"To this day they will not speak to us" – Jeramie Rain on Sandra and Lucy

On 6 October 2022, the interestingly named Still Toking Productions channel on YouTube streamed a video call with Marc Sheffler and Jeramie Rain, two of the villain actors from The Last House on the Left. It was titled Still Toking with Marc Sheffler & Jeramie Rain-Dreyfuss, using the latter's name from when she was married to fellow actor Richard Dreyfuss between 1983 and 1995. Three members of the podcast team interviewed the two actors in a Zoom-like format.

The interview was re-uploaded in audio-only on 5 March 2025, minus a short introductory section. In this post, I will be using the original 2022 version for timestamps, but take off around three minutes if you're using the 2025 re-upload. It's not well known, with both uploads combined having under 400 views at the time of writing.

A lot of the video is the usual general stuff you get on such occasions, but unsurprisingly I'm concentrating here on anything that seems to touch on Sandra Peabody's experience on set. The first is a segment beginning at 38:09. First we get Rain:

"It wasn't scary! Nothing was scary about it!"

Then Sheffler interjects:

"Nah, not for us."

It's impossible to tell whether or not Sheffler is intending to contrast the villains' experience with that of any of their colleagues. After Rain reassures everyone that "it was all fake!" – meaning the stage violence, but not sitting well with Sandra's set walk-off – there comes a part where Sheffler says:

"The four of us [baddies] had a tremendous fun time with each other. It remains one of my most loving experiences in show business, making this movie."

This is conventional retrospective comment and nothing new. But immediately after this, at 38:34, we get a startling comment from Rain:

"Do you know, the girls [whose characters] we killed, they don't like us, and wanted nothing to do with us. I had to hang with the bad—the baddies hung together, and the victims, they wanted—they clung to Wes [Craven] and Sean Cunningham. They wanted nothing to do with us; they hated us."

Rain laughs as she says this, but her recollection of what might now be considered a distinctly unhealthy set environment ties in disturbingly well with her own recollection 20 years earlier in Celluloid Crime of the Century. Just after Fred Lincoln has informed us that Sandra was afraid of himself, David Hess and Rain throughout shooting, we move to a clip with Rain saying of Sandra and Lucy:

"I'm sure they had a very, very bad time with it. And I didn't hang out with the girls. I never really got to know them. They probably hated me. [laughs]"

Rain's Still Toking line also fits with Yvonne Hannemann's comment in Szulkin (p51) that:

"The girls sort of huddled together [and] were always afraid, and would be cowering even during lunch!"

Most of the evidence we've seen about fear in this blog is centred on Sandra, but Rain's comment in the 2022 interview suggests that even the generally more confident Lucy Grantham may have been uncomfortable with the way the villain actors were behaving towards her and Sandra.

Rain then tells us something remarkable, yet that I've never seen so plainly stated before, about the victim actresses' relationship with the villain actors:

"To this day. To this day they will not speak to us." 

This revelation that Sandra and Lucy remain (at least in 2022) unwilling to speak to their screen tormentors even half a century on from production is truly extraordinary, and it it is a moment when Rain's usually easy laughter dies away and she comes across as completely sincere. However, Sheffler immediately moves in and makes a joke of it, saying:

"They treated us like the trash we were."

This brings back Rain's laugh, and she responds that:

"And we played the trash that we were!"

That brings the segment to an end, and the discussion moves to conventional matters like the film's inclusion in an exhibition at MoMA. As is the frustratingly invariable pattern with Last House cast interviews, there is no attempt by the hosts to follow up on Rain's startling comment that Sandra and Lucy have not been willing to make up with the villain actors even fifty years after filming wrapped.

This, it should be noted, is not merely a case of Sandra always refusing to speak to any colleagues after the end of a film she had starred in. After her final on-screen role, as Bird in Teenage Hitchhikers, she kept in touch with director Gerri Sedley by mail. This is specifically a Last House thing.

There is one other short segment of the interview worth mentioning.  At 42:00, just after Sheffler has made a light-hearted comment about he and David Hess having "terrorised people" while sharing a place after Last House ended, Rain offers this. The audio is intermittent, but lip-reading makes it obvious that she says:

"And the nicest guy in the world is David Hess—was David Hess."

This line is astonishing to anyone who has encountered this same David Hess – among other things – openly stating on the DVD commentary track that he threatened to rape Sandra, repeating the claim to Vanity Fair, recollecting her emotional collapse as a sexual opportunity, and (via Marc Sheffler's 2017 interview) being "brutal with her" while filming Mari's rape scene.

I have no evidence that Jeramie Rain knew about any of these comments from Hess when she gave the Still Toking interview. But whatever a man who does all that to one young woman might be, it's very hard to call him "the nicest guy in the world".

"I wanted that reaction from her" – David Hess's 2011 Terror Trap interview

David Hess died in October 2011. In February of that year, he had given what proved to be one of his final interviews (Wayback backup), to the website The Terror Trap. This site specialised (it seems to have been inactive since around 2014) in horror and thriller films from 1925 to 1987, and so The Last House on the Left fell squarely into its remit. Hess's interview is fairly lengthy and, as was normal for this kind of coverage, not especially hard-edged. It is, however, interesting.

Hess talks at considerable length here about many of the people he worked with throughout his career, briefly about music but in far more detail when it comes to his film career. He says Corinne Clery could have been "the love of [his] life" despite being his screen rape victim in Hitch-Hike (1977). He says he's worked with "really good friend" Ruggiero Deodato five times. He shows compassion when discussing a family tragedy Louis Jourdan had suffered just before they worked together on Swamp Thing, the 1982 superhero movie directed by Wes Craven.

When it comes to Last House associates, Hess says Craven was "more professional" on Swamp Thing than he had been a decade earlier. He mentions still being close friends with Jeramie Rain and Marc Sheffler. He calls Lucy Grantham "incredible" and opines that if he and her "got together tomorrow, it would be like there was no time in between". Finally, when asked what this film had that would be nearly impossible to recapture today (ie in 2011), he suggests friendship: "we were all friends so we worked for each other". (Underlining is The Terror Trap's.)

When it comes to Sandra Peabody, however, the tone is very different. First, Hess is asked about his audition and whether any of the other Last House principals had been with him apart from Martin Kove, who had taken him along. Szulkin (p38) tells us that Kove himself had originally been asked to play the role, but felt it too dark and so recommended Hess. On the audition question. Hess is clear:

No. Just us and Sean Cunningham (the producer). And the girl who I scared half to death. (Laughs.)

Is that "girl" Sandra? Both Hess himself and Sandra (p41) give fairly extensive reminiscences about this audition in Szulkin, but neither so much as mentions the other being present. Hess, however, does mention in passing (p39) that a secretary was there. Almost certainly a woman, she would seem a more likely candidate.

Immediately after the section about Grantham, Hess without prompting goes on to say, "Sandra was a little different. I think she was more… vulnerable. Memory-wise, there's a visceral attraction to Sandra's Mari in the film. Krug does that." Frustratingly, the Terror Trap interviewer does not quiz Hess on what he means by the somewhat confusing second half of that quote. Hess then goes on to suggest that Krug feels "kind of filthy" to attack the innocent Mari, but has "gone too far at this point." At which point Hess adds:

And that’s the way we inter-related, even when we weren’t shooting. Sandra was an innocent and I held my character. She didn’t want to get anywhere near me. [...] She didn’t want any part of me. She thought I was a fucking monster.

After this, the Terror Trap interviewer does ask an interesting question, which prompts an even more interesting answer:

Terror Trap: Was that because she was a really enthusiastic Method actress and she was creating that whole thing? Or was she actually really scared of you?

David Hess: I think she was really scared. She wasn’t what I would call a complete Method actress. I mean, I studied with Sandy Meisner and Stella Adler. I knew what the fuck I was doing. I knew how to maintain that character, even off screen. And for very good reason. I wanted that reaction from her.  

There is a lot to unpack here. First: "I think she was really scared", in 2011. This is the same man who in 2008 admitted threatening to rape her. The same man who Fred Lincoln and Wes Craven both noted Sandra as being afraid of in Celluloid Crime of the Century in 2002. The same man who Sandra herself said "I was scared" about in Szulkin (2nd edition 2000) in connection with his knife stalking. Lincoln says that "what you're seeing in her face is real fear", also in Celluloid Crime of the Century. Hess, speaking some years later than that, says he thought she was really scared.

Then there's the name-dropping. We've already met Sanford "Sandy" Meisner on this blog, since Sandra spent two years studying under him in the late 1960s. It is... somewhat surprising that a man who also studied with him would not recognise a fellow Meisner-trained professional. It is also... somewhat surprising that a man who studied with him would imagine that Meisner's principle of "living truthfully under imaginary circumstances" could ever include threats of real sexual violence as a legitimate part of an acting toolkit.

Marc Sheffler, speaking for an interview in 2022¹ and a man who knew David Hess well for a number of years, has a very different perspective on Hess's acting background during his Last House days. Sheffler says:

He knew nothing about acting, he was doing what he thought people should do, so he was in character 24/7 the entire shoot.

This creates a conflict. A man who "studied with Sandy Meisner and Stella Adler" cannot be a man who "knew nothing about acting". It's not possible for both Hess and Sheffler to be accurate here. This is one case where the answer seems crystal clear: Sheffler is correct. He was speaking more than a decade after Hess had died, so unfairly denigrating his former associate would have looked gratuitously insulting. Hess, meanwhile, was making the point to the Terror Trap interviewer that he "knew what the fuck [he] was doing".

Except that he didn't. 

Finally, consider the warmth Hess shows to so many former colleagues, the genuine concern for Jourdan, the friendship with Deodato, the praise for Grantham. There is one and only one person here who he covers more than incidentally who gets absolutely none of this. No remorse, no regret, no warmth, no compassion. Most actors, forty years on from a difficult film and considering a co-star who has retreated from acting, will at least manage a formulaic "I hope she's happy in her life now" or similar.

Sandra Peabody gets nothing. 

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