As a major star in what was by then seen as a highly significant horror film both in terms of its influence on the genre and in terms of Wes Craven's development as a director, Sandra would have been a highly desirable guest at such events. Despite the fame and appearance fees on offer, she has consistently declined all such invitations – maintaining the courage of her convictions.

After leaving acting a few years after Last House, Sandra showed another form of courage – moral courage – in the way she approached her career. Instead of trading on her notoriety, she refused to publicly recognise the work that had exploited and harmed her. Instead, she threw herself into creating safe, supportive spaces both in children's TV shows like the Emmy-winning Popcorn and in her still-ongoing decades of work as a talent agent and acting coach.

Sandra could have gained a good deal of fame and money from being "the girl who was Mari" over the last half-century. Instead, she has given only one interview – to Szulkin – and has never appeared to talk about Last House on the Left on camera. Her principles and resilience appear repeatedly in her work, whether in staying to finish Mari's role despite fear and mistreatment or in choosing to work in underfunded children's TV.

In short, courage runs through Sandra Peabody's professional life. She deserves to be recognised and honoured for that.

¹Twain, Mark. The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins, 1894. Epigraph to ch. 12.

"She was not into any of that stuff" – Sandra as odd woman out

Sandra Peabody's Last House on the Left experience included abuse and mistreatment, with even director Wes Craven later acknowledging that the production "put her through hell". One of the factors sometimes mentioned as having contributed to her broader unhappy experience was her isolation from the rest of the cast – not in terms of being deliberately kept apart, but more in terms of personality.

David Szulkin's book, Wes Craven's Last House on the Left: The Making of a Cult Classic, provides some vivid examples of this – and, as so often, we find passages that are perhaps more revealing now than they appeared to readers when the book was new more than a quarter of a century ago.

We have of course covered Mari's rape scene extensively on this blog, and we should always remember and respect Sandra's absolute refusal to talk about it: although there is the "My God... I had the feeling they really hated me" that Wes Craven reported she had said after the scene had been filmed, Sandra's only direct quote about it – anywhere – is simply "No comment". This stands apart from how anyone else has spoken about the scene.

A striking piece of editorial text by Szulkin comes on p45, very near the start of the chapter "Babes in the Woods: A Crash Course in Guerilla Film Making", which covers the filming of the movie. He says:

"Despite the demanding nature of the project and its often gruesome subject matter, most of the cast report having fun on the set."

At first sight, that reads as a reassuring note that the actors generally enjoyed making even this harsh story. At another glance, however, that "most" really stands out. When you realise that the person who was held over a cliff, the person whose fear was deliberately not calmed by her director, the person who was terrified by the rape scene and the person who walked off the set were all one and the same – Sandra Peabody – the word takes on a much darker and more troubling appearance.

Sandra has been described by several members of the Last House team in terms such as "sweet", and her fellow victim-actress Lucy Grantham says (p42) that they were very different, with Sandra being "ladylike and shy" as opposed to Grantham's rebellious personality. On p51 Grantham says:

"We were living, for the most part, in Sean's house [...] There was a lot of partying and a lot of fun."

This is backed up in the actors' commentary track. While I'm not here going to give what seem like gratuitous specifics about people's private lives, it's clear that at times the partying and fun went considerably beyond simple socialising.¹ This is nothing especially shocking for the 1970s, but it does add to the picture of a production where many personnel played hard as well as worked hard.

We don't know exactly what Sandra's own arrangements were, although she does mention (p50) travelling by train from New York to Westport at least once, presumably via the still-operational New Haven Line. However, her comment (also p50) that Hess "would come after us" (plural) "with a knife at night" shows that she can't simply have travelled home every evening of the shoot.

Steve Dwork provides an example of Sandra's attitude to Last House's material not being the same as most of her colleagues' on pp53–54 of Szulkin:

"Nobody was politically correct about [the violence]. Even with some of the sexual scenes, I don't think anybody on the set was really put off, except Sandra, who was involved in doing it. She was not into any of that stuff, professionally or otherwise—"

Here I'll pause to comment on that apparently odd "or otherwise". There are several ways it could be interpreted, but those would simply be speculation, so let's continue with Dwork's quote:

"—which was an understandable reaction on her part... I mean, if I was being stripped naked and slashed about with fifteen strangers standing around watching, I don't think I would deal with it too well!"

Fifteen is probably intended as exaggeration for effect; Craven and Sean Cunningham, on their own commentary track, come to the conclusion that even ten would likely be on the high side.²

More significantly, Dwork singles out Sandra as the only person who was "put off" by the sexual scenes – which in her case involved not only the forced lesbianism scene which made her cry, but also playing Krug's victim in a rape scene which Anne Paul described as "really graphic, bloody, nasty, horrible" and which Yvonne Hannemann described as "really quite upsetting" and "very rough".

Since Phyllis's earlier rape was off-screen, Sandra Peabody is the only person who had to portray a rape victim in real time – in a scene that as filmed was, as Marc Sheffler makes clear, both longer and harsher than the edited version we see in the final movie. She is the only person among the core cast who has never spoken on camera about the film. She is the only person who is explicitly noted as being "ladylike and shy".

Sandra is also the only person who we know was threatened with physical injury; and the only person who David Hess repeatedly and publicly talked about in sexualised, humiliating and sometimes violent ways. Not a single one of those stories was challenged or even contextualised in the same material, either at the time or on the Arrow Blu-ray release.

Of all the people who worked on Last House on the Left, Sandra Peabody stands out, not merely for her feelings about the material but for the fact that over half a century on she has still not been granted the public recognition and apology she should long ago have received for what she went through. As I say so often, because it is the truth: Sandra Peabody deserves better.

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 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.

For Sandra at Christmas

My heartfelt wish for Sandra Peabody, this Christmas and always, is that she has the peace, compassion, dignity and safety she deserves in her life.

Sorry seems to be the hardest word

By now we've firmly established that Sandra Peabody endured treatment in connection with her Last House on the Left role that was far beyond what an actress should expect while making a movie. She was psychologically and emotionally abused by certain others to an extent that was often not considered acceptable even by the lax standards of 1970s film-making, let alone today's more humane sets.

Marc Sheffler, who has spoken more than most of the surviving Last House veterans on the record over the last few years, said in his 2022 YouTube interview with Hollywood Wade that:

"[Sandra] was a sweet person [...] she was a particularly nice person [...] A sweet, kind, harmless girl"¹

Sheffler also shows empathy for her in his "Junior's Story" interview, saying that he doesn't blame her for being extremely frightened when David Hess "just went at her" during the filming of Mari's rape scene.

The Last House makeup artist, Anne Paul, described Sandra in her "Blood and Guts" interview as:

"A sweet girl. Young and sweet. A little skittish, you know? Who wouldn't be?"

Fred Lincoln, among others, mentions Sandra leaving the set and that sometimes "she was scared to death". Sheffler, corroborating this in his 2018 Without Your Head interview, says that Lincoln was sent to persuade her back, since he already knew her.²

Meanwhile, Wes Craven called Sandra "plucky" and said he "liked [her] a lot" when discussing her having "hung in there" despite being treated "very roughly" during the aforementioned rape scene (Szulkin, p79). He also praised Sandra in It's Only a Movie, saying:

"Sandra Peabody did a great job. She really put herself out there and she was a very sweet girl who was not some worldly wise [laughs] you know, uh, starlet, and we put her through hell."

As we can see, there is no real shortage of people willing to go on the record and express the opinion that Sandra was a nice person, that she was frightened, or that she endured sometimes very rough treatment. Sheffler himself is open about his holding her over a drop and threatening to let her go as a way to extract the desired performance.

What there is a shortage of – in fact, to the best of my knowledge, a total absence of – is anyone who was directly involved in the production of The Last House on the Left actually saying sorry or even expressing regret at what Sandra went through. We don't of course know what might have been said to her in private, but in public? I've found absolutely no sign.

Sheffler comes the closest, validating her fear of Hess in "Junior's Story" for example and telling Without Your Head that "anybody would be scared" at being held partly over a cliff. But in well over 20 years from the David Szulkin book's publication, he never seems to have taken the next step. Nor have I found any other member of cast or crew doing that, nor being prompted to by either professional or horror fandom interviewers.

It wouldn't even be necessary for such a person to admit to deliberate wrong-doing. A simple, public statement, in an interview or online, saying something like "I'm sorry that Sandra was so frightened" or acknowledging that they were inexperienced and made mistakes that caused Sandra distress would be significant in its own right. It could also be said without infringing her privacy.

Extraordinarily, the person who came the closest to expressing outright regret about Sandra's treatment was David Hess. At the end of his otherwise appallingly abusive commentary track story about the rape scene, he says:

"It's terrible the way we manipulated Sandra, it's just so… but she asked to be manipulated, buddy. She did!"³

The initial expression of apparent remorse is rendered worthless almost immediately by victim-blaming – but even this momentary recognition of Sandra's treatment is more than anyone else seems to have managed in decades.

I don't know why it has apparently never happened. Film-making and societal attitudes in general have shifted so far in half a century, especially in the last decade or two, that it is surely unlikely that loyalty to fellow Last House team members would still outweigh the simple compassionate humanity of openly regretting their colleague's fear and distress.

And time is running out. Hess himself died in 2011. Fred Lincoln died in 2013. Wes Craven died in 2015. Sean Cunningham is in his eighties. Even the youngest personnel who worked on the movie are now well into their seventies. The opportunity for one of them to go on the record will not be there forever. Sheffler, for example, an articulate interviewee who has repeatedly told the cliff threat story. 

Expressing apology or even simple regret, acknowledging that Sandra Peabody deserved better, would not wave a magic wand and remove the abuse she suffered in connection with her role as Mari on Last House on the Left. It would, however, be meaningful, and it would address what is by this point an increasingly sad and striking absence.

¹ "Marc Sheffler sits down w/ Hollywood Wade to discuss the infamous Horror film Last house on the Left", Hollywood Wade | Crime & Entertainment, YouTube, 4 Sep 2022. Timestamp 36:21
² "Marc Sheffler of Wes Craven's Last House on the Left interview". withoutyourhead, 4 Apr 2018. Timestamp 28:55
³ 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.

Is the evidence sufficient to conclude that Sandra Peabody was abused?

Over the last 40 or so posts, we've looked at a number of pieces of evidence concerning the way Sandra Peabody was treated in connection with her starring role as Mari in The Last House on the Left. It's time now to take stock and see what we can reasonably conclude from it.

For this post specifically, I have set three criteria, and I will only admit evidence to the dossier here if it meets at least one of them:

1. Mentioned by Sandra personally.
2. Mentioned by at least two separate people. 
3. Obvious by simple examination.

Keeping these requirements in mind, we can say that:

Sandra was frightened on set, of David Hess in particular. Meets criteria 1 and 2. Sources:

1. Sandra herself to a limited degree ("I was scared" regarding the knife stalking).
2. Wes Craven ("David was quite scary, especially to Sandra.")
3. Fred Lincoln ("I knew her for [...] years, and she was afraid of me!")
4. Marc Sheffler ("She was frightened of Hess to the core of her existence.") 
5. David Hess ("I think she was really scared [...] I wanted that reaction from her.")

Sandra's genuine fear is visible at times in the film itself. Meets criterion 2. Sources: 

1. Lincoln ("What you're seeing in her face is real fear.")
2. Sheffler ("The fear on her face [...] was real.")

Hess remained in character as Krug even outside filming itself. Meets criterion 2. Sources:

1. Craven ("[Hess] wasn't a nice guy between takes or anything like that.")
2. Sheffler ("Twenty-four hours a day, all Krug, all the time.")
3. Yvonne Hannemann ("[The actors] stayed in those characters for a few weeks!")
4. Hess ("I held character with her for four weeks.")

Hess was physically intimidating off-set. Meets criterion 1. Source:

1. Sandra herself ("he was trying to live his part... He'd come after us with a knife at night, trying to freak us out.")

Mari's rape scene was very rough and distressed Sandra. Meets criteria 1 (indirectly) and 2. Sources:

1. Sandra herself, via Craven ("My God... I had the feeling they really hated me.")
2. Hannemann ("really quite upsetting [...] really got very rough [...] Sandra needed to be consoled.") 
3. Sheffler ("David was... brutal with her. [...] She was scared shitless, and I don't blame her.")
4. Hess ("got pretty physical with her.")

The rape scene was filmed in long, documentarian-style takes with the camera locked off. Meets criterion 2. Sources:

1. Craven ("[I said] we're going to shoot this three times [...] from beginning to end.")
2. Sheffler ("[Craven] pretty much locked off the camera and let it play.")

Sandra was also distressed by the forced lesbianism scene in the woods. Meets criteria 1 and 2. Sources:

1. Sandra herself ("I actually cried a lot [...] it was very upsetting for me to do it.")
2. Craven ("Sandra was scared shitless here.") 

Sandra walked off set during filming in Connecticut, only returning when Lincoln persuaded her to continue. Meets criterion 2. Sources:

1. Lincoln ("She did run away, the night before shooting, I had to go get her!")
2. Sheffler ("[She] was hitchhiking back to New York [...] Sean and Wes sent Freddie to go find her.")

Sandra walked out during a pre-release cast, crew and backers screening. Meets criteria 1 and 2. Sources:

1. Sandra herself ("I was horrified and upset [...] I walked out.")
2. Marshall Anker ("She was very upset by what she was seeing.")

Sheffler held Sandra partly over a cliff or ledge and threatened to push her over to scare her. Meets criterion 2. Sources:

1. Sheffler ("If you don't do this then I'm [...] gonna just push you.")
2. Hess ("Marc, we were all on the rock at the time [...] one of the things you said that I remember [was] 'And the film will keep going!'")

Hess claimed he had threatened to rape Sandra if she did not perform as he wanted. The claim itself meets criterion 3. Source:

1. Hess: ("I'm really going to fuck you if you don't behave yourself.")

As we have only Hess's word for this, we cannot assert within our criteria that he actually made the threats he claims. For similar reasons, Hess's multiple other disturbing comments about Sandra on DVD/Blu-ray extras (music featurette, "Can I?", "Krug Conquers England") do not meet our criteria either.

As such, we can only admit the part which is obvious by simple examination of the Vanity Fair piece and the commentary track: that Hess says without remorse that he did these things. To appropriate a real person's identity for multiple stories of sexualised coercion and humiliation is abusive in itself.

Overall conclusion

Even if we confine ourselves to the above corroborated or obvious incidents, we can fairly conclude, to a reasonable ethical standard, that Sandra Peabody was abused psychologically and emotionally in connection with her work on The Last House on the Left.

I acknowledge that the recollections quoted were made some years after the film was shot, but this is unavoidable as to my knowledge no equivalent testimony exists from the 1970s. It would be most unlikely to in an exploitation-era film context. This is also why I have set the criteria I mentioned.

I am not here imputing malice or a deliberate intent to harm to specific people involved with the movie, but this is not required to reasonably use the term "abuse" in modern ethical frameworks. Nor am I claiming that every individual incident was abusive in and of itself.

This finding once again underlines the very significant courage, resilience and professionalism that Sandra showed in completing the extremely demanding role of Mari despite severe and justified fear and distress.

That since leaving acting she has spent half a century working to support young people – safely – emphasises what a remarkable person Sandra Peabody was and remains.

To this day, Sandra remains true to her vocation

The most successful creation of Sandra Peabody's post-Last House on the Left career in TV production was undoubtedly her Emmy-winning Popcorn, but all good things must come to an end, and in 1993 the show was not renewed. After the cancellation, Sandra was laid off from KATU.¹

She certainly didn't stop there, of course. Even while Popcorn was still running, in 1988 she produced A Time to Care, a documentary about the Twin Oaks Care Center in Albany, Oregon. Sandra was interviewed for the Albany Democrat-Herald newspaper:

"It's a neat idea for a series because what they're basically saying is that more than ever people are reaching out to help others."²

Sandra told the paper that the first segment would look at how volunteers helped the home's residents. The show was picked up by Group W (Westinghouse) to be syndicated and distributed.

Her continuing interest in creating content for children and young people was shown in 1994 when she acted as casting director for Wee Sing Under the Sea, the ninth instalment of the long-running Wee Sing series of home videos. This was filmed in Sandra's home city of Portland, the last entry in the series before production moved to Los Angeles.³

Although in 2001 Sandra created and producing the public television series Zone In, a show which Szulkin (p197) says covered "tough issues for kids", by then she had begun to turn her attention to acting coaching, as well as acting as a talent agent to help young actors make their way safely in the industry.

In the late 1990s, Sandra taught the Meisner technique to the then-unknown Bret Harrison. Although he was only fifteen at the time, Sandra was sufficiently impressed with his early mastery of Meisner's "living truthfully under imaginary circumstances" and emotional openness to invite him to attend more advanced classes without payment.⁴

We've already noted both Harrison's and Alicia Lagano's success in starting professional acting careers after studying with Sandra. Another youngster who ended up on screen after being taught by her was Calais Radcliffe, who began with an episode of the sketch comedy series Portlandia while still a fifth-grader. Sandra helped her arrange to audition – successfully – for the show. Her mother reported that she was told Radcliffe was:

"really good, able to improv, and [...] comfortable talking to adults."⁵

Once again, Sandra's commitment to supporting young actors paid off. Similarly, Harrison reported that she "showed [him] what acting was really about" and was the one who had encouraged him to go to Los Angeles in order to further his career.⁶

I've said in the past that I don't intend to name the institution where Sandra Peabody currently works; she deserves peace. What I will say is that after more than a quarter of a century, she is still offering classes for both adults and children this winter – emphasising a "supportive environment", just as you would expect from the woman who's been creating those for half a century.

¹ Schulberg, Pete. "Where does news stop, advertising begin?". The Oregonian (19 February 1993). p46.
² Lopez, Cindy. "Sweet Home care center included in documentary". Albany Democrat-Herald (29 July 1988). p5.
³ Dickson, EJ. "‘Wee Sing,’ a Direct-to-Video Children’s Musical Series, Has an Adult Following Online". vice.com (13 April 2014).
⁴ The Oregonian (24 September 2007).
⁵ Turnquist, Kristi. "West Linn fifth-grader played the scene-stealing, bratty MTV exec on 'Portlandia'". oregonlive.com (8 January 2013).
⁶ Yim, Su-Jin. "Chicken-Winging It As An Actor". The Oregonian (17 January 2001). pB01.

"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

"Horrified and upset" – Sandra's screening walk-out

The incident when Sandra Peabody walked off the set of The Last House on the Left has already been covered here What's less often mentioned – although the Road to Nowhere podcast did – is Sandra's walk-out from a cast, crew and backers screening of the film before its August 1972 public release.

In March of that year, such a screening was held in Manhattan, and Szulkin informs us (p117) that Sandra attended with her mother. It's not stated what form the film was in at the time, but it seems likely that it was almost complete and included sequences that are no longer found in modern cuts, such as the extended version of Phyllis's disembowelment.

The screening did not go well for Sandra, who was quite open to Szulkin about her unhappiness with the film at that time:

"I was horrified and upset. It was not at all what I thought it would be. I think the most upsetting scene for me was the one in the woods... but I don't think I ever saw the whole thing. When I went and viewed it, I walked out."

"The one in the woods" is not further described, but we also know from Szulkin (p73) that Sandra found one of the woods-set sections, which before cuts included forced oral sex on Mari by Phyllis and then Sadie, "very upsetting" to film and cried a lot while making it. Wes Craven acknowledged that Sandra was "scared shitless here". She says she didn't "know how it came off, probably horribly" – which suggests she'd never seen that sequence in its final form.

Marshall Anker, who played the incompetent sheriff, was also at the same screening and was sitting next to Sandra. His comment on the occasion (p117) is somewhat unsympathetic:

"She was very upset by what she was seeing [...] Sandra was carrying on, 'Oh my God! Oh, it's so horrible! All that blood!' I thought to myself, 'Doesn't she know what she did? What did she think this movie was going to be, a comedy?'"

This is perhaps a little unfair, and not only because the parts Anker appeared in were largely comedic. Sound man Jim Hubbard points out (Szulkin, pp190–91) that people involved in shooting a film can be concentrating on what they have to do in the moment, and that it's "therefore sometimes shocking" when they see the final results after editing. Hubbard says:

"[T]his was definitely the case with Last House. It was so much more gruesome and appalling than my impressions of its making that I was amazed."

Other Last House personnel have considerably more positive memories of the screening. Sean Cunningham says, "We had a great time" – which rather ignores the fact that Sandra clearly did not – while David Hess states that he went to all of the pre-release screenings in spring and summer 1972 and "the reactions were amazing!"

When she was interviewed in the 1990s for Szulkin's book, Sandra told him (p189) that:

"I have not seen this film in a long time, so to recollect it is hard."

Indeed, already by the mid-1980s newspapers covering her work on Popcorn were omitting her film acting career from her career summary altogether. Probably few people then even knew of the existence of Voices of Desire or Teenage Hitchhikers, but by that time The Last House on the Left had already acquired a cult following. It seems likely that Sandra herself left it out of the career highlights she provided for publication.

To this day, in her biography on the website of the institution where she still coaches, Sandra Peabody does not mention the film that "horrified and upset" her as soon as she saw it on screen. For a major star of a movie to make negative feelings known at a private screening like this really gets noticed, as Anker's comment shows. Sandra took the courageous option and walked out rather than endure more.

"This outstanding program" – Sandra's award-winning Popcorn

The first ever Popcorn, uploaded to the official KATU News YouTube channel in 2022

I posted recently about Sandra Peabody's early career after acting, including her first teaching post and her first major award in children's TV production. Today I'm going to cover perhaps her most remarkable creation in that respect: Popcorn. You can watch the debut episode from 1985 above, complete with "computer" genius Kernel Popcorn and the iconic theme tune.

Popcorn was aimed at children between around six and ten years old. It ran on Portland, Oregon-based ABC affiliate station KATU between 1985 and 1992 and began as a one-off special before being expanded to a full-fledged series. Especially originally, Sandra fulfilled multiple roles: for the launch special embedded above, she was credited as overall producer; features writer, producer, director and co-editor; and studio production producer and writer!

Even that understates the extent of Sandra's dedication to the show, however. She spent a lot of time combing local schools for ideas, as well as training children to appear on camera – one of Popcorn's key features was that it was presented by kids, not by adults talking down to them.¹ Sandra found it hard to winnow the 50 or so applicants down to four, telling The Oregonian that:

"There's still a lot of the kid in me. [...] They were all wonderful in their own way."²

The final selection was based on personality, naturalness on camera, ability to read a TelePrompTer (Autocue) and ability to ask questions. This last point was crucial, as Popcorn both sent its young presenters out on location and invited guests to the studio, including multiple Olympic champion speed skater Eric Heiden.³ Considering the show aired at 7:30 am on a Sunday, this was quite some coup.

Unsurprisingly for public service television, money was always very tight. The show's annual budget was just $25,000, around a tenth that of a single episode of a successful-but-not-stellar series. Popcorn's props budget was almost non-existent, a mere ten dollars per show. Undeterred, and despite her other duties, Sandra visited local garage sales and flea markets to obtain items to help enhance the show.⁴

This brought her a significant honour – the Ollie Award presented by the American Children Television Festival. Sandra asked for a better time slot for Popcorn, but was told that ABC would not permit preemption of its network programming. So she turned back to what she did best: encouraging kids to participate. More than 400 letters arrived asking to help with Popcorn, and so she set up auditions.

This being Sandra Peabody, she didn't do things by halves. She set up a "Spotlight on Kids" section, which accepted everything from jokes to music to science experiments, and asked for two-minute audition tapes. Over 300 arrived. The solution was simple: edit each tape down to 30 seconds because, in Sandra's words:

"We want to make them look the best they can look."⁵

Sandra told The Oregonian that, in time, she intended to work her way through all 300 of the tapes. Because of course she did. The segment premiered in 1987, by which time the show had acquired a partial sponsor: a popcorn maker!

Although clearly created as a labour of love, Popcorn is the show that won Sandra her greatest professional recognition. As well as the aforementioned Ollie, it picked up three significant accolades including her Emmy:

• 1987: National Association of Broadcasters Award, in the "Service to Children" category.
• 1988: NAPTE Iris Award, in the "Excellence in Local Broadcasting" category.
• 1992: Northwest Emmy Award in the "Outstanding Public Service Announcement or In-House Campaign" category.

Popcorn was mentioned more than once in submissions to the US House's deliberations on the state of children's TV. In April 1989, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) publication, Service to Children: Television Idea Book was attached to the organisation's submission to a Telecommunications and Finance Subcommittee hearing. Its listing about the show noted that:

"Themes of personal effort and self-assurance permeated the program. Popcorn gives kids the chance to 'do anything they do the best'."⁶

In March 1993, the show was mentioned to the same House subcommittee in a statement by Paul LaCamera on behalf of the NAB. The statement referred to Popcorn:

"This outstanding program [...] informs and educates children in a creative way [and] has tackled some tough issues, including the Persian Gulf War."⁷

By the time of LaCamera's statement, Popcorn was no longer on the air. However, its legacy extended well beyond its few years on Portland's screens. One of the original four "Popcorn reporters", Aaron Cooley, grew up to become a professional writer in his own right. He created the ten-episode Showtime series The First Lady, a 2022 drama which explored the pressures and experiences of Betty Ford, Eleanor Roosevelt and Michelle Obama.⁸

Four decades after she had created Popcorn, the love and care for young people that Sandra Peabody poured into the show she created was still reverberating. Popcorn may be gone, but its influence lives on.

¹ Christensen, Mike. "Broadcasters Fight Requirements for Children's TV", The Atlanta Journal and Constitution (16 November 1989). p24.
² McDermott, Judy. "Popcorn", The Oregonian (16 December 1985). p29.
³ News article, The Oregonian (15 December 1985). p41.
⁴ Buttler, Ruth. "Experts really care what goes into kids' TV", The Grand Rapids Press (1 November 1987). p124.
⁵ "Letters inspire talent segment", The Oregonian (27 March 1987). p48.
⁶ "Children's Television." Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, House of Representatives, One Hundred First Congress, First Session, on H.R. 1677 ... April 6, 1989. p78.
⁷ "Children's Television." Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, House of Representatives, One Hundred Third Congress, First Session, March 10, 1993. p50.
⁸ Turnquist, Kristi. "Portland native Aaron Cooley on Showtime’s ‘The First Lady,’ and TV’s true stories trend", oregonlive.com (12 April 2022).

What Sandra did next – her early post-acting career

After The Last House on the Left and several further exploitation films, Sandra Peabody's final screen acting role was as Bird in 1974's Teenage Hitchhikers, as we've already seen. She continued to act on stage for at least a short time after that, as she is listed as having appeared in Tunnel of Love at the Oregon Ridge Dinner Theater; this play ran from December 1977 to January 1978.¹

Sandra remained in theatre for a while, starting out on what would become a major part of her life: supporting young people in the arts. She was hired by the highly prestigious American Academy of Dramatic Arts, teaching theatre techniques to children.² In 1982, now working for Cablesystems Pacific, Sandra created Portland Tonight. This was a late-night talk show based loosely on Johny Carson's hit The Tonight Show, but with a strong local element.³

Also in 1982, Sandra devised Get Movin' ... with Kids, a children's variety show. She certainly put in the hours with this programme, acting as writer, director and producer. Get Movin' ran for 26 episodes and won Sandra her first major accolade, the 1983 CableACE Award presented by the National Cable Television Association for Best Children's Series. It would not be her last.

Sandra created Get Movin' at a time when funding for kids' TV was on the wane. She was determined that children's own ideas would play a prominent part, placing an ad in the Portland Children's Museum's newspaper – playfully called Boing! – asking to hear from them about their interests. On top of this, she obtained the use of the cable company's local studio to hold auditions for local talent.⁴

Her next show would be the one that would bring Sandra her greatest success: Popcorn. That is a fascinating story which deserves – and will get – a post of its own in the future. But by the 1980s Sandra Peabody had moved decisively onto a different career path, overcoming both her sad experience on Last House and the more expected problems of kids' TV finances to begin a lifelong commitment to safely supporting young performers.

¹ "Wednesday at Oregon Ridge", The Baltimore Sun (4 December 1977), p146.
² "Popcorn", The Oregonian (15 December 1985), p29.
³ News article, The Oregon Journal (21 January 1982), p15.
⁴"Children's talent captured on film for TV showing", The Oregonian (21 December 1982), p26.

On the road with Sandra – Teenage Hitchhikers, her final film role

Note she's credited under her own name in this movie

Sandra Peabody's screen acting career lasted only a decade, from her debut in Misfit in 1965 through The Last House on the Left to... this. Teenage Hitchhikers was her farewell to this branch of the arts, being filmed in September 1973 and hitting drive-ins the following year with a general release in 1975. In 1977 a significantly cut version was classified X in the UK. I said in an earlier post that I'd never seen this title, but I've rectified that now. The movie is relatively easy to get hold of, as it was released on region-free Blu-ray by Dark Force Entertainment in 2020.

Despite its almost clichéd exploitation movie title this is a more interesting film than might be supposed, and not just because it features Margaret Whitton in a supporting role. The setup is pretty simple: Mouse (Kathie Christopher) and Bird (Peabody) are two young women hitching across America and paying for their rides with... well, it's sexploitation. You guess. So far, so 1970s. What's unusual here is the fact that the ladies are – mostly – in control of all this. It's kind of a road movie/sexploitation/comedy mash-up, and sometimes as awkward as that sounds.

Considering the microscopic $15,000 budget and one-week production time, the film is surprisingly well put together; it doesn't look like a student movie. Pacing is uneven, admittedly: an orgy scene late on in the story – clearly there as a draw to the drive-in crowd – drags on for more than a tenth of the film's eighty-minute runtime and eventually becomes tedious even if you're into that kind of thing. A couple of the comedic set pieces are more in the mould of a rather overlong Benny Hill Show sketch than anything, too. Still moderately funny if you're in the mood, though.

Using rape as a source of humour wasn't a hard no back then – Blazing Saddles also came out in 1974 – but it does firmly place movies that do it as "of their time". That said, at least this time Mouse and Bird have one over the somewhat bumbling rapist (Ric Mancini) who our heroines have to save Jenny (Nikki Lynn) from and who appears in a couple of scenes. A sequence involving a nude Peabody, playing an inmate of the "State Farm for Wayward Girls", calmly criticising his "technique" while eating an enormous, not-at-all-symbolic red apple, is memorable if nothing else. (By this point Jenny has been rescued; the rapist is alone.)

The supplementary material for the Teenage Hitchhikers Blu-ray includes an interview with the director, Gerri Sedley (a pseudonym for Jerome S. Kaufmann). Notably, he praises Sandra for being the "smartest" of the cast, and we discover that they kept in touch via mail after the film wrapped. Both he and cinematographer Bill La Mond, who provides a commentary track, note that weather conditions did not help the production. The opening scene was filmed in driving rain, and temperatures were not always on their side either. The crew numbered around six, tiny even by the standards of similar movies.

Sandra also shows a side to her acting in this film that many of its (and her) fans might have enjoyed seeing more of had she remained in movies. She has good chemistry with Christopher, and her comic timing is a good match for Christopher's own. Unsurprisingly for this kind of movie, her clothes aren't always on, but as long as the quips keep flowing you can believe reasonably well that these two young women are making the choices in their lives – and, later on, allowing Jenny to join their little gang as well.

Teenage Hitchhikers isn't quite the lost classic some reviews make it out to be. It is, however, something a little bit different from the average mid-70s flick in this genre that its female leads are – by 1974 sexploitation standards, so calibrate your expectations – generally more empowered. Indeed, the film is generally more successful when it's sending up exploitation conventions and less appealing when it's simply following them.

One final thought. End credits aside, the very last time we see ever Sandra on a movie screen, she's with Mouse and Jenny in their dubiously acquired car, grinning hugely and flipping off the camera as they drive away. I can't help but cheer. 

Sandra Peabody and Sanford Meisner

As I noted in my post last week about Sandra Peabody's career beyond acting, her approach to the craft was and remains informed by the Meisner technique. This was summed up by its originator, Sanford Meisner (1905–97) as "living truthfully under imaginary circumstances". That means an emphasis on emotional authenticity and moment-to-moment connection. Meisner himself is considered one of the greatest teachers in American acting history; Sandra's acceptance by his Neighborhood Playhouse and two years of study with him were a mark of her considerable promise as a 19-year-old Carnegie Mellon drama student.

Meisner became disenchanted with the then (and later) popular Method approach to acting. While the Meisner Technique Studio that bears his name makes a point – as Meisner himself did – of not disparaging actors who find Method works for them, it also points out that the "sense memory" approach to Method acting was limiting, and that this view was in fact shared by the famed Russian acting teacher Konstantin Stanislavski (1863–1938). The Studio's website notes that:

Sandy did not believe an actor needed to experience trauma in order to play a traumatized person. He also noticed harmful habits in actors who relied on their emotional scars. To that end, he developed a new approach, centered around an actor’s imagination. 

In other words, rather than drawing on real past trauma as a way of getting "inside the head" of a similar character, Meisner's technique teaches actors to develop imaginary backgrounds but to react to them in the moment as real. The psychological health benefits include the avoidance of potentially retraumatising "dredging up" of old memories from real life, and the ability to more easily "de-role" (step out of character) after a scene without lasting harm.

This combination makes Meisner's technique very useful for playing difficult emotional roles. An actor whose character is unnerved by their scene partner's character will "live authentically in the moment" and so react genuinely instead of consciously "play-acting" their responses. With cinema, where the camera's close gaze makes micro-reactions much more noticeable to viewers than they are in some other forms of acting, this makes the person's reactions believable – because, in the moment, they are real.

The Meisner teaching programme is demanding, and Meisner himself is described by emotionalpreparation.com as "a tough but passionate teacher, pushing his students to their limits but always with the intention of helping them become truthful and honest actors". Sandra would not have been able to cruise through her two years by any means.

She would have undertaken exercises like the Repetition Game (two actors repeat phrases back and forth, focusing on their partner's behavioural and emotional shifts) which "helps actors get out of their heads"; and learned the Reality of Doing: an actor who needs to cry for a scene should be feel that need naturally, without forcing or consciously pretending. Meisner's technique places the emphasis on "truth, instinct, and emotional authenticity".

For Meisner to be successful and safe, an actor requires their scene partner to be emotionally open, responsive to impulses, present and attentive and committed to listening. Since the technique requires openness and vulnerability, as well as spontaneous responses, both partners must also have complete mutual trust. This allows the emotional vulnerability that is necessary for Meisner to be safe and effective. As a professional Meisner teacher, Sandra's own assessment of her student Alicia Lagano noted her willingness "to be open and real".

Sandra has now been teaching Meisner's technique for a quarter of a century. Her earlier work as a children's television producer gave her further insights into what actors need from the outside. Children are in general naturally more open than adults, and Sandra frequently teaches young people in her acting classes. Her apprenticeship from Meisner himself, her experience as a screen actress, and the experience she later gained in production and teaching, all go together to explain her success in coaching actors like Lagano and Bret Harrison who have achieved professional acting careers.

Sandra Peabody clearly grasped Meisner's technique very, very well indeed.

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.

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