"You start to wonder how much you can protest violence when you're making a living from it" – Last House, Vietnam and real-world harm

The Vietnam War often comes up in discussions of The Last House on the Left, and indeed it was very much in the minds of many people in early-1970s America. There was, as Wes Craven notes in Szulkin (p15) a feeling both that the most powerful footage available was in what was coming out of South East Asia and that the full horrors of the situation were being concealed. As Craven goes on to say:

"There was a great amount of feeling that 'It's time we showed things they way they really are.' In Last House we set out to show violence the way we thought it really was, and to show the dark underbelly of the Hollywood genre film."

Szulkin notes in editorial text that the era saw films appearing with levels of graphic violence that had not been seen previously, such as 1971's A Clockwork Orange and Straw Dogs – both of which, like Last House on the Left, received particular criticism for their brutal depictions of sexual violence.

As Szulkin also tells us, the original script for Night of Vengeance contained several direct references to Vietnam – including Krug strongly implying to Mari that Weasel learned how to torture while out there. It wasn't only fiction which was affected by the war: Marc Sheffler, in his early twenties at the time, was of an age where, subject to deferments, the draft lottery might have chosen him to fight.

Contrary to some more recent assertions in horror and wider film media, Craven says (Szulkin, p16) that he does not regret making Last House – but he does acknowledge that a film like that can have real-world effects:

"I think if you spend too long working in that area, you brutalize your soul [...] You start to wonder how much you can protest violence when you're making a living from it."

This tension between the insistence that there are high-minded ideals behind the film's creation and the harsher realities of its actual production also surfaces when producer Sean Cunningham tells Szulkin (p33) that:

"[Wes Craven and I] thought it might be worth doing as a way to turn violence around on itself make people re-evaluate that which they call entertainment."

Szulkin's immediately following editorial drily observes that, "[r]egardless of this lofty rationale", there really isn't any avoiding the fact that Last House on the Left was planned as an exploitation movie first and foremost, violence and shock value being what its financial backers wanted. As I've noted, at least some of the genre's norms survived into production, with significant implications for Sandra Peabody especially.

The real problem here is that Last House only succeeded – to whatever extent you think that it did – in critiquing real-world violence by perpetrating (even if unintentionally) harm of its own. While no actor was actually shot or disemboweled, Craven's apparent belief – again, common in 1970s exploitation but disturbing in retrospect – that only physical danger was a show-stopping problem left the door open for much else.

In Sandra's case, her sometimes extreme fear was at least sometimes mined as a resource by Craven, such as in the torture/rape sequence. The director acknowledges on his commentary track that Sandra was "scared to death", but asserts that this made for "a scene that was absolutely convincing". ¹ The harm caused by letting that fear play out was often little considered in 1970s exploitation cinema.

Sandra was of course threatened with physical violence – Sheffler telling her he'd throw her over a cliff if she didn't improve and Hess's claimed threat of rape. Even though there is no evidence that any of these threats were made with intent to follow through, psychological and emotional damage are now firmly established as real and significant harms, even if the specific question of whether they qualify as violence is still debated.

However, one thing seems clear. You can have all the fine-sounding soundbites in the world about how you wish to make a statement against violence by confronting audiences with what it truly means. But if in the course of illustrating your intention – in this case by making Last House on the Left – one of your cast is herself harmed, then you have fundamentally undermined the argument you claim you wish to make.

The acknowledged facts of Sandra Peabody's real-life suffering on set include being subjected to extreme fear, threatened with physical harm and experiencing misery when acting certain scenes. These severely compromise whatever power Last House may have had to lay claim to a truly progressive justification for its harsh cinéma vérité approach and unflinching representation of violence.

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.

"We put her through hell" – Wes Craven as exploitation director

Although this blog is primarily concerned with Sandra Peabody, the person who is usually most closely associated with The Last House on the Left is its director, Wes Craven. There's a tendency among film fans and writers to retcon his early 1970s incarnation as being basically the same as the Craven of the Scream days a quarter of a century later.

This is not really accurate.

In It's Only a Movie, the 2002 making-of documentary that originally appeared on Region 1 DVDs while Celluloid Crime of the Century was brought to Region 2, Craven says:

"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." ¹

Craven doesn't say that last bit with any particular relish, but nor does he say it with any obvious regret or remorse. He smiles in that Wes Craven way as he says it, and though his face becomes more serious afterwards we only see that for a moment before the documentary moves to the next interviewee.

Right at the end of the show, Craven says this, which does not bring massive confidence in his ability to make quick, firm and clear decisions:

"I was stoned most of the time; I don't remember! [laughs]"

Again, this is said lightly as a slightly embarrassing recollection of the days when he and his colleagues were – as Sean Cunningham put it in Szulkin (p45) – "kids running around with a camera". However, given what I've covered here in terms of Sandra's treatment on set, Craven's "stoned" instead prompts more serious questions about his oversight of such a difficult and – for its time – extreme movie.

The US federal Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 had come into force in April 1971, just a few months before Last House production began, but enforcement on film sets was often weak until the 1982 Twilight Zone tragedy forced a major reassessment of set safety. A director's part in actor welfare was largely informal and verbal.

This was even more the case in exploitation cinema, which often operated on the margins of the law. Guerilla-style shooting without permits was common, and Craven confirms in Celluloid Crime of the Century that this may have unsettled Sandra:

"We had no credentials. [...] we didn't have any permits. I could see very easily that [Sandra] would be afraid that suddenly this is just going to take a turn – I don't know, It's a snuff film or something. 'What am I doing out here with these people?'" ²

A few listicles and poorly researched articles have suggested that Sandra genuinely believed that she might be in a snuff film, but there is no evidence for this. Craven's tone is jokey, although mentioned only a short time after he'd discussed her genuine fear of David Hess in particular.

What Craven does not discuss is how frightened Sandra was of Hess during Mari's rape scene specifically, a scene which multiple people from Marc Sheffler to Yvonne Hannemann to Craven himself have acknowledged as being very difficult for her. On his commentary track Craven notes more generally that she was "scared to death" and shortly afterwards says:

"To me, it still is one of the most realistic rape scenes I've seen because it's totally ugly and the guy looks like a total animal, and the woman is just in that place where she can do nothing about what's being done to her, and [...] she'll never be the same, and yet she somehow has more dignity than he'll ever have in the rest of his life, and it's very powerful." ³

While Craven does not explicitly link Sandra's fear and this scene, in 2017 Sheffler did just that – vividly and revealingly. His words imply that it was because of Craven's decision to lock off the camera for long takes that Hess was enabled to take the very aggressive approach he did; as Sheffler put it, "he just went at her" and severely scared Sandra.

There's also the forced lesbianism scene, which Sandra said in Szulkin (p73) was "very upsetting for [her] to do". As we have also seen, this was much longer and more explicit before cutting, and a scene where at least one of the most exploitative segments took a double-figure take count. We don't know why it required so many takes, but these were not done in a closed studio but in an unpermitted, largely unsecured outdoor setting.

There is no suggestion that Craven perpetrated any abuse himself, or that he approved of what Hess says he did. There is nevertheless strong evidence from multiple sources – including the director himself – that Sandra was severely frightened on set. There is not strong evidence that Craven chose to do much about it beyond consoling. Sheffler's cliff threat story also suggests a remarkable lack of interest by the director in exactly why his actress was suddenly so much more worked up.

This toleration of, and even use of, genuine fear by an exploitation film director was by no means unique to Last House on the Left. What it does do, however, along with the existence of the extended forced lesbianism scene, is to show that 1971 Wes Craven was not the same director as the Wes Craven™ of several decades later.

He was, rather, an inexperienced exploitation director, and – at least sometimes – he behaved like one. Arguments about the film's place in the horror canon or as a statement against violence make little practical difference if you are Sandra Peabody, "treated very roughly" (Craven's comment to Szulkin on the rape scene) by a man of whom, according to Sheffler you are "frightened to the core of [your] existence".

Steve Dwork, who was a production assistant on Last House, tells Szulkin (p50) in yet another anecdote from that book that reads uncomfortably when considered with a 2020s emotional toolkit:

"Sandra [...] often needed to be consoled or encouraged by Wes. [...] During some of the more demanding scenes in the woods, Wes spent a good deal of time with her, basically telling her, 'This is for God and country; you've got to do this.'"

This sounds more like coercion than partnership, and again it feels more like an exploitation director's approach than that of the later "Master of Horror" Craven. People will often insist that "he got better", and that is true – but that rather avoids the point about where he got better from. His expert handling of actors by 2001 was of little relevance to Sandra in 1971.

Craven was still alive and active when Hess's admissions (boasts, really) of extreme psychological and emotional abuse were published in the 2000s. Indeed, he was interviewed for the very same Vanity Fair piece. By this time Craven was massively influential and could have been published at will, had he issued a brief statement condemning Hess's words and expressing apology or at least sympathy for Sandra.

I have not been able to find one. I cannot say with absolute certainty that he never made one – but if he did, it has certainly not turned up in my extensive searching. Despite being the director of, and the man whose lengthy and starry career in horror began with, The Last House on the Left, in all my research Wes Craven has not appeared once in connection with any such comment.

Craven died in 2015, so no such statement will ever be possible. The opportunity is gone for good.

Yet again, Sandra Peabody deserved better.

¹ It's Only a Movie, dir. David Szulkin, 2002. Available as an extra on many DVD and Blu-ray releases of The Last House on the Left.
² Celluloid Crime of the Century, dir. David Gregory, 2003. Available as an extra on many DVD and Blu-ray releases of The Last House on the Left.
³ 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

¹ Commentary track featuring actors David Hess, Marc Sheffler and Fred Lincoln, available on multiple DVD and Blu-ray releases of The Last House on the Left.

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.

Wes Craven's old-school attitude to actress fear

Wes Craven is sometimes referred to as an "old-school director". Indeed, John Carpenter of Halloween fame used that exact phrase when paying tribute to Craven after the latter had died in 2015. For the most part, people who say this are doing so as a compliment. This plays into the overwhelmingly positive reputation that Craven has these days – so much so that any serious criticism at all of him is fairly unusual. Blogger AntBit in Projected Figures did use the word "hagiography" in 2020 in their negative assessment of The Hills Have Eyes Part II, but wording that strong is definitely not the norm.

One of the things that's often mentioned about Craven is his "gentlemanly" approach to his actors. Biographies and retrospectives often contrast him with directors like Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) who could push their actors beyond reasonable limits – Marilyn Burns may later have leaned into her experience making that film, but Leatherface actor Gunnar Hansen's insider account Chain Saw Confidential makes it clear that Hooper's approach sometimes extended far beyond anything that would be considered ethical today.

But to return to Craven, let's look at his comments on a commentary track he recorded (along with producer Sean S. Cunningham) for DVDs of The Last House on the Left.¹ This is included on my Metrodrome Region 2 edition (copyrighted 2007 and released in 2008) but I believe it dates from a few years earlier than that. Commentary tracks are frequently revealing, with the informal setting often encouraging cast or crew to speak more freely than they would in a more structured interview. That is the case with Craven. Here, for example, he talks about the scene where Mari is attempting to get Junior to let her go:

I remember doing this scene over and over and over with Sandra, just pushing her and pushing her and pushing her until she got frantic enough, you know. I remember her looking at me like [she was thinking] ‘Just leave me alone, you monster.’ [laughs, pauses until end of scene] And so, like, there’s the take. Just made that moment work.

This particular memory is somewhat troubling by 2025 ethical standards, but it would probably be given a pass by audiences two decades earlier watching a movie three decades older even than that... were it not for the fact that this is the very same scene where Marc Sheffler made his threat to drop Sandra Peabody off a cliff if she did not get it right, as he admitted on Celluloid Crime of the Century.

What's perhaps more striking in its own right is when Craven acknowledges severe fear on Sandra's part. One of the most disturbing parts of Last House is the scene where Krug's gang force Phyllis and Mari to strip and perform sexual acts on each other. Szulkin (p73) calls this sequence "stark and ugly" and "especially creepy". Here's an extract from what Craven has to say about that scene on his commentary track:

David [Hess] was quite scary, especially to Sandra. [...] he wasn’t a nice guy between takes or anything like that, he kept to himself with [Sandra and Lucy Grantham]. I always told her that, you know, he’s an actor and he’ll be responsible, but [...] this all had a very real sense to her [...] Sandra was scared shitless here.

"Scared shitless" is strong language from a director who rarely swears during this commentary. There's no real acknowledgement of Sandra's fear being something requiring intervention, at least beyond Craven's assurances about Hess – which we now know were mistaken.

Finally, and surely most strikingly from the perspective of a modern listener, there's Craven's comment on the sequence where Mari's knife torture leads into her rape. He says about this:

Sandra was, I know, scared to death in this film, but it made for a scene that was absolutely convincing. Because she was genuinely frightened during all of this and as a director sometimes you just stand back and let something play out, you know, the actor’s not really in danger, but it took on a terrible reality. 

This is a startling passage to encounter now. Craven's attitude of non-intervention, of letting an actress's real fear be used to enhance a scene's realism, has far more in common with other exploitation horror directors of the 1970s than it does with the thoughtful and sympathetic elder statesman of horror that he later became. Craven also uses the old-fashioned definition of "danger" as meaning only physical danger. That would not be tolerated on a film set today, not now we know so much more about the importance of psychological and emotional health.

But back in those Connecticut woods in autumn 1971, and even thirty years later when talking about those times, Wes Craven's attitude to a very scared young actress's fear was not quite what many of Craven's modern biographers, assessors – and yes, hagiographers – tend to make it out to be.

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.