"David Hess should have gone to prison" – That Final Girl Life's podcast

Given how rarely Sandra Peabody's mistreatment in connection with The Last House on the Left is mentioned in the media, I try to keep an eye out. Or indeed an ear, as was the case in December when I found the Road to Nowhere podcast, which treated the abuse seriously. As its host made clear:

"The film, no matter how loud a statement against violence it may be, still ended up inflicting real violence on at least one of its leads."

Until very recently, this was the only podcast I was aware of which discussed Sandra's abuse. That changed the other day, and this time I was an unwitting catalyst. I commented on this review of Last House by a fellow British Letterboxd user who goes by the name of Chindilani, and in the comments you can read the exchange we had on that site. (She had not previously been aware of what happened behind the scenes, so the review itself does not mention that.)

Chindilani¹ publishes a podcast called That Final Girl Life. This is hosted on Patreon, but the core episodes are free and – excellently – include full text transcripts. She takes an unusual and intriguing approach in that she looks at how various final girls in horror films might be affected by their trauma in their lives after the movies end. I listened to the episode about Sarah from The Descent² and found it a very interesting listen.

The episode about Mari in Last House on the Left is, unsurprisingly, primarily about the 2009 version of the character, given that she survives the film and 1972 Mari does not. Again, it is well worth listening to, and it made me think in ways I had not before. But of course on this site it is 1972 Mari, and especially the real woman who played her, with which we are most concerned.

Chindilani does not pull her punches where David Hess in particular is concerned. For example, fairly early in the episode, we get:

"Some of the things that David Hess (a) says about Sandra Peabody and (b) admits to in interviews is like… are just horrific"

She also notes the "repressed Protestant" comment that Hess used in the two-part quote in Celluloid Crime of the Century. Perhaps because there is so much else alarming in Hess's various comments, few people stop to remark on his attack on Sandra's background. We do at least get the sympathetic Lucy Grantham telling Szulkin (p42) that:

"Sandra was this sweet, rather naive 'good girl' [...] more ladylike and shy [than me, and] very much like the character she played in the movie"

Chindilani then turns to an extensive look at the remake's Mari, ending by noting Sara Paxton's reassurance that she "felt safe" with Garret Dillahunt, who played Krug in the remake. From there on in, the final quarter of the episode largely concentrates on Sandra Peabody and her far less reassuring experience. The host lays her cards on the table straight away, saying that the things she had learnt made her "so fucking furious".

She then looks in detail at David Hess's behaviour in paticular. Concentrating on Hess makes sense given the extreme nature of his public statements, and the fact that if she had also discussed the likes of Marc Sheffler's cliff threat or Wes Craven's mining of Sandra's fear in any detail, the episode would have risked becoming unmanageably long and diverted attention from its central theme: 2009 Mari's trauma.

Chindilani covers a good deal of ground here. She covers most of the rape-threat commentary track extract, Sandra's set walk-off, and the "Can I?" incident. She contrasts what happened with A Serbian Film. I've never seen it and almost certainly never will, but I grasp her central point: that that was a film with extreme content but one where nobody actually got hurt on set.

The host goes on to touch briefly on a later rape-and-violence Hess vehicle, Ruggero Deodato's The House on the Edge of the Park (1980). Chindilani deliberately avoids looking too deeply into how the women on that film were treated, and I don't know either. However, in the 2011 Terror Trap interview, Hess spoke about a similar film, Hitch-Hike (1977), and said of his screen victim Eve, played by Corinne Cléry:

"If you look at the scene again, the question is whether it was rape or not. It may be rape and perhaps in her mind, she wanted to be raped. But she sure was enjoying it. So is that rape?"

I think Hess's comment speaks for itself.

Chindilani states that she does not want to rewatch Last House 1972 for a very straightforward reason:

"I don't want to see a woman actually get sexually assaulted."

She then goes on to say that "David Hess should have gone to prison" for the simple reason that sexual assault is a crime. In spite of the often sad and misogynistic reality of the era, especially in low-budget exploitation cinema, it was a crime in 1971 Connecticut too – although the American approach to statutes of limitations meant that Hess was safe from prosecution by the time he made his various comments in the DVD era.

I think it interesting to note that the hosts of both the podcasts which I have seen seriously covering Sandra's abuse – Road to Nowhere and That Final Girl Life – are real-life survivors, as both mention occasionally in their pieces. In the case of the latter, you can listen to or read Chindilani's brief explanation of her background near the beginning of her first podcast, which went on to cover Dani from Midsommar.

Sandra Peabody is also in that company. Regardless of to what extent Hess's most extreme claims are true or fantasy, there is little serious doubt that she was abused. Podcasts like That Final Girl Life offer Sandra something she has too often been denied: validation and respect as a survivor.

¹ She does not use the name explicitly in the podcast, so I am using her Letterboxd handle for convenience instead of writing out "the That Final Girl Life host" each time.
² She based her episode on the US cut, not the original UK version. If you've seen The Descent, you'll know why that matters for her purposes.

Coverage of Sandra's treatment in horror and film media is... unsatisfactory

Earlier I looked at whether Sandra Peabody's experience making Last House on the Left was covered extensively both in legacy media and in academic publications. In both cases, on what was necessarily a sample of both types of media, I found that it was not. In fact, Sandra's abuse was mentioned only once or twice.

So, let's turn our gaze to horror media. Surely that will bring us better results? Last House is, after all, a highly influential film – often treated as something of a foundational text for the slasher movies that followed it.

In his book about US exploitation cinema of the era, The Style of Sleaze, Callum Waddell notes that Chas Balun, who wrote for Fangoria and acted as its film critic, disdained Last House on the Left on its original release, saying:

Even some of the genre’s most famous critics found themselves unsure of how to approach Craven’s debut film. Celebrated Fangoria contributor Chas Balun would write that The Last House on the Left should be scorned for its ‘explicit horror and mayhem ... one of the most repugnant “horror” films ever made’.¹

This however says nothing about the film's production conditions. Digging deeper, we can look at back issues of genre periodicals – and here we do find something, albeit not much. Another major US horror magazine, Rue Morgue, ran a "Whatever happened to...?" article about Sandra in its March/April 2022 edition. The relevant part says:

"[Sandra] didn’t exactly receive prima donna treatment on set [as] co-stars David Hess and Marc Sheffler remained in character between shots, bullying her and even going so far as actually threatening to harm her to get good footage. She reportedly walked out of the cast screening of the film, horrified by what she saw."

This is factually true, and Sandra's screening walk-out isn't often mentioned, but it's notable that her actual abuse is reduced to part of one sentence. The feeling of this being largely treated as a trivia spot is enhanced by the one small picture showing the bound and gagged Mari as she spots her mailbox. Not great for an article written as recently as 2022.

Books? Again, there's very little that I've found, beyond of course Szulkin's much older work. Jason Zinoman's book Shock Value is notable – and unusual – for repeating David Hess's rape threat from Zinoman's own Vanity Fair article, although it truncates it and adds an assertion about Wes Craven's behaviour:

"Craven did not object to his star David Hess's method-style brutality [...] On the set, it was equally uncomfortable, which [Hess] readily admits. 'I was very mean to the girls, so when it came to the rape scene [Sandra Cassell] didn't have to act,' he says, referring to the costar who played one of the victims. 'I told her, "I'm really going to fuck you if you don't behave yourself. They'll just let the camera run."'²

The second half of Hess's magazine quote, in which he tells Sandra he will "devastate" her and trivialises her reaction as saying he didn't think "she was too happy about that", is omitted by Zinoman here.

Surely horror-focused web pages and blogs – as opposed to listicles or Blu-ray reviews – will have something relevant to say? I touched on Surgeons of Horror's blog post near the end of my piece about their podcast. Elsewhere, though, the results are unimpressive. A few examples will suffice.

Ashley Manning's review of the film notes that it feels "very raw and real", but the only real attention paid to production ethics is this:

"The final sequence involves a chainsaw, and it looks like the shot was incredibly dangerous and something that wouldn’t be made in the same way today."

Nicolò Grasso's piece "The Imitative Grindhouse Cinema of Rob Zombie" notes that Zombie is particularly influenced by Last House, as well as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and adds:

"Actors are constantly sweating and panting, experiencing real hell on these independent productions to the point that their suffering increases the empathy of the viewers."

This is a rare acknowledgement of the toll on grindhouse cinema's performers, not just their characters. As soon as this uncomfortable aspect is raised, however, the writer moves on to talk about Zombie being influenced by Mari's walk to the lake before her murder.

More interesting for our purposes is the article "Exploiting Exploitation: The Last House on the Left", published without a byline by Morbidly Beautiful in 2018. An odd mix of conventional article and extended listicle, it includes this:

"[A]t least on film, it’s hard to see where the actor Hess ends and the character Krug begins. That is the genius of an intelligent, talented actor like Hess. David’s thespian abilities will make you think, “Is this guy really crazy?” Damn fine acting!"

This is deeply frustrating: the writer glimpses the blurring of character and actor that was behind Hess's obsessive holding character, but never takes that a stage further to consider that his "genius" resulted in real-life harm to Sandra. Worse, the "Can I?" incident is referenced (largely accurately) by Morbidly Beautiful – but only in the listicle-like "trivia" section at the end.

Let me be clear: Sandra Peabody's abuse is not trivia. That so many sources still treat it as such is a sign of how far they still have to travel in properly acknowledging what was done to her.

Admit One Film Addict has a spotlight on David Hess. The section about Last House is headed by the rape scene close-up – unusually, with Sandra's eyes open – but all we actually get about her is this, right at the end of that section:

"Hess's technique of method acting really came into play as he famously threatened co-star Sandra Peabody to get a better reaction from her."

The author calls Hess "easily one of [their] favourite bad guys" and refers to his part in Last House as a "triumph", so I suppose it's something that his threat is mentioned at all. We do see yet another appearance of the misuse of the term "method acting", however.

We'll end with two sources that do at least mention the ethical failure of Last House on the Left's production. Davide Prevarin's article for Frame Rated includes this brief passage near the end:

"Actors were mostly inexperienced first-timers, and the crew filmed at certain locations without permits. A fair deal of what was once termed “method acting” was involved, now better described as “workplace abuse”."

This last point is very important, and the use of the word "abuse" in Last House media is sufficiently rare as to be highly noticeable when it does occur – but predictably and disappointingly, the writer suggests that it was simply one aspect of several that added up to the film receiving cult status.

Finally for this post, there's the detailed review of the movie by the oddly named 2 Unpaid Movie Critics!!! blog. This once again contains factual errors ("the bound and gagged victims are being slowly carried out the window of the apartment" – we only see Mari being carried, and it's the fire escape door). However, the piece does include this:

"In another one of those Blu Ray interviews, David Hess [mentions that Sandra] suddenly got this look in her eyes, like she had really gone somewhere else mentally, and he says, 'At that point, I knew that if I'd really wanted to, I could have f****d her, and she wouldn’t have done anything.' What??? [...] I found myself wondering how Craven found a career after this movie."

The quote from the music featurette is – why is this so unsurprising? – incorrect in the words inside the quotes, though at least more or less accurate in terms of the impression Hess gives.

All in all, while there are perhaps more mentions of Sandra Peabody's treatment in these pieces than in the more general or academic texts, there is still a serious dearth of pieces that cover it at any length. She really does deserve better.

¹ Waddell, Callum. The Style of Sleaze: The American Exploitation Film, 1959–1977. Edinburgh University Press (2018). p124.
² Zinoman, Jason. Shock Value. The Penguin Press (2011). p77.

The information gap

One thing that has really struck me since beginning my research into Sandra Peabody's treatment while she was making The Last House on the Left, and that's how little her mistreatment – indeed, outright abuse – is mentioned when the film is discussed. The evidence is out there, available to anyone who looks for it in the right places, so why isn't it more often brought up?

Some people suggest that this has to do with certain parts of the horror community still giving a degree of respect to "films that really cost to make" that has largely disappeared from many other areas of cinema. Since Alfred Hitchcock's abuse of Tippi Hedren became widely known, for example, there's considerably less reverence paid to him as an auteur. His cinematic achievements are still acknowledged, but the human cost is now treated as part of the story.

Although this is necessarily somewhat subjective, I think there is something in the suggestion. Transgressive horror, in particular, seems sometimes to excuse even the kind of "transgression" that has real-world effects. Excuses for harsh shooting conditions, excessively demanding directors, treatment of young women as "the girls" and so on are still to be found more here than in some other cinematic genres.

However, this only takes us part of the way. Something as extreme as David Hess's claim in Vanity Fair to have threatened Sandra Peabody with rape was still able to pass without editorial pushback – or, astoundingly, any questioning of Wes Craven, who was interviewed in the same article – as recently as 2008. However, #MeToo and related developments have made it vanishingly unlikely that this would happen again.

So why? I think a big part of the reason is that people simply don't know about it. When I wrote about the Vanity Fair article, Hess's absolutely unambiguous words managed a grand total of three Google hits. The number varies slightly from search to search, but in my experience it is never above ten. This makes the piece effectively invisible, buried beneath a mountain of often unreliable listicles, unless someone actively looks for it or (as I did) stumbles upon it.

A similar thing can be said about the other major stories of Sandra's mistreatment. Marc Sheffler's cliff threat and Hess's "Can I?" story are in Celluloid Crime of the Century. Sheffler's description of Hess's approach to the rape scene as "brutal" is from his "Junior's Story" interview. Sandra's own "No comment" about that scene is from p79 of Szulkin. And the most abusive of them all, Hess's explicit and degrading rape threat anecdote, is from the actors' DVD/Blu-ray commentary track.

What do all these things have in common? They are all in bonus material of one kind or another. The documentary, interview and commentary track are on current Blu-rays published by Arrow. While a film like Last House will have a larger fraction than usual who actually consume these extras, it is still a minority. In the mid-2020s movie-watcher's world, streaming is now king – and streaming services rarely include extras.

In the case of David Szulkin's book, the same applies but more so. Although Wes Craven's Last House on the Left: The Making of a Cult Classic is absolutely crucial for understanding Sandra's perspective – as the only place she has ever spoken about the film on the record – it is also somewhat obscure. The second and final edition appeared in 2000, and despite Szulkin himself remaining active well after that the book is long out of print.

In truth, it is entirely understandable if a viewer of Last House arrives at the movie unaware of anything other than the film itself and the fact that it was directed by Wes Craven. Except arguably for Sean Cunningham, no other person directly connected with Last House on the Left is likely to have mainstream name recognition. David Hess comes the closest, and even he largely appeared in other violent exploitation films.

Ironically, despite a society that is more online than ever before, it is harder than it has been for years to publish information relating to Sandra's abuse in a way that will both do justice to the topic and to Sandra herself, and actually be read. Social media has devoured not only much of legacy media, but much long-form online media too. This blog, for example, is now very much considered a niche format.

This is not to say that the people who prefer to excuse unethical behaviour in 1970s exploitation no longer exist. They do; in fact, not long before I started this blog, a relatively mild comment of mine on another platform lamenting that David Hess never apologised to Sandra was met with a somewhat sneery response, along the lines that I should not expect independent film-making of that era to be as "comfortable" as 2020s studio productions.

But I would like think that that is a relatively small, if sometimes loud, slice of the horror fandom. I think more people simply see Last House as "the place Wes Craven started out" and then judge the film – positively or negatively – on the basis of what appears on screen. Probably most of them understand that 1970s film-making lacked features we now take for granted, such as intimacy coordinators, but far fewer realise that this case goes far beyond that.

I am under no illusions: this blog is very unlikely to go viral. It's just not the right kind of writing to do that, so I place it on record more as an act of witness than anything else. Sandra Peabody deserves to have her suffering taken seriously, as well as the courage she showed in continuing to work under such duress. But for that to happen widely, the evidence will first have to become known widely – and it seems that we are still some distance from that.

The normalisation of cruelty – Fred Lincoln's "really pushed it" line and Last House set culture

Quite some time ago, I posted about a line of Fred Lincoln's from the actors' commentary track. This was said by him just after we'd seen the fire escape scene, in which the drugged, gagged and bound Mari is kidnapped and placed in the Cadillac trunk (boot). As the trunk is opened, we can just glimpse the already abducted Phyllis already in there, also tied up.

As the car drives away, and after a mild gripe from David Hess about Marc Sheffler going out of frame in a previous shot, Lincoln observes:

"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."¹

Given the context of the comment, if that line were sincere it could only realistically mean that Sandra Peabody and Lucy Grantham were left in the trunk – perhaps still bound – for the drive to Connecticut. It's twenty miles or so even to the state line. "Left 'em" doesn't seem to imply physical force (as "kept 'em" might) but neither does it suggest even grudging agreement, which "we had to ask 'em to travel in the trunk" might have.

I want to be very clear at this point that I have not changed my view from the older post: I firmly believe Lincoln was not being sincere and was instead making a very dry joke. After all, from a purely practical perspective and even if I misunderstood Jim Hubbard's diary in Appendix III of Szulkin, the idea that the only workable options were one, buy another car or two, keep the actresses confined in the trunk until Connecticut is preposterous. Consider the options:

• The New Haven Line railway. Sandra mentions (Szulkin, p50) using this train at least once
• Taking a bus. I don't know the 1971 situation, but today you can travel that route in two hours (with one change)
• Hiring a cab. Even with out-of-town fees, cheaper and simpler than buying a car
• Renting or borrowing a car
• Making two trips – it's just over an hour to Westport in 1971 traffic
• Rejigging the production schedule, which happened anyway at times

That isn't even an exhaustive list of reasonable possibilities. Given the number of practical options other than Lincoln's "buy[ing] another car", for this actually to have happened in the way he suggests – even allowing for 1971 standards for transport being less comfortable than today – would have required one of two things:

1. A total failure of common sense on the part of everyone with any power on set, including Wes Craven himself. Serious and dangerous incompetence.
2. A desire to make Mari and Phyllis's plight "more authentic" by effectively kidnapping their actresses for real. Serious and dangerous abuse – and potentially a federal felony.

For all the Last House production's alarming failures of ethics and safety, most obviously seen in Marc Sheffler's cliff threat and – if Hess's largely uncorroborated boasts are to be believed – his own sexual threats, they do seem to have drawn the line at extended physical endangerment of Sandra and Lucy. That alone for me rules out the "trunk incident" actually having happened.

There is also no on-track corroboration of Lincoln's line. One of the others (I think Hess) says "Right" after the sentence about being unable to afford another car, but it comes across like a man simply acknowledging a storyteller; elsewhere Hess tends to be enthusiastic and amused when tales of Sandra's mistreatment are brought up.

Of course, it would help if the horror media had ever actually asked Fred Lincoln about this while he was alive, or indeed people like Sheffler. Their consistent failure to challenge Last House personnel in interviews has left us without a simple acknowledgement that it was a joke. That would have settled the issue. But the question needed to be asked. Indeed, it still does.

What is more immediately concerning, however, is what Lincoln's line reveals about the culture on the Last House on the Left shoot, and indeed for decades afterwards. When this commentary track was recorded in the 2000s, Hess, Sheffler and Lincoln were in their fifties and sixties. They had stature, families, fame—but what they didn't seem to have was any notion of acceptable behaviour in public.

As I've pointed out, there appears never to have been any public apology from any surviving and active Last House cast or crew for the unquestioned mistreatment that Sandra was put through. Considering increased understanding of issues of consent and safety on film sets, as well as the willingness to revisit historical ethical failures over half a century, this looks increasingly out of step.

The commentary track shows the most extreme version of the culture: there, David Hess can openly describe threatening to rape Sandra, saying "apropos of what Marc did" to link his abuse to Sheffler's cliff threat story. Sheffler himself also relates the cliff threat elsewhere, such as in Celluloid Crime of the Century, while Marshall Anker can describe Sandra's horror and upset before her screening walk-out as "carrying on".

There is, sadly, a consistent picture here. What the evidence shows is that not just rough treatment but distress or actual abuse can be minimised, trivialised and even – as on the commentary track – laughed about and treated as amusing lore from the filming front. The woman who was seriously harmed and whose decision to live her life in peace and privacy means she deserves someone to speak up for her gets nobody.

Sandra Peabody suffered terribly in making The Last House on the Left. She showed great courage, resilience and professionalism in completing her role at all, never mind providing the film's emotional centrepiece. The least she deserves now is kindness when others speak about her experience. Instead, she has for decades often been shown nothing of the sort. 

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. 

"I wonder how damaging being in this movie was for her" – the Surgeons of Horror podcast

Surgeons of Horror is a long-running blog which advertises itself as "dissecting horror films". One of its earliest posts – in fact only the second, made in May 2016 – is about Last House on the Left. The post itself does not say all that much beyond the obvious, but at the end are links to a podcast. The ones there are now dead, but the episode remains available on Spotify.

As might perhaps be expected of a recording from so early in a series' life and so long ago – notably, before #MeToo took root – the episode has at times very poor sound quality, which makes it difficult to reliably pick out who of the three participants (Paul Farrell, Ben Skinner and Miles Davies) is speaking. As such, I will not identify individual speakers here; apologies to the personnel in question.

The episode lasts 79 minutes and ranges widely, covering subjects as different as VHS video cover designs and how censors can sometimes be more lenient with non-sexual violence than with consensual sex. However, here I shall concentrate on what they say about Sandra Peabody's experience.

This is not Road to Nowhere – the word "abuse" is never uttered and that podcast's strong moral tone in terms of Sandra's treatment is largely absent. However, nor are the Surgeons of Horror team members purely celebratory. After a while, they go through the movie's plot points in roughly chronological order, and when they get to the forced oral sex scene one says:

"It is kind of quite gratuitous in the way it's handled. Sandra [...] was actually genuinely quite scared and there's a bit where Lucy who plays Phyllis [...] is talking her through it saying, "It's okay, there's no one else around here." All of that was actually improvised [...] Which makes you kind of really start to think it was quite a harrowing thing going on. "

This reference to Lucy Grantham's compassionate response to Sandra's distress is quite often mentioned, but it's unusual to see it specifically noted as suggesting that the scene was "harrowing" for Sandra, despite this being a matter of record thanks to her telling Szulkin (p73) that she found this part of the movie very upsetting to film.

Very shortly afterwards, the podcasters note the looseness of the script and the level of improvisation, pointing out how much a situation like this requires actors to trust their director:

"Wes [Craven] is [...] not the skilled director that he went on to become, and [...] just allowing the actors to improvise [and if you do that] it can easily swing in the wrong direction. [...] I'm sure [Sandra] was just like, just praying he would call cut [...] at any point."

Since the improvisational nature of the script is quite often framed positively by horror writers, this is a notably empathetic reading, and one which recognises the power imbalance present on set. It should however be emphasised that Sandra herself has never confirmed or denied that she was "praying [Craven] would call cut".

A little later, we reach the scene where Mari is attempting to get Junior to release her, which thanks to Marc Sheffler's repeated stories we know was when the cliff threat occurred. The speaker says:

"When you learn this stuff, I'm seriously watching this thinking, 'Uh, what's going on here?'"

As often in shows that run through the chronology quickly, however, there's no dwelling on something has clearly disconcerted the podcaster. We soon arrive at Mari's rape scene, and given its pivotal nature unsurprisingly this gets attention from the Surgeons of Horror team:

"David Hess even said that [...] he could sense that she was really, really genuinely scared in that moment, you know, and it's not, she's not acting by that point. Hmm. She was really, really scared"

This is a sanitised version of the various things Hess actually said about Sandra in that scene, perhaps sourced from a listicle, though I don't know for sure. There's then a brief comment about Krug's drooling, though the coverage doesn't go into its real-life effects on Sandra beyond noting that "the act alone is invasive" and acknowledging that it makes the effect more shocking.

After the chronological run through the fictional story has ended, the podcasters discuss the characters, beginning with Mari. Unusually, they cover her role in Teenage Hitchhikers before moving on to Last House itself. Sandra's fear is again mentioned:

"Sandra was scared [...] of the guys in the movie, the three [villains] and actually, she actually walked off set before they were ready to shoot, only to be persuaded to come back."

There then follows the common and depressingly minimising description of Hess's behaviour as "a bit method", but then we get a more interesting and insightful comment from the same speaker:

"[Sandra] was really intimidated by [Hess] in particular [and] when you kind of watch this stuff and read about it, you just start to question the logic behind it."

It's not often you get a podcaster – other, of course, than Jara on Road to Nowhere – who openly questions whether this approach was acceptable. After a brief diversion, he goes on to say that, although his own approach to acting and directing has generally been aligned with letting the actors "roll with it":

"you kind of are a bit awakened to the impact that that could necessarily have [and] I wonder how damaging being in this movie was for her [Sandra]. I mean, [she] has never spoken on any of the commentary stuff and come out and spoken about the impact it's had on her."

Sandra has of course spoken to Szulkin, whose book is mentioned in another context elsewhere in the podcast, but it is certainly true that she's never spoken on camera or tape about Last House on the Left. This last extract is considerably more thoughtful than a lot of informal (and even formal) media coverage of this film in terms of considering the human impact of the way it was made. Most of all, it centres Sandra.

Sadly, once again there's no pause for a more detailed examination of this point – Road to Nowhere really does stand out in this regard – and the rest of the podcast is a fairly straightforward mixture of analysis and silly humour.

In 2022, Surgeons of Horror like many other sources noted the 50th anniversary of the film's release with a retrospective post. The piece by Saul Muerte runs to nearly 600 words, but despite #MeToo by then having had considerable effect on discourse elsewhere, there's almost no coverage of the ethics of Last House's production. All we get is this oblique sentence:

"It should also be noted that some scenes were questionably pushed beyond the limits of decency; a sign of creative freedom at the risk of the players involved."

It's jarring to see a piece include a mention of "risk of the players involved" but then move immediately on to the link between the names of Krug and Freddy Krueger. Given that the podcast at least considered Sandra Peabody's experience on set, if sometimes frustratingly superficially, the lack of any further comment in a relatively lengthy blog post feels like a missed opportunity.

No questions asked – how keeping things cosy has failed Sandra

Something that's become increasingly apparent as I've looked into Sandra Peabody's treatment while making The Last House on the Left is how little this issue has been seriously interrogated in the last half-century. While there have been interviews with cast members and of course David Szulkin's very important making-of book, for the most part they've been essentially celebratory.

What we haven't seen, beyond the Road to Nowhere podcast, the very occasional mention in an academic paper or the scattergun approach of various listicles, is coverage that spends more than moments turning an openly critical eye on the production itself. Once you come to the conclusion that Sandra Peabody was abused, not merely that she "had a hard time on the movie" or similar euphemisms, this becomes an increasingly glaring absence.

One reason is of course Sandra's decision to prefer peace and privacy and her work in other fields to leaning into her fame as "the woman who was Mari". If she had chosen to exploit this fame – or notoriety – there might have been more attention paid to her. But given her weeks of fear and intimidation, doing this could well have proved deeply damaging. Sandra's decision to stay away must be respected absolutely.

Members of the Last House team have often guested at horror conventions and similar events. However, these are designed as celebratory affairs. Any questions towards invited guests that seriously challenge them are generally deeply unwelcome – moderation at Q&A sessions almost always weeds these out before they can even be asked. This avoids embarrassment for the stars who have been invited, and for the events which have often paid them substantial appearance fees.

We can see an example of this in the case of Fangoria's 2009 Weekend of Horrors, as reported by The Bedlam Files at the time. David Hess, Marc Sheffler and Fred Lincoln attended a special Last House on the Left panel, along with Szulkin. The panel was described as "pretty raucous", which itself suggests there was very little opportunity for serious, reflective discussion of the ethical dimension to the film's production.

According to the Bedlam Files reporter, Sheffler told the cliff threat story at the panel. There is no suggestion that anyone challenged him on whether this kind of threat was acceptable. Nor indeed does our correspondent give any impression that Hess was asked about his open admission that he threatened rape against Sandra, something which had appeared in Vanity Fair the previous year.

We see the same thing in online interviews. The 2018 Without Your Head and the 2022 Hollywood Wade pieces last over an hour apiece, and in both of them Sheffler is asked about the cliff threat. ¹, ² In both cases he provides a version, but in neither case is he confronted with serious questions about it. By the time these interviews were published, questions of consent and safety in historic film-making were becoming prominent, making their absence more striking here.

While I don't know what those two hosts specifically may or may not have agreed with Sheffler beforehand, some interviewers will worry that if they get too harsh, their subject will pull out or that they may lose their "access to the stars" altogether. Given the way modern online media works, there can be a genuine fear that even a short period without such big-name guests might hole the show below the waterline.

Despite this, when there evidence of serious mistreatment of a member of the cast, as there is in Sandra's case, taking such a gentle line risks airbrushing the reality that she lived. The story of a woman threatened with being thrown off a cliff can be softened into lore or even jokey trivia. The question of Wes Craven's ethical responsibility is skimmed over. The fact that one of Sheffler's Last House co-stars claimed to have threatened rape gets omitted completely.

There is indeed a balance to be struck. We see this on the Arrow Blu-ray, where "Junior's Story" allows Sheffler to speak without an interviewer's voice being heard at all. The result is very revealing even though the cliff threat is not even hinted at. However, the word is balance. When, as with Sandra's experience, there is a near-total absence of serious questioning in virtually every source, that is not balance at all. That is whitewashing.

¹ "Marc Sheffler of Wes Craven's Last House on the Left interview". Without Your Head, YouTube, 4 Apr 2018.
² "Marc Sheffler sits down w/ Hollywood Wade to discuss the infamous Horror film Last house on the Left", Hollywood Wade | Crime & Entertainment, YouTube, 4 Sep 2022.

10 Listicles That Mention Sandra's Last House Experience – How Do They Fare?

Now that I've come to the conclusion that Sandra Peabody was abused, in psychological and emotional terms, in connection with her work on The Last House on the Left, it's time to turn to a form of online media which occasionally uses that very word: the listicle. A listicle is an online article which is essentially a list, usually with a title along the lines of "7 Ways Last House Changed Cinema".

Let's have a look at some popular listicles about the film and see how well their claims stand up.

WhatCulture: 10 Horror Movie Scenes More Real Than You Think (Josh Brown, 2021)

• "[F]ew people involved in the production actually had any fun making it" – false; Szulkin (p45) says "Most of the cast recall having a good time on the set."
• "[David Hess and Marc Sheffler] boasted about their treatment of Peabody, explaining how they really threatened her before shooting, with Hess allegedly threatening to sexually assault her for real while shooting the rape scenes while Sheffler threatened to kill her if she didn't give a convincing performance after a bunch of failed takes." – reasonably accurate, except that Sheffler doesn't boast in the same way as Hess and never threatened to kill Sandra; the harshest he got was "you'll be fucking mangled".

WhatCulture [again]: 10 Horror Movie Scenes That Genuinely Terrified Actors (James Egan, 2023)

• "[W]hen Sandra Peabody had to shoot her gang-rape scenes" – false; Mari is raped by Krug with other gang members looking on; she is not gang-raped.
• "In the scene in question, Peabody's character is bound, gagged, and violated" – false; by the time Mari is raped, her restraints have been removed.
• "Hess constantly harassed Peabody off-screen, to ensure she looked disgusted in any scene where they shared the screen." – "disgusted" is a very strange choice of word.
• "Hess was so nasty to her, the young actress walked off and tried to quit the production." – true.
• "Peabody [...] refuses to discuss her experience on The Last on the House on the Left [sic] since." – not quite accurate; she spoke to Szulkin in for his 1997/2000 book.

Buzzfeed: Men Getting Away With Alleged Abuse Of Women On Set (Hannah Marder, 2021)

• "According to the documentary Celluloid Crime of the Century and the book Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left, Peabody (who went by the name Sandra Cassel at the time) was horribly mistreated by her male costars." – points for referencing the sources, but it's a real stretch to say the book says she was "horribly mistreated", even though it reads disturbingly in places now.
• "Marc Sheffler admitted to threatening to throw her off a cliff to try to rile her up for a scene (though in 2018 he stated she was not in real danger)" – correct on both counts, though it suggests Sandra not being in danger reduces the severity.
• "David Hess allegedly threatened to actually assault her in a rape scene they were about to film" – apparently a reference to the commentary track, though the inline link leads only to another listicle. "Assault" is a euphemism; the writer shrinks from the word "rape".
• "The documentary doesn't directly say this, but numerous actors and crew members, including Hess himself, talk about how they believe she was scared he might actually hurt her, and how all her reactions were real." – "numerous" is generalising too much, although Sheffler at least suggests it.

Looper: Horror Roles That Really Messed Up The Actors' Heads ("Looper Staff", 2024)

• "As actor Marc Sheffler recalled on the film's home release commentary track" – followed by an accurate, slightly shortened version of the commentary track cliff threat story.
• "David Hess doubled down on the threat approach by saying he'd actually assault her to get a better result from her reaction" – apparently referring to the same commentary track, though as usual omitting Hess's explicit and degrading language.  Again, we see the euphemistic "assault".

Listverse: 10 Horror Films That Were a Nightmare To Make (Lorna Wallace, fact checked by Darci Heikkinen, 2023)

• "Sandra Peabody, who played Mari, feared that the scenes of rape and torture might actually cross over into reality" – we don't know whether Sandra thought this.
• "David A. Hess says that during his rape scene with her" – followed by an accurate, full version of the "Can I?" story.
• "Craven says that Peabody “often wasn’t acting.”" – true.
• "He explains that Hess would stay in character while not shooting, meaning “Sandra really was afraid of him, and probably of Fred [Lincoln] a bit too.”" – true, stated in Celluloid Crime of the Century.
• "Marc Sheffler also threatened Peabody when she was struggling with a scene they had together." – followed by a shortened but accurate version of the cliff threat story.

MovieWeb: Why Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left Is Controversial, Explained (Zoe Dumas, 2023)

• "Last House’s realistic look has left a bad taste in many reviewers’ mouths over the 50 years since its premiere. To some, the approach and subject are exploitative and tasteless." – true, and unusual for such an article to mention.
• "[During Mari's rape scene] the film moves into a closeup of their two faces, Mari’s spirit slowly draining from her eyes." – another rare reference, to Sandra's disturbing "blank look".

The Mary Sue: 7 Scream Queens Who Were Traumatized by the Directors Who Made Them Famous (Dan Van Winkle, 2018)

• "On the movie’s home release commentary, actor Marc Sheffler [...] described threatening Peabody in an attempt to improve her acting abilities – followed by an accurate if slightly shortened transcript of the cliff threat.
• "David Hess—who starred as fellow gang member Krug Stillo—was also in on it, threatening to assault Peabody to get a reaction from her." – the wording here is very reminiscent of the Looper piece mentioned above. As there, "assault" is substituted for "rape".

Screen Rant: 10 Behind-The-Scenes Facts About Wes Craven's Last House On The Left (Jake Dee, 2020)

• "Sandra Peabody had a terrible time making the movie, as she was treated too aggressively by method actors David Hess and the others who constantly harassed and demeaned her throughout filming." – this frames outright mistreatment as "method acting", while "and the others" is vague.
• "Both Lincoln and Peabody refuse to speak about the film publicly." – true of Sandra (bar for Szulkin's book), not true of Lincoln who speaks on camera in Celluloid Crime of the Century and on tape in the actors' commentary track.

Mental Floss: 14 Facts About The Last House on the Left (Eric D Sneider, 2016)

• "Craven [...] first envisioned Last House as a hardcore film" – true (stated by Lincoln in Celluloid Crime of the Century)
• "The film was an uncomfortable and exploitative situation for [Sandra] anyway, but it was made worse when the actors who played her attackers stayed in character as cackling psychopaths throughout the shoot." – broadly true, though there's little "cackling".
• ""She was scared to death of us this entire movie," Lincoln said. "We put her through hell," said Craven." – both true (Celluloid Crime of the Century, It's Only a Movie).
• "Today, when actors from the film are interviewed about it, Cassell is usually conspicuously absent." – always absent, not merely "usually".

Horror News Network: Ten Things You Might Not Know About... Last House on the Left! (William Burns, 2015)

• "According to various cast and crew members, actress Sandra Peabody was genuinely terrified throughout most of the shoot, at one point walking off-set" – true.

Summing up

In general, the listicles do not make that many serious factual errors. However, what's most apparent is that the same stories come up again and again. Marc Sheffler's cliff threat, David Hess's threat of rape (often euphemised to "assault") and Hess and others staying in character and frightening Sandra.

It's rare for any listicle to break from the pack and list something truly different. The second WhatCulture piece and that by MovieWeb are notable exceptions, the first noting Sandra's set walk-off and the second mentioning both the film's arguably exploitative nature and Sandra's strikingly disturbing expression in the rape scene close-up.

If you've read this blog throughout, you'll note the complete absence in these ten listicles of, among others, Hess's knife stalking, the same man's music featurette comment, Craven's use of Sandra's fear, the cut forced oral sex scene, Lincoln's trunk joke and Sandra's walk-out from the pre-release screening.

And this is the problem. The same anecdotes get endlessly recycled and flattened, so that we reach the frankly absurd position where a man threatening to throw an actress off a cliff is treated as just one item of trivia among many, sometimes treated as if it were all of a piece with the movie's low budget or Hess acting alongside a live chainsaw.

Once again, the full gravity of what Sandra endured while making Last House on the Left is not made clear. Once again, her suffering is widely framed as "Did you know?" lore rather than a serious ethical failure resulting in harm to a real person. Once again, Sandra's own voice (via Szulkin) is barely present.

Once again, Sandra Peabody deserves better.

Coverage of Sandra's treatment in academia is... also sparse

A few posts ago, I looked at how Sandra Peabody's experience on the Last House on the Left set and its knock-on effects (eg Blu-ray extras) was covered in legacy media. My conclusion was that it wasn't to any great extent. Today, I'm taking a look at how academic writing has covered the same issue.

First, I must be open about the fact that I do not have access to large academic libraries, pre-digital era texts or anything beyond the limited free tier of JSTOR. As such, I'm confined to what's available publicly online. And as my subject line suggests, this is limited to say the least.

One paper that I've already mentioned is Allison Virginia Craig's 2012 PhD dissertation (UK: thesis) for the University of Albany, State University of New York, "Only a girl like this can know what's happened to you" : traumatic subjects in contemporary American narratives. ¹ I noted this when covering David Hess's 2008 admission in Vanity Fair of threatening Sandra with rape. Craig covers this on p37, quoting the full passage:

"Night of the Living Dead "became an instant hit at drive-ins, in large part because of its extreme gore" [...] And it was not just the gore that seemed real; it was also the sexual violence. In Last House on the Left, lead actor David Hess admitted he 'was very mean to the girls [while shooting the film], so when it came to the rape scene, [Sandra Cassell] didn't have to act'"

Craig continues to reproduce the full Vanity Fair rape threat admission from Hess. As I noted in my earlier post, Craig's paper was (and remains at the time of posting) the only Google hit for Hess's words other than the original Vanity Fair article itself and a handful written by me in the last few months. However, she does not linger on Sandra's experience, quickly moving on to other movies and the author's broader argument.

One paper that does dwell a little on Sandra's treatment is another PhD submission, this time by Geneveive Newman of the University of Pittsburgh. In Of Victims and Survivors: Representing Collective and Individual Rape Trauma,² Newman introduces a section on "Sexual Violence in the Media, Off-Screen" on p4 as follows. She notes that, although many women have spoken out since the start of the #MeToo movement:

"Somewhat less has been said and written about violence, sexual and/or otherwise, on set during the production of media texts, enacted against women in particular."

She then names the four women she has chosen as examples, Tippi Hedren, Sandra Peabody, Marilyn Burns and Evan Rachel Wood. Newman first talks about Hedren's abuse by Alfred Hitchcock while making The Birds and raises the question, "whether [her] performance could equally have been achieved with a safe set and better directing."

Immediately afterwards, we get this significant passage: 

"Along these lines, Sandra Peabody’s "performance" in Last House has less to do with acting by her own admission and more to do with the very real fear she experienced on set. It is difficult to track down interviews with Peabody about her experiences, or with David Hess [...] but both actors have expressed regret for having participated in the film at all."

"By her own admission" is a real stretch. Still, this is notably direct for writing about Sandra's experience on the Last House set, though as we saw with the Road to Nowhere podcast, the author doesn't seem to have known that David Szulkin's book is the only place she has spoken on the record about the film.

More problematic is the final part of the extract. Neither Sandra nor Hess have in fact explicitly said they wished they hadn't been in the film – although some sources have claimed they have – and certainly Hess was willing to chat to fans about it during the many conventions he was invited to even well after his rape threat admission.

The closest published approach I know of to confirmation that Sandra regrets participating in the movie is reported by Wes Craven on his DVD commentary track from the 2000s:

"I previously ran into Sandra Peabody when I was up in Oregon for some film conference. And I think she's now teaching acting [...] Kind of acted uncomfortable with the fact that she had ever been part of such a movie." ³

This doesn't give us anything beyond "uncomfortable" and I won't speculate further, but even that matches Sandra's consistent refusal to appear at horror conventions or related events. Indeed, she is the only member of the core personnel of Last House – by which I mean victims, villains, director and producer – never to have been interviewed on camera about the movie.

Returning to Newman's paper, she is forthright:

"Unlike [Alfred] Hitchcock, Wes Craven did not take it upon himself to torment Peabody, but rather allowed her cast-mates to do so."

There then follows a near-full and accurately worded quote of the commentary track version of Marc Sheffler's cliff threat. Newman goes on:

"The article in which this quote appears also includes a note that Hess threatened to assault Peabody in order to produce the fear reaction that the scenes called for. All of this contributes to the fact that, rather than being allowed to perform fear, anxiety, and trauma, Peabody lived those emotions with a camera pointed at her vulnerability."

The article in question is a 2018 Mary Sue piece, "7 Scream Queens Who Were Traumatized by the Directors Who Made Them Famous". This is currently bylined Dan Van Winkle, but is credited to a different name in the footnote and in Newman's citation. This article isn't the worst as listicles go, but it is still a listicle rather than an in-depth study.

Most notably, the Mary Sue entry for Sandra's experience spends most of its word count on Sheffler's cliff threat, with only a single sentence allocated to Hess's explicitly sexualised stories of abuse. The listicle's use of the common, and frankly unhelpful, US euphemism "assault" means that his rape threats don't get any explicit mention, despite Newman's paper's subject.

Newman's reliance on a secondary written source – the Mary Sue article – over a primary non-written one – the actors' DVD commentary track ⁴ – has led the author to misrepresent Hess's attitude to Last House on the Left, and arguably Sandra's too. This raises uncomfortable questions about how much academia has not yet caught up with the multimedia world, where some vital evidence is simply not available in print.

These two papers are pretty much the sum total of what I've managed to find that discuss Sandra Peabody's off-camera treatment. Stephanie Chang's "Uniquely American Symptoms": Cold War American Horror Films as Repositories of White Nationalist Affect is more concerned with racial matters, and does not talk about what happened to Sandra during the shoot, despite (on p107) citing Celluloid Crime of the Century for a brief note on Last House's budget. ⁵

There are, of course, plenty of publications which talk about The Last House on the Left in terms of its impact on the horror genre, on Wes Craven's career, and on the representation of women in rape-revenge narratives. But when it comes to what Sandra Peabody went through in her own right over half a century ago, there is still a large space waiting to be filled.

¹ Craig, Allison Virginia, ""Only a girl like this can know what's happened to you" : traumatic subjects in contemporary American narratives" (2012). Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024). 535. https://doi.org/10.54014/P20D-9BFW 
² Newman, Geneveive, "Of Victims and Survivors: Representing Collective and Individual Rape Trauma" (2023). University of Pittsburgh.
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.
4 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.
⁵ Chang, Stephanie H., "Uniquely American Symptoms": Cold War American Horror Films as Repositories of White Nationalist Affect (2022). University of California, Los Angeles.

A rare supportive voice in media – the Road to Nowhere podcast

As we've seen, coverage of Sandra Peabody's experience when filming The Last House on the Left in legacy media is extremely thin. While there is rather more mention of on-set events in online sources, these often treat Sandra's mistreatment lightly, framing it in terms of "Did you know?" pieces or even as trivia. We will return to look at that in more depth in a future post. Today, though, I want to highlight an exception.

Horror-themed podcasts are common, and inevitably I haven't been able to listen to all those that have covered Last House. The only podcast I have personally heard that covers what happened to Sandra in any depth at all is the four-part Road to Nowhere series, produced by the Anatomy of a Scream Pod Squad in summer 2021. This is available on both Amazon and Apple platforms:

Amazon episodes: one, two, three, four.
Apple episodes: one, two, three, four.

The overall running time well exceeds two hours, and many aspects of Last House on the Left are covered, ranging from Wes Craven's early life to a look at postmodernism in horror. However, just over a minute into episode one there is a sign that Road to Nowhere will be covering Sandra:

"I will be covering the harrowing accounts by crew members of when pantomime violence turned into actual assault."

("Pantomime" here is used in the US English sense. ) Still, only near the end of episode two, "The Swingin’ ‘60s & Horror Nihilism", do we see that Road to Nowhere will break from the pack in covering Last House's making. At 30:16 comes a note by the podcaster that they are themselves a sexual assault survivor, and that transgressive horror can be cathartic, followed by:

"But it would be irresponsible of me to only throw praise at and study the film without exploring how dangerous a set this was for the people working on it, particularly the women. The film, no matter how loud a statement against violence it may be, still ended up inflicting real violence on at least one of its leads."

The host notes that Sandra walked out of a screening of the movie, something confirmed by the actress herself in Szulkin (p117). This we will also return to in a future post. The Road to Nowhere podcaster finishes by noting the difficulty of finding Sandra talking about Last House – though not explicitly that Szulkin is the only source – but adds that "given what she went through, it's not surprising".

Episode three is titled simply "Sandra Peabody", a rare centring of Sandra in horror media coverage. The first half of the 23-minute episode is devoted entirely to her, with Jara drawing on David Szulkin's book. There is the odd error, such as saying that Yvonne Hannemann needed consoling during production when in fact she had said Sandra needed consoling after the rape scene, but mostly things are solid.

Jara offers a biographical introduction to Sandra Peabody, including her early low-budget films and her study under Sanford Meisner, as well as her "fateful" decision to respond to a casting call for what was then called Night of Vengeance. Jara's statement that "from the beginning, the dark energy surrounding the film created an oppressive work environment" is a stretch, but after Jeramie Rain's comment on how Phyllis's death scene put her off eating meat, at 03:53 the podcaster says:

"This blurring of reality and fiction caught Sandra off-guard, despite her American Playhouse training. [...] It is a gross exaggeration, however, to blame her for any of the film's missteps, especially since she was being asked to act her way through real instances of abuse." 

There follows a fairly lengthy extract from Celluloid Crime of the Century, disappointingly uncredited and with its speakers unnamed. It's from the middle part of the documentary which contains a dense series of Sandra-related events, including David Hess's "Can I?" anecdote, Wes Craven and Fred Lincoln talking about Sandra's fear, and the base version of Marc Sheffler's cliff threat.

Jara returns to editorial comment at 06:53, saying:

"Learning about Sandra's on-set abuse makes it all the more heartbreaking to watch her character walk numbingly into the lake [...] where she is then shot." 

We're then told briefly of Sandra's move from acting to children's TV production, followed by her roles as talent agent and acting coach. Jara does however suggests that her role in Voices of Desire, released only slightly after Last House on the Left, "struck a haunting note" during research. We're played a short extract of a scene where Sandra's character is running through an apparently haunted house, to which the podcaster says:

"What is unnerving about the film is just how closely it follows the narrative of a woman attempting to recover from a long period of abuse. It is difficult not to see parallels between her experience on the set of The Last House on the Left and this nightmarish sequence."

After this, Jara makes a striking comment, drawing on personal experience as a survivor:

"The difficulty [...] has always been reconciling this film's significance to me and to a breadth of works in the horror genre with Sandra Peabody's abuse."

This is a profoundly important point, and it's a bit of a shame that it's not explored in any real depth thereafter, even in the near-hour-long fourth episode in which the podcaster talks to writer and musician Ten Backe as the latter gives her own perspective on the film. Still, the segment's closing words are clear and direct:

"My final thoughts on Sandra rest with the hope that she and anyone else who was impacted by the abuse on this set was able to find peace in the 50 years since. No amount of criticism can absolve the production as a site of real-life abuse, however, and I reject the kind of film-making which endangers cast members to a point of inflicting trauma. I do not see putting your cast and crew in harm's way as aspirational in the slightest."

Whether or not her Last House experience "inflict[ed] trauma" on Sandra Peabody is not for me to say, and of course the filming did see multiple people show empathy and kindness to her. Nonetheless, Jara's expressed wish that Sandra has been able to find peace is strong and compassionate, and Road to Nowhere shows a rare and significant concern for her not merely as Mari's actress but as a person.

Coverage of Sandra's treatment in legacy media is... sparse

It's very rare for the treatment of Sandra Peabody, or even her role as Mari in The Last House on the Left, to gain any coverage in what's often now called "legacy media". For example, searching for her name – including both "Sandra Cassell" and "Sandra Cassel" – in Google brings no hits at all on the New York Times website other than an uncomplimentary review of a 1970 play she acted in. ¹

Meanwhile, doing similar for Britain's The Guardian brings up this 2015 piece by Noah Berlatsky, who makes no mention of Sandra's distressing experience but instead solemnly informs us that:

"The whole film is a hyperbolic, moral panic middle-class paranoid fever dream." ²

More recently, we've seen a 50th anniversary piece by Scott Tobias in 2022, which again says nothing about the off-camera events. The ending does however read rather differently to those of us who have learned more about what David Hess in particular said:

"Craven’s seeming artlessness results in a pervasive feeling of helplessness. We might wish it were only a movie, but it’s not so easily shaken." ³

Finally, there's this, by prominent film critic Mark Kermode. This 2024 article is a more general piece about Wes Craven, whom he interviewed many times, written to mark the 40th birthday of A Nightmare on Elm Street. The last couple of paragraphs, however, do cover Last House, with Kermode's own part in its story being mentioned:

"When a British distributor appealed against the 16 seconds of cuts applied by the BBFC in 2002 to the previously banned film, I was asked to submit a report establishing the film’s historical stature – after which the BBFC doubled the length of the cuts." ⁴

There is no suggestion that Kermode knew in 2002 about what David Hess in particular was about to claim on multiple DVD and then Blu-ray extras, nor that he knew about Hess's comments when he wrote that article last year. Even so, these three articles mention concerns over Last House on the Left's production precisely zero times, which is perhaps notable for a newspaper with The Guardian's strong ethical stance.

These two publications' lack of coverage of Sandra's experience rather sets the pattern. While I don't have access to the enormous newspapers.com library and so can only mention what I can see via Google or archive.org, for the most part I've found very little in the mainstream press. I've looked at the USA's Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, Britain's Independent and Daily Telegraph, Australia's Sydney Morning Herald, Canada's Globe and Mail and more besides. Even where Last House is covered at all, the off-camera concerns get nary a mention.

In fact, I've only found two articles that cover Sandra Peabody beyond simply discussing Mari's fictional torment. The first is a Daily Mail piece from 2023 about "video nasties", the name given in the UK to films that were released to video in Britain before the Video Recordings Act 1984 banned the home distribution of movies which had not obtained a BBFC certificate. For many years, Last House could not be legally sold on video for this reason. Mail writer Matt Drake says:

"Sandra Peabody who starred in the movie said she regretted appearing in the movie due to a constantly changing script and suffering abuse from her male co-stars." ⁵

Sandra does indeed tell Szulkin (p50) of feeling unsure about how the script was going to be changed, but she doesn't use the word "abuse" in the entire book. The closest she comes is in her description of Hess's night-time knife stalking, and even then she limits herself to "I was scared". She's never said explicitly that she regretted appearing in the film, either.

As a reminder: if it's not in the Szulkin book, then it's not an official Sandra Peabody quote. In half a century, she has not spoken on the record to anyone else about Last House on the Left.

More recently, and again in the British media, Metro – a free-sheet widely distributed in railway stations, on buses and the like – in March 2025 featured an article by Brooke Ivey Johnson talking about the need for intimacy co-ordinators in Hollywood. The article is very bitty, as is Metro's style, but deep in the body text we get:

"Sandra Peabody in The Last House on the Left endured equally vile treatment, with her co-star David Hess allegedly threatening to actually violate her in a rape scene they were about to film. Many people involved in the film later stated how the actress was scared he might actually hurt her and how all her reactions to the 'simulated' assault were real." ⁶

This isn't bad at all, certainly compared with the slew of often barely coherent Last House listicle entries out there. Hess did claim he'd threatened Sandra with rape, and that she hadn't been sure whether he'd go through with it. "Many people" might be a bit of an exaggeration for the "hurt her" claim, but we certainly hear that Sandra was scared of Hess from both Wes Craven and Fred Lincoln in Celluloid Crime of the Century, and from Marc Sheffler in a 2022 YouTube interview. ⁷

Still, these are isolated pinpricks of light in a "legacy media" landscape that on the whole seems deeply uninterested in what happened to a young actress on an exploitation film set over fifty years ago. Even Wes Craven's name doesn't seem to be enough to bring mainstream attention back to Sandra and what she went through while making this highly influential film.

As I keep on saying: Sandra Peabody deserves better.

¹ "Stage: A Musical by The Rubber Duck". The New York Times (13 December 1970). p84.
² Berlatsky, Noah. "Wes Craven's brutal truths about sex, death and childhood". theguardian.com (1 September 2015).
³ Tobias, Scott. "The Last House on the Left at 50: Wes Craven’s shock horror retains its power to shock". theguardian.com (30 August 2022).
⁴ Kermode, Mark. "Mark Kermode on… director Wes Craven, who made horror ‘a positive force in a world filled with fear". theguardian.com (3 March 2024).
⁵ Drake, Matt. "The original 'Video Nasties': The low budget horror films released using a loophole straight to VHS - so how many have YOU seen?", dailymail.co.uk (6 August 2003).
⁶ Ivey Johnson, Brooke. "Gwyneth Paltrow’s creepy comments about sex scenes are why intimacy coordinators are needed". metro.co.uk (19 March 2025).
⁷ "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 36:30

"Light-hearted and entertaining" – DVD/Blu-ray reviewers and that commentary track

It's been more than twenty years now since the David Hess, Marc Sheffler and Fred Lincoln commentary track for The Last House on the Left was first released on DVD. You know, the one which includes Sheffler telling a particularly harsh version of the cliff threat story and Hess gleefully recounting how he threatened to rape Sandra. That same commentary track exists intact on the Arrow Blu-ray you can still buy off the shelf in HMV.

You might think, therefore, that those physical media reviewers who actually go through the extras – which is by no means all of them, granted – would be sure to have something to say about these anecdotes. A few sentences in passing, at least. Any words at all, really.

You would be wrong.

Here is a representative sample of ten reviews whose writers do more than simply list the track as one of the included extras.

DVD Talk, 2009: This reviewer calls it "quite a compelling track" with "plenty of funny and interesting anecdotes and insights". The piece adds that "these grizzled veterans may not be the classiest guys walking--shortly after the rape sequence, Sheffler notes (somewhat tangentially) that the film 'got me laid a lot.'"

Blu-ray.com, 2011: Comparing it to the Craven/Cunningham track, the reviewer states simply that the actors' one is "a looser, more candid roundtable".

Rock! Shock! Pop! Forums, 2018: Another restrained comment here, simply that it's "an interesting commentary that really does give a pretty decent look at the picture's production from the point of the three core villains".

Horror Cult Films, 2018: In this review we're informed that the track is "very lively, in fact quite raucous and even foul mouthed". This is followed by "Unfortunately Hess [sic] becomes rather dislikable when he thinks it’s funny that he held Grantham [sic] over a cliff and threatened to let her go unless she played a scene properly", which doesn't give enormous confidence that the reviewer was listening particularly hard. They end with "Overall great fun though."

HK and Cult Film News, 2009: This is a review from 2009, with comments from 2012, reposted in 2025. It's significant, though, for saying this:

The only thing I find hard to watch--the rape scene--comes not from what's happening in the story but from what went on during the filming of it. As David Hess relates during the commentary, he had the already nervous Sandra Cassel so distraught and fearful of him that much of her humiliation and distress during the scene are real. Marc Sheffler also tells of actually grabbing her and threatening to push her over a precipice if she didn't stop fouling up take after take of their main scene together. For me, these two accounts are the creepiest thing about the movie.

This reviewer still shies away from laying out exactly what they mean with the Hess point, but at least they reference it at all. Bizarrely, though, this very same review later informs us that "[f]ans of the film will no doubt enjoy the yakky, argumentative, and funny commentary track featuring Hess, Lincoln, and Sheffler."

High-Def Digest, 2011 – The actors' commentary is apparently an "amusing conversation" where "the men clearly enjoy each other's company" and "overall, the comments and discussion are light-hearted and entertaining".

Kendall Lacey's Webworld, 2018 – Here we read the commentary "is a joy", and the "guys get on great and their track is fantastic."

The Mercenary Journal, 2022 – This one isn't a conventional disc review, more an essay about commentary tracks in general. Still, we get the Last House actors' track listed first in the author's list of favourites: "They joke, poke fun at each other and banter as they debate the merits of the film. At times you get the impression their personalities in real life weren’t all that different from the characters they played in that film. It’s lots of fun."  

DVDCompare, 2011 – This reviewer states that compared with the Craven/Cunningham effort, the Hess/Sheffler/Lincoln affair "is the party track, with each of the guys telling story after story, often in an attempt to one-up each other." And "Even if you've heard Hess tell the same stories a hundred times, they never get old."

Given what Hess actually says on the track, I seriously dispute that final point. More importantly, I can think of at least one person they got old for after the very first experience. Because she was there, on that Connecticut set, being subjected to David Hess's behaviour in person.

In the final analysis, I've found ten reviewers, spanning a period of years, who've written enough about the Hess/Sheffler/Lincoln commentary track that they've presumably actually listened to it – meaning listened, not just skipped through the first ten minutes. And here's the scorecard:

• Actually engaging with the two most unpleasant anecdotes: 1
• Mentioning one of them, albeit with significant errors: 1 
• Ignoring both the stories completely: 8

This is not the greatest final tally in the universe, is it, horror media reviewers? Even the two reviews that do make it out of the "ignore the cliff and rape threats altogether" category have problems: HK and Cult Film News adds a supplementary sentence that reads like it came from a completely different reviewer, while Horror Cult Films makes a ridiculously basic error with actors' names.

The HK reviewer comes the closest to naming what matters, and it's notable that the review originated in 2009 – a time when Hess was still being invited to guest at conventions. Even that piece, though, while it describes Sheffler's cliff threat openly, still reduces the severe abuse Hess wallows in inflicting on Sandra to her being "distraught and fearful" resulting in "humiliation and distress". True, but incomplete.

In terms of saying out loud, in clear language, that the commentary track contains David Hess recounting in explicit terms a threat of sexual violence made against Sandra Peabody on the set of Last House on the Left, the number of the ten reviewers who make it that far is... zero.