How can we watch The Last House on the Left ethically today?

We have established that Sandra Peabody was abused in connection with her work on The Last House on the Left. We also now know from Marc Sheffler himself that the fear on Sandra's face in the scene after the cliff threat was real and deliberately caused. Sheffler also tells us that "a lot of what you see from her is real" because Sandra was "scared shitless" by David Hess's approach to Mari's rape scene. Hess himself tells us that he threatened to rape her for real.

At this point it becomes unsustainable to reasonably lump what happened on the Last House shoot in with the stories of "rough shoots" or "gruelling productions" that are fairly common when discussing 1970s cinema – especially independent grindhouse films shot guerilla-style on small budgets. The ethical issues thrown up by this film are in a qualitatively different category, even before you add in Wes Craven's own mining of Sandra's real fear for realism.

This does not mean that Last House on the Left should be banned. My own view is firmly that this would be wrong, and indeed counter-productive. It doesn't even mean that people shouldn't watch it as a film. We can still watch The Birds as a horror landmark even though we know that Alfred Hitchcock abused Tippi Hedren.¹ We can still enjoy The Wizard of Oz as a family classic even though we know that MGM abused Judy Garland.²

But the word "know" is important. Although it has taken many decades from the time of the abuse, it is now well understood and accepted that these women were abused, and this fact is routinely mentioned in any serious study of the films in question. With Last House that is not the case. Indeed, as my look at legacy media and academic writing has shown, it remains rare that Sandra's treatment, as opposed to Mari's, is mentioned at all.

There is worse. While those who watch the film on streaming services will probably and quite reasonably assume that it was made, if not to modern standards, then at least without actual harm, that cannot be said about those who know what is on the current Blu-ray release. Arrow Films made the choice to include Celluloid Crime of the Century, "Scoring Last House", "Junior's Story" and the actors' commentary track.

We therefore have considerable evidence for Sandra's mistreatment available for the price of a disc. When you add in David Szulkin's book – not that hard to find second-hand – there is really no excuse for serious studies or writing about Last House on the Left not to include at least something about what happened behind the scenes. Listicle-style euphemisms like "Peabody found it difficult" are so inadequate as to border on the offensive in themselves.

The film is indeed influential on its genre and for effectively launching Craven's highly significant career as a horror director. It is perfectly reasonable for film schools to study it as such. But it is not reasonable for them to simply skate over or omit entirely the reasons why the film looks as it does, since at times when Sandra is on screen, Mari's disturbingly realistic appearance is intimately connected with her actress's treatment.

So no, we don't need to stop watching Last House on the Left. We do, however, need to watch it honestly, understanding what happened in its making and the serious harm that was caused to a young and vulnerable woman by real-life threats and fear. If we cannot even give Sandra that, then all our protestations about respecting women in film are only so much hot air. We must do better. Sandra Peabody deserves better.

¹ Lang, Brent, "Tippi Hedren on Why She Went Public About Being Sexually Abused by Alfred Hitchcock". Variety (16 November 2016).
² Jha, Subhash K., "Judy Garland, the first abused child superstar". National Herald (28 June 2020).

"Nobody is served by refusing to see that for what it is" – my Letterboxd review of Last House

Although this blog is my main focus when discussing what was done to Sandra Peabody as she worked on The Last House on the Left, it is not the only place I write. I recently posted a review of the film on Letterboxd, and for completeness I shall reproduce it here. I awarded the film the minimum possible star rating of 0.5 out of 5, and I made it very clear why I was doing that. Here is the review in full:

"I rarely rate films based on behind-the-scenes stories, but Last House on the Left is an exception, because the way Sandra Peabody (Mari) was treated by certain colleagues bleeds directly into what you see when watching. Her on-screen fear during Mari's most traumatic sequence is not only largely genuine, it was at least in part deliberately induced. This was due to the frighteningly aggressive way David Hess decided to play Mari's tormentor Krug in that scene, an approach which even in the 1970s could and should have been moderated by Wes Craven.

The above only scratches the surface, as do the slew of listicles and trivia spots that fail to capture the true extent of Peabody's suffering. I strongly advise fans of this film to experience the Blu-ray extras in full – especially those featuring or partially about Hess – as well as David Szulkin's essential (though long out of print) making-of book. That now reads a good deal more disturbingly in places than it likely did when first published in the late 1990s. So it should: "it was another time" is rarely a particularly good excuse for ethical failings.

Last House is therefore not a movie I feel able to assess purely on its story. For what it's worth, though: despite its undeniable influence on the genre it is largely a tonally jarring mess. A mess with the occasional flash of real power, yes, not least in two almost wordless scenes involving water. One of these centres Mari and may well be the most genuinely affecting sequence in the film. It is also one of the few times that the bizarre soundtrack (by Hess) provides genuine enhancement to a scene. The grainy Super 16 picture sometimes serves to make the found-footage feel disturbingly effective but at other times simply looks amateurish.

For all the high-minded talk about Vietnam and depicting unflinching violence as a statement *against* violence, this is at heart an exploitation movie – directed by a man who back then could behave more like his peers than many fans of the later Wes Craven™ prefer to admit. This is visible in a cruel scene involving Krug's gang sexually humiliating their young victims (Phyllis, played by Lucy Grantham, is the other). It was originally filmed much longer and in gratuitous, leering detail. In her only Last House interview, Peabody told Szulkin she cried a lot while acting it.

Last House on the Left being a rape-revenge film, it is no spoiler to say that the final third covers the "revenge" part of proceedings. I'm not the first person to note that this resembles nothing so much as a violent and at times truly absurd precursor to Home Alone. The use of a live chainsaw, several years before Tobe Hooper had the same stupid idea, offered extra danger to those on set for very little extra on-screen impact. The ending, meanwhile, is a great deal less profound than it seems to think it is.

But the effect on Peabody especially outweighs everything else. It is to Wes Craven's discredit that he apparently never managed to make the jump from "I wouldn't make a film this way again" to "I shouldn't have done it then either; I'm sorry, Sandra". I would prefer to give this film no rating at all, but Letterboxd's setup means that could seem like I was simply unsure. I am not: the way Last House was made resulted in real and unnecessary distress, often visible on screen, and nobody is served by refusing to see that for what it is."

As you will note, I have avoided mentioning any of the most serious stories Sandra's abuse and mistreatment explicitly. That would have risked turning them into exactly the sort of uncontextualised trivia that I have been trying to avoid for more than fifty posts here. It would also have risked Sandra's dignity for much the same reason. Instead, I have simply provided anyone who is seriously interested with easily accessible and significant ways into the primary sources: the Blu-ray extras and Szulkin's book.

Since Letterboxd is fundamentally a film review platform, I have also included more about the Last House fictional story than I do over here where I assume my readers are familiar with its plot. I acknowledge that the film is not without worth as a film, but I explain that this is outweighed by the harm that Sandra endured in its making. Whether anyone will ever engage with the review on Letterboxd I don't know, but it was important to me to write it.

At the very least, I have added something that is rarely seen in Last House on the Left section on that site: a highly negative review in English that runs to more than a few sentences. You already know, I'm sure, what my motivation was for writing and posting it, but to spell it out once more to centre the person who should be centred here: Sandra Peabody deserves better.

Compassion in the woods

Despite the highly concerning evidence already presented about Sandra Peabody's experience while making The Last House on the Left, it shouldn't be imagined that the set was a place of unrelieved fear and unhappiness. There were plenty of people involved who were simply doing their jobs as well as they could on minuscule resources, and several who stood out in more positive ways.

We've already met assistant director Yvonne Hannemann, whose compassion in the wake of Sandra's distress at filming Mari's rape scene contrasted with David Hess's recollections in particular. Again contrasting with Hess was producer Sean Cunningham's empathetic note about the "terrifying, ugly place to be" that was Mari's actress's position during the torture and rape sequence.

Sandra herself tells us via Szulkin (p47) that she got on well with the cinematographer, Vic Hurwitz:

[He] was one of the better people on that set. That guy was great. He told me, "Have something else in your life besides acting, because it's a terrible business." He was a real fatherly kind of guy to me.

Sandra's opening sentence praises him only in relative terms, which perhaps reveals more about how she saw the set itself than it does about Hurwitz. Nevertheless, she goes on to make it clear that her view of him was genuinely positive. Her choice of the adjective "fatherly" is striking.

Sandra ends her recollection by lamenting Hurwitz's death in a bicycle accident – she says "a few years after Last House", but she was misremembering: Hurwitz died in July 1973. Sandra's liking for the cinematographer makes Marc Sheffler's implication in his commentary track threat that Hurwitz would keep filming if Sheffler dropped her from the cliff feel particularly distressing.

Lucy Grantham had a special position in Last House as Phyllis, Mari's fellow victim of Krug's gang. Hannemann remembers (Szulkin, p51) that "[t]he girls sort of huddled together". However, as Grantham herself points out in Szulkin (p39), the two young actresses were different in reality as well as in fiction:

Sandra was this sweet, rather naive "good girl", and I was much more rebellious in my personality [...] Sandra and I were really going in two very different directions [so] there was no sense of competition between us. In fact, Sandra was very much like the character she played in the movie, and so was I.

We don't get a quote from Sandra about Lucy, but it was Grantham who, in the scene where the gang force the girls to strip and perform sexually for their amusement, recognised that Sandra's distress went beyond her character's and took the initiative. As Wes Craven put it in his DVD commentary track,¹ Grantham who was "more experienced just in the world in general" than Sandra:

improvised, on the spot, and [it] was I think completely real because Sandra was scared shitless here and it was Lucy just saying, just, we’ll get through this scene, um, it’s just the two of us you know, stripped naked.

This refers to the moment where, shortly after the girls have been stripped, Phyllis holds Mari and says quietly to her, "It's just you and me here, nobody else." This already poignant moment becomes deeply moving when you know that it was ad-libbed by one actress to help another get through a very difficult scene – one which Szulkin (p74) notes had more material filmed than was eventually released.

Steve Miner, who went on to become a notable horror director but was a lowly 20-year-old production assistant on Last House, praised Sandra in the It's Only a Movie documentary as being "a real trooper" despite her being "freaked out" by the scene where Mari walks into the lake. He adds a human touch by noting that Sandra took "a long shower" afterwards.

Miner is notable as being someone from this film who Sandra would work with again. Just before she left exploitation for good and foreshadowing her long and successful career behind the camera, she was script supervisor on the sexploitation comedy Video Vixens, for which Miner was assistant editor.

Returning to Last House on the Left: with David Hess holding character for weeks on end and apparently enjoying the fear he engendered in Sandra, it is a relief to know that most people on this scrappy exploitation set in the woods got through the Last House shoot without resorting to threats and intimidation towards her.

Sandra Peabody deserved these displays of respect and kindness. But they should have been universal.

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.