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. 

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.

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.

Filmed, cut, exploited – the forced oral sex scene

Cropped screenshot showing clapperboard during a cut sequence described below

In my last post, I talked about Sandra Peabody walking out of a pre-release screening of The Last House on the Left. I included her quote in which she said that she thought "the most upsetting scene for [her] was the one in the woods" and noted that Sandra had told Szulkin (p73) that she had found the sequence where Mari and Phyllis are forced to strip and perform sex acts on each other distressing to film.

Today, we'll look at that section of Last House in more detail. On p73, after having introduced the sequence, Szulkin gives us some unusually strong editorial text:

"This stark and ugly sequence is arguably the most disturbing portion of the entire movie. The sickos' snickering commentary [...] was all unscripted. The obviously improvised dialogue, combined with shaky, documentary-like camerawork and a lack of music throughout most of the scene, makes this sequence especially creepy and all too real."

By the time of this scene Mari and Phyllis's bonds have been removed, but their gags still hang loosely around their necks, a disturbing reminder of their captivity. As I said last time, Wes Craven acknowledged on his commentary track that Sandra "was scared shitless" while making this part of the movie. ¹

What isn't mentioned in that commentary is how far the filming of this sequence exceeded what made it to Last House's final cut, something which might help explain why Sandra was so upset. Szulkin hints at it when he says on p74 that "some softcore footage of the forced lesbianism later hit the cutting-room floor" but in fact there was a great deal more.

The Arrow Blu-ray contains about 48 minutes of outtakes and dailies (rushes) which are presented without sound. Most of the last few minutes is taken up with parts of this sequence that are not in the finished film, most notably an extended and more explicit nude section in which Krug's gang force Mari to receive oral sex from first Phyllis and then Sadie.

The soundless nature of this material makes it feel even more like snatched security camera footage than the final sequence, and this is one place where Szulkin's reminder (p15) that "Last House was first and foremost an exploitation flick" really does show. It could certainly be argued that including these particular outtakes as a Blu-ray extra for entertainment purposes is exploitative in itself.

This feeling is heightened when you see the clapperboards at the start of some of these takes. The still at the top of this post is from very near the end of the Blu-ray extra. I've deliberately cropped it closely to show only the clapperboard, but the full still shows the naked Mari lying on her back in the woods with Phyllis kneeling over her during the oral sex sequence. Sadie, Krug and Weasel kneel behind, enjoying what they're forcing the girls to do.

Note the take count: eleven. It's only fair to acknowledge that Craven and company were not experienced film-makers and so may have counted takes or scene numbers in a different way to what one might expect. Even so, eleven does seem a high number for a scene involving full nudity and simulated forced sexual content in front of an audience, all the more so when funds and time were tight.

Unusually for the generally easygoing Lucy Grantham, Phyllis's actress did not enjoy filming this part of the movie, as she tells Szulkin on p73:

"I hated that scene. [...] I worried that it would set the tone for the whole movie [...] I knew it was an important part of the movie, in terms of showing how vicious and cruel the villains were, but I remember thinking that I'd rather not be expressing the cruelty in that way. But that was how it was and I didn't question it."

That last sentence is perhaps revealing of early 1970s exploitation gender dynamics, but when one remembers that Grantham had worked in adult movies and so understood the feeling of being expected to perform naked before a largely male audience, it's striking how strong her dislike for the scene is.

Marc Sheffler, in his 2017 interview for Without Your Head, also touches on this:

"I don't think she was very happy at the scene between Jeramie [Rain] and her, you know, when when Jeramie was telling Lucy [Grantham] to to go down on her. I don't think she was real happy with that, but you know, she soldiered on through it and it is what it is." ²

That last line is reminiscent of Sheffler's "you do what you do" over a decade before in another context. In Celluloid Crime of the Century, Craven also touches on the improvised line Lucy Grantham came up with ("It's just you and me here, nobody else") to comfort Sandra when she realised her co-actor was frightened and unhappy:

"Lucy said something to the younger, more naive girl [Sandra] of, there's just you and me here, there's nobody else here, which was totally improvised right on the spot. And it was so moving, so touching."

Craven does not comment on whether filming should have continued on such a sensitive scene with an actress in clear distress, but Sandra's own words to Szulkin (p73 again) are unequivocal and notably strong for a woman whose quotes to him are generally fairly restrained:

"That was probably the scene that bothered me the most, especially the way it was originally written. The whole thing really freaked me out... in fact, I actually cried a lot during that scene. I don't know how that scene came off, probably horribly, but it was very upsetting for me to do it."

Sandra doesn't explain whether "the way it was originally written" meant the original, hardcore script that was never filmed, or the forced oral sex sequence that we now see in the Blu-ray outtakes and dailies. If the latter, then it's a salutary reminder that cutting a scene before release doesn't erase the fact that the actors had to perform it in the first place.

In the case of this particular cut section, it was enough to disturb even the normally relaxed Lucy Grantham – and to deeply upset Sandra Peabody. 

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.
² "Marc Sheffler of Wes Craven's Last House on the Left interview". withoutyourhead, 4 Apr 2018. Timestamp 29:14

"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).

The cliff threat redux – Marc Sheffler's commentary track version

I've already noted Marc Sheffler's story about threatening Sandra Peabody with being thrown off a cliff – as a technique for jolting her into hitting her marks – in my post about Celluloid Crime of the Century. As I noted there, Sheffler has told this story more than once, and today we'll look at one version he recounted at around the same time (early 2000s) as that documentary: the DVD commentary track he shares with David Hess and Fred Lincoln.

Again, this concerns the woods scene where Mari is attempting to convince Junior to let her go. On the commentary, Marc Sheffler says:

Ugh, I remember this scene. What a freaking pain. Do you remember what happened? With her not getting it and I had to hold her over the cliff?

After a brief and unrelated digression by the actors, Sheffler tells us that Sandra "wasn't at the anxiety level that she needed to be" for the scene, and that after multiple takes "everybody was getting annoyed". He adds that he asked Wes Craven to "give me a minute with her". Sheffler then notes they were over a cliff and says:

I took her and I put her over the cliff, I just grabbed her and I went like this. And I said, 'If you don't get this fucking scene right now, I'm gonna drop you, I'm gonna fucking drop you, right now. And Wes'll shoot it, and Vic [Hurwitz]'ll shoot it, and we'll have a different scene, but it'll work 'cause you'll be fucking mangled.' And I said, 'You better fucking get this.'

Given that this is necessarily an audio-only track, we don't know what "went like this" refers to. Vic Hurwitz was the cinematographer, a man who Sandra describes in Szulkin (p47) as "great" and "fatherly". There's no suggestion in either version of Sheffler's story that Hurwitz was involved in the threat or its setup.

Sheffler concludes his anecdote by saying that he signalled to Craven to roll the film, and that Sandra was "so nervous and so scared" when he brought her back up that she hit her marks.

David Hess adds a corroborating note immediately afterwards, saying they were all on the rock at the same time. Hess tells Sheffler that:

One of the things you said that I remember, ‘And the film will keep going. And the film will keep going!’

Hess adds of Sandra in connection with the above that "she al—" but he is then cut off by the others moving on to the next topic of discussion.

It's only fair to note that this is the harshest-edged version of the cliff threat story I have found; there are also versions of it couched in significantly milder language, and I shall certainly return to those. The "boys' club" atmosphere of a commentary track like this can sometimes result in its participants exaggerating details for effect; Sheffler does not usually swear to this extent in interviews, for example.

As with the Celluloid Crime of the Century version, Sheffler shows that he saw this as a way forward born of frustration, not malice. What it does add to our knowledge, though, is that Sheffler felt Sandra's anxiety level was insufficient for the scene, instead of the vaguer "she wasn't getting it" the documentary version included. He is also explicit that Sandra was "nervous and scared" when brought back up. Hess's addition to the story isn't in Celluloid Crime of the Century, either.

Both versions of Sheffler's story contain the details that he asked Craven for a short time with Sandra, and that this was when he took her to the cliff. However, the director himself says on his commentary track that he was the one whose pushing led to the scene working. For Craven to state that suggests that he did not enquire particularly closely about exactly what Sheffler had been doing during his "minute with her".

Looking at Szulkin to see whether this incident is recorded there, we find that it seems to be, albeit quite briefly (pp 75–76). Sheffler and Sandra both refer to the scene, but with different emphases. Sheffler tells us that "a lot of that [scene] was improvised" and that:

For some reason, for her that scene was a struggle, and I kind of bullied her a little bit to get a performance out of her.

He notes that the scene "required a lot of takes" – so the basics here match both the documentary and commentary versions Sheffler gives. "Kind of bullied her a little bit" is one of the milder wordings of this incident that I've mentioned already. Assistant director Yvonne Hannemann also reminisces:

I remember that Sandra was really very worked up about that scene. Quite enormously worked up.

Szulkin does however note that Hannemann's memories may be at least partly confusing this event with Phyllis's death scene, as she goes on to mention a detail that doesn't apply to Sandra's scene. Still, she does use Sandra's name, so perhaps she was conflating the two scenes, not especially surprising given she spoke to Szulkin a quarter of a century after the Last House shoot.

 We'll give the final word to Sandra herself, who provides only a short quote. In full:

I thought I was quite wretched in that scene.

"Wretched" is an ambiguous word. It can mean both "very unhappy" and "of poor quality". As such, we can't tell whether Sandra felt distressed or whether she was criticising her performance. All that can be ascertained from the movie itself is that Mari's desperation – entirely appropriate to the character's situation – seems highly convincing to this viewer.

An audio-only extract from this section of the commentary track, including the part beginning with Sheffler's "I took her and I put her over the cliff" above, was uploaded to YouTube in 2012 by user servomoore. At the time of posting, it can be listened to here.

"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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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