The faces of courage

We know that Sandra Peabody was frightened, especially of David Hess, during her time filming The Last House on the Left. That is attested by multiple people, including Wes Craven, Marc Sheffler, Fred Lincoln and Hess himself. But her being frightened does not mean she was not courageous. Indeed, Mark Twain once wrote:

"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear"¹

Sandra showed exactly these qualities while working. She was not as naive as she is sometimes painted; she signed up for a movie she knew at the time would contain significant violence, as she acknowledges on p41 of Szulkin:

"[B]y the time I came in, they had decided to do it as just a violent film, without all the sex [...] they promised that all of that [porn] was totally out... and they did take it out."

So, Sandra knew what she was getting into in that sense. She knew the role of Mari would be challenging, thanks to the nature of the part; that much was clear even allowing for the looseness of the script. That, of course, is very different to knowing that Hess would be, as Marc Sheffler later stated, "brutal with her" during filming of the rape scene to the extent of terrifying her.

Yet despite this mistreatment, and her fear being – as Sheffler also said – visible on screen in the final film, she remained to complete her role. Not only that, but her performance ensured that Mari is often today seen as the emotional centrepiece of the film. Indeed, her tragic story is often represented on Last House material such as the front cover of my Metrodome DVD set.

Sandra's courage showed itself in another way, too. Quite early in the Connecticut portion of the shoot – the exact time is difficult to pinpoint – she walked off set. It's often missed today how radical an act of boundary-setting that was for a young actress on a 1970s exploitation movie. Sandra was potentially risking her career rather than stay, and she only returned to the set once Fred Lincoln had reassured her that nobody would hurt her.

Having completed her role, Sandra once again put her principles ahead of easy compliance when she walked out of a pre-release screening of Last House. This was of course highly visible and brought comment from others, with Marshall Anker recalling open surprise as he told Szulkin (p117) about the screening, recalling that he had wondered, "Didn't she know what she did?"

Fast forward a few years and we see Last House on the Left begin to acquire a reputation as a cult classic. In the UK, where the film had been denied a certificate by the BBFC in 1974, it was released on home video in the early 1980s until being banned as a "video nasty" under the 1984 Video Recordings Act. By the time the film was legally released on DVD almost two decades later, it had become eagerly anticipated among fans.

The 2000s also saw a boom in horror conventions and similar events. As a major star in what was by then seen as a highly significant horror film both in terms of its influence on the genre and in terms of Wes Craven's development as a director, Sandra would have been a highly desirable guest at such events. Despite the fame and appearance fees on offer, she has consistently declined all such invitations – maintaining the courage of her convictions.

After leaving acting a few years after Last House, Sandra showed another form of courage – moral courage – in the way she approached her career. Instead of trading on her notoriety, she refused to publicly recognise the work that had exploited and harmed her. Instead, she threw herself into creating safe, supportive spaces both in children's TV shows like the Emmy-winning Popcorn and in her still-ongoing decades of work as a talent agent and acting coach.

Sandra could have gained a good deal of fame and money from being "the girl who was Mari" over the last half-century. Instead, she has given only one interview – to Szulkin – and has never appeared to talk about Last House on the Left on camera. Her principles and resilience appear repeatedly in her work, whether in staying to finish Mari's role despite fear and mistreatment or in choosing to work in underfunded children's TV.

In short, courage runs through Sandra Peabody's professional life. She deserves to be recognised and honoured for that.

¹Twain, Mark. The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins, 1894. Epigraph to ch. 12.

"Horrified and upset" – Sandra's screening walk-out

The incident when Sandra Peabody walked off the set of The Last House on the Left has already been covered here What's less often mentioned – although the Road to Nowhere podcast did – is Sandra's walk-out from a cast, crew and backers screening of the film before its August 1972 public release.

In March of that year, such a screening was held in Manhattan, and Szulkin informs us (p117) that Sandra attended with her mother. It's not stated what form the film was in at the time, but it seems likely that it was almost complete and included sequences that are no longer found in modern cuts, such as the extended version of Phyllis's disembowelment.

The screening did not go well for Sandra, who was quite open to Szulkin about her unhappiness with the film at that time:

"I was horrified and upset. It was not at all what I thought it would be. I think the most upsetting scene for me was the one in the woods... but I don't think I ever saw the whole thing. When I went and viewed it, I walked out."

"The one in the woods" is not further described, but we also know from Szulkin (p73) that Sandra found one of the woods-set sections, which before cuts included forced oral sex on Mari by Phyllis and then Sadie, "very upsetting" to film and cried a lot while making it. Wes Craven acknowledged that Sandra was "scared shitless here". She says she didn't "know how it came off, probably horribly" – which suggests she'd never seen that sequence in its final form.

Marshall Anker, who played the incompetent sheriff, was also at the same screening and was sitting next to Sandra. His comment on the occasion (p117) is somewhat unsympathetic:

"She was very upset by what she was seeing [...] Sandra was carrying on, 'Oh my God! Oh, it's so horrible! All that blood!' I thought to myself, 'Doesn't she know what she did? What did she think this movie was going to be, a comedy?'"

This is perhaps a little unfair, and not only because the parts Anker appeared in were largely comedic. Sound man Jim Hubbard points out (Szulkin, pp190–91) that people involved in shooting a film can be concentrating on what they have to do in the moment, and that it's "therefore sometimes shocking" when they see the final results after editing. Hubbard says:

"[T]his was definitely the case with Last House. It was so much more gruesome and appalling than my impressions of its making that I was amazed."

Other Last House personnel have considerably more positive memories of the screening. Sean Cunningham says, "We had a great time" – which rather ignores the fact that Sandra clearly did not – while David Hess states that he went to all of the pre-release screenings in spring and summer 1972 and "the reactions were amazing!"

When she was interviewed in the 1990s for Szulkin's book, Sandra told him (p189) that:

"I have not seen this film in a long time, so to recollect it is hard."

Indeed, already by the mid-1980s newspapers covering her work on Popcorn were omitting her film acting career from her career summary altogether. Probably few people then even knew of the existence of Voices of Desire or Teenage Hitchhikers, but by that time The Last House on the Left had already acquired a cult following. It seems likely that Sandra herself left it out of the career highlights she provided for publication.

To this day, in her biography on the website of the institution where she still coaches, Sandra Peabody does not mention the film that "horrified and upset" her as soon as she saw it on screen. For a major star of a movie to make negative feelings known at a private screening like this really gets noticed, as Anker's comment shows. Sandra took the courageous option and walked out rather than endure more.

"This outstanding program" – Sandra's award-winning Popcorn

The first ever Popcorn, uploaded to the official KATU News YouTube channel in 2022

I posted recently about Sandra Peabody's early career after acting, including her first teaching post and her first major award in children's TV production. Today I'm going to cover perhaps her most remarkable creation in that respect: Popcorn. You can watch the debut episode from 1985 above, complete with "computer" genius Kernel Popcorn and the iconic theme tune.

Popcorn was aimed at children between around six and ten years old. It ran on Portland, Oregon-based ABC affiliate station KATU between 1985 and 1992 and began as a one-off special before being expanded to a full-fledged series. Especially originally, Sandra fulfilled multiple roles: for the launch special embedded above, she was credited as overall producer; features writer, producer, director and co-editor; and studio production producer and writer!

Even that understates the extent of Sandra's dedication to the show, however. She spent a lot of time combing local schools for ideas, as well as training children to appear on camera – one of Popcorn's key features was that it was presented by kids, not by adults talking down to them.¹ Sandra found it hard to winnow the 50 or so applicants down to four, telling The Oregonian that:

"There's still a lot of the kid in me. [...] They were all wonderful in their own way."²

The final selection was based on personality, naturalness on camera, ability to read a TelePrompTer (Autocue) and ability to ask questions. This last point was crucial, as Popcorn both sent its young presenters out on location and invited guests to the studio, including multiple Olympic champion speed skater Eric Heiden.³ Considering the show aired at 7:30 am on a Sunday, this was quite some coup.

Unsurprisingly for public service television, money was always very tight. The show's annual budget was just $25,000, around a tenth that of a single episode of a successful-but-not-stellar series. Popcorn's props budget was almost non-existent, a mere ten dollars per show. Undeterred, and despite her other duties, Sandra visited local garage sales and flea markets to obtain items to help enhance the show.⁴

This brought her a significant honour – the Ollie Award presented by the American Children Television Festival. Sandra asked for a better time slot for Popcorn, but was told that ABC would not permit preemption of its network programming. So she turned back to what she did best: encouraging kids to participate. More than 400 letters arrived asking to help with Popcorn, and so she set up auditions.

This being Sandra Peabody, she didn't do things by halves. She set up a "Spotlight on Kids" section, which accepted everything from jokes to music to science experiments, and asked for two-minute audition tapes. Over 300 arrived. The solution was simple: edit each tape down to 30 seconds because, in Sandra's words:

"We want to make them look the best they can look."⁵

Sandra told The Oregonian that, in time, she intended to work her way through all 300 of the tapes. Because of course she did. The segment premiered in 1987, by which time the show had acquired a partial sponsor: a popcorn maker!

Although clearly created as a labour of love, Popcorn is the show that won Sandra her greatest professional recognition. As well as the aforementioned Ollie, it picked up three significant accolades including her Emmy:

• 1987: National Association of Broadcasters Award, in the "Service to Children" category.
• 1988: NAPTE Iris Award, in the "Excellence in Local Broadcasting" category.
• 1992: Northwest Emmy Award in the "Outstanding Public Service Announcement or In-House Campaign" category.

Popcorn was mentioned more than once in submissions to the US House's deliberations on the state of children's TV. In April 1989, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) publication, Service to Children: Television Idea Book was attached to the organisation's submission to a Telecommunications and Finance Subcommittee hearing. Its listing about the show noted that:

"Themes of personal effort and self-assurance permeated the program. Popcorn gives kids the chance to 'do anything they do the best'."⁶

In March 1993, the show was mentioned to the same House subcommittee in a statement by Paul LaCamera on behalf of the NAB. The statement referred to Popcorn:

"This outstanding program [...] informs and educates children in a creative way [and] has tackled some tough issues, including the Persian Gulf War."⁷

By the time of LaCamera's statement, Popcorn was no longer on the air. However, its legacy extended well beyond its few years on Portland's screens. One of the original four "Popcorn reporters", Aaron Cooley, grew up to become a professional writer in his own right. He created the ten-episode Showtime series The First Lady, a 2022 drama which explored the pressures and experiences of Betty Ford, Eleanor Roosevelt and Michelle Obama.⁸

Four decades after she had created Popcorn, the love and care for young people that Sandra Peabody poured into the show she created was still reverberating. Popcorn may be gone, but its influence lives on.

¹ Christensen, Mike. "Broadcasters Fight Requirements for Children's TV", The Atlanta Journal and Constitution (16 November 1989). p24.
² McDermott, Judy. "Popcorn", The Oregonian (16 December 1985). p29.
³ News article, The Oregonian (15 December 1985). p41.
⁴ Buttler, Ruth. "Experts really care what goes into kids' TV", The Grand Rapids Press (1 November 1987). p124.
⁵ "Letters inspire talent segment", The Oregonian (27 March 1987). p48.
⁶ "Children's Television." Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, House of Representatives, One Hundred First Congress, First Session, on H.R. 1677 ... April 6, 1989. p78.
⁷ "Children's Television." Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, House of Representatives, One Hundred Third Congress, First Session, March 10, 1993. p50.
⁸ Turnquist, Kristi. "Portland native Aaron Cooley on Showtime’s ‘The First Lady,’ and TV’s true stories trend", oregonlive.com (12 April 2022).

What Sandra did next – her early post-acting career

After The Last House on the Left and several further exploitation films, Sandra Peabody's final screen acting role was as Bird in 1974's Teenage Hitchhikers, as we've already seen. She continued to act on stage for at least a short time after that, as she is listed as having appeared in Tunnel of Love at the Oregon Ridge Dinner Theater; this play ran from December 1977 to January 1978.¹

Sandra remained in theatre for a while, starting out on what would become a major part of her life: supporting young people in the arts. She was hired by the highly prestigious American Academy of Dramatic Arts, teaching theatre techniques to children.² In 1982, now working for Cablesystems Pacific, Sandra created Portland Tonight. This was a late-night talk show based loosely on Johny Carson's hit The Tonight Show, but with a strong local element.³

Also in 1982, Sandra devised Get Movin' ... with Kids, a children's variety show. She certainly put in the hours with this programme, acting as writer, director and producer. Get Movin' ran for 26 episodes and won Sandra her first major accolade, the 1983 CableACE Award presented by the National Cable Television Association for Best Children's Series. It would not be her last.

Sandra created Get Movin' at a time when funding for kids' TV was on the wane. She was determined that children's own ideas would play a prominent part, placing an ad in the Portland Children's Museum's newspaper – playfully called Boing! – asking to hear from them about their interests. On top of this, she obtained the use of the cable company's local studio to hold auditions for local talent.⁴

Her next show would be the one that would bring Sandra her greatest success: Popcorn. That is a fascinating story which deserves – and will get – a post of its own in the future. But by the 1980s Sandra Peabody had moved decisively onto a different career path, overcoming both her sad experience on Last House and the more expected problems of kids' TV finances to begin a lifelong commitment to safely supporting young performers.

¹ "Wednesday at Oregon Ridge", The Baltimore Sun (4 December 1977), p146.
² "Popcorn", The Oregonian (15 December 1985), p29.
³ News article, The Oregon Journal (21 January 1982), p15.
⁴"Children's talent captured on film for TV showing", The Oregonian (21 December 1982), p26.

Fred Lincoln and Sandra's set walk-off

We've so far met two of the three male members of Krug's gang, David Hess and Marc Sheffler. The third was Fred Lincoln. He was different from the others for two reasons. One, he had significant film acting experience, much of it in the New York adult movie scene – although Szulkin (p37) tells us that he had also worked as a stunt man on The French Connection (1971).

And two, he already knew Sandra Peabody. He notes in Celluloid Crime of the Century that "she was somebody that I knew from legitimate movies too. We had done things together". In the DVD Region 1 documentary It's Only a Movie: The Making of Last House on the Left, he is even clearer:

We had the same agent. We met. We'd gone on auditions together for different parts, different jobs. I had gotten her work.

My own searching hasn't turned up a film on which both actors worked, but not everything in that era would have been as clearly recorded as it is today. Besides, Lincoln doesn't actually say they'd both won the auditions for any one film.

On the DVD commentary track Lincoln shares with Hess and Sheffler,¹ he says he'd known her "for eight years". Since that timescale would make Sandra a fifteen-year-old high-school student, two years before her known movie debut in Misfit (1965), that seems a likely misremembering. Indeed, in the It's Only a Movie documentary Lincoln offers the much more reasonable "maybe three, four years".

One thing he did not misremember, however, was that early in the filming process Sandra left the set temporarily. In Szulkin (p50) Lincoln explicitly ties this action to her fear:

[The film] was really a fun thing... except, for some reason, Sandra was afraid. Sometimes, she was scared to death... in fact, she left the production after one or two days, and we had to talk her into coming back!

Szulkin immediately asks Sandra herself if she was upset during the shoot. Upset and fear are not quite the same thing, and Sandra does not touch on her walk-off, but she does say:

I was upset because I'm an emotional person, and I reacted to what was going on as if it were real. [...] I ended up doing a horrible job in the film. I was very upset, and I felt like I should have channeled that, but I couldn't... I was a young actress and I was still learning to balance any emotions I had from outside of the film into my scene work.

Sandra does not expand on what those emotions "outside the film" might have been, but her self-assessment as having done "a horrible job" is not shared by the majority of Last House fans. Indeed, her performance as Mari is often considered the emotional heart of the movie.

Lincoln again notes the earliness of Sandra's walk-off in Celluloid Crime of the Century, where he says it was "the night before shooting". Meanwhile, Marc Sheffler corroborates Lincoln's story in a 2018 interview.² He says:

I recall she walked out at one point, she she left the set, she ran away and was hitchhiking back to New York. And Freddie [Lincoln] knew her so I think Sean [Cunningham] and Wes [Craven] sent Freddie to go find her.

The "hitchhiking" detail is also mentioned by Sheffler in the 2022 interview with Hollywood Wade that I mentioned in my post about David Hess's night-time knife stalking. In that interview Sheffler goes on to call Sandra a "sweet, kind, harmless girl" and say he could "see very clearly" how Hess remaining in character 24/7 would "scare the shit out of her".³

Sandra's walk-off has been on the public record for many years, at least since Szulkin published Wes Craven's Last House on the Left a quarter of a century ago. It's generally been framed as, to put it bluntly, an overwhelmed girl running away from material she couldn't deal with. I'm not so sure.

For a start, we now know that it wasn't only the on-screen events of Last House that were frightening. Sheffler tells us that David Hess was in character round the clock and severely scared Sandra. Sheffler knew that Hess scared her at the time, just as Craven knew. What he didn't know, of course, was a far more serious reason for Sandra's fear: that Hess was also the man who stalked her with a knife and threatened to rape her.

Sheffler also provides another important note: Sandra was hitchhiking "back to New York" – in other words, she didn't walk off set in the urban settings where the early parts of the movie are set, but in the Connecticut woods. That's a bigger deal. And in fact, it's an even bigger deal than it at first appears.

1970s exploitation was a small world. Most of its practitioners knew each other and word got around. Even regular society was pervaded by misogyny – at the time Last House on the Left appeared, no US state criminalised marital rape. The same was true of acting: women who asserted boundaries were often branded "difficult", replaced by other, more malleable performers, and found it hard to get future exploitation acting gigs. While the Last House production team was not sexist in this way, as a young actress Sandra Peabody would hope to be working for others in the future, not all of whom would share the relatively liberal outlook of Craven and Cunningham.

She wasn't as new to low-budget acting as is often made out, either. Sandra herself says (Szulkin, p197) that after her debut in Misfit, she "started getting roles in low-budget drive-in movies that were being shot in Florida". One of these was the mystery thriller The Horse Killer (1970), also now lost. Szulkin notes that after Last House she went on to act in a movie filmed in New York then called The Seven Deadly Sins but which then changed title to something Sandra couldn't remember; this became Massage Parlor Murders! Not mentioned in Szulkin, but released in the same year as Last House on the Left, was the erotic horror film Voices of Desire.

Put all that together and the walk-off picture becomes considerably more nuanced. While her fear doubtless played a part, Sandra was also taking a rather radical step: asserting her boundaries. This show of agency doesn't surprise us today, but for a young and still relatively inexperienced actress in exploitation, that was not a low-risk manoeuvre. She could have ended up in that "difficult" box and struggled to find work in the future. Sandra Peabody was potentially risking her career rather than endure.

Lincoln, whom she knew already, persuaded her back with lengthy ("I talked to her and talked to her") and quiet reassurance ("It’s only a movie, nobody’s going to hurt you") as he remembers telling her in Celluloid Crime of the Century. Lincoln was sadly wrong about the second part of that. But even if Sandra's walk-off was temporary, the fact that it happened at all in that era and genre is remarkable.

Sandra stood up for herself when it would have been easier to say nothing – another example of the moral courage that would serve her so well in later life. 

¹ Commentary track featuring actors David Hess, Marc Sheffler and Fred Lincoln, available on multiple DVD and Blu-ray releases of The Last House on the Left. 
² "Marc Sheffler of Wes Craven's Last House on the Left interview". withoutyourhead, 4 Apr 2018. Timestamp 28:55
³ "Marc Sheffler sits down w/ Hollywood Wade to discuss the infamous Horror film Last house on the Left", Hollywood Wade | Crime & Entertainment, 4 Sep 2022. Timestamp 35:43

"So much compassion for everything in the world" – Sandra beyond Last House

Although this blog is intended primarily to bring together evidence regarding Sandra Peabody's treatment during the production of The Last House on the Left, I very much also want to show a side of Sandra that is often overlooked: what she did after leaving acting. Her final on-screen role was as Bird in Teenage Hitchhikers, which hit drive-ins in 1974. I haven't seen it, but I've always been glad that her farewell to exploitation (and indeed to film acting) was in a silly comedy where she wasn't being brutalised on-screen or off.

After that, she made a move into the production side of things, with a number of television shows to her name. Perhaps most notably, she was executive producer (and a lot more besides) on the Oregon-based children's show Popcorn, which ran from 1985 to 1992 and won Peabody an Emmy, among other awards. I'll be devoting an entire post to that one at some point, as it is a remarkable story and one full of Sandra's deeply admirable devotion of her professional life to creating exactly the safe, supportive spaces she had been denied as a young actor.

For the last quarter-century, Sandra has worked as a talent agent and acting coach, showing a strong interest in working with young people. She has drawn on the Meisner technique (behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances) she learned in her youth from Sanford Meisner himself, and is still giving classes today, even though now into her late seventies. I have chosen not to identify the institution at which she now works; although she does not conceal her involvement, nor does she make a show of publicising it, so I would like to allow her to maintain the peace which she seems to have found in that role.

Some of Peabody's pupils have gone on to professional acting careers. One of these is Alicia Lagano, who among her many roles has appeared as Cristina Castelli in All About Us and Selena in The Client List. Sandra had this to say in 2012 when asked by The Oregonian for her memories of Lagano's early promise:

"She had so much compassion for everything in the world. She was open and affected by everything, which is a great element for an actor to have, that kind of feeling and ability to relate to things and be so open at such a young age. She was willing to try everything, to throw herself on her face. Some people worry about their image and what they look like and what people will think of them. She was just so open and real."

The appreciation was mutual, with Lagano calling Peabody "a great teacher" and "so honest". But look at Sandra's quote there. She praises Lagano first of all for her compassion. Then she goes on to note her openness and realness, and her willingness to be vulnerable. I find that profoundly moving: here we have a woman who was treated by David Hess with the very opposite of compassion, who had her vulnerability and openness exploited for abuse. She is nevertheless encouraging those things safely in her own student.

Moral courage is defined as having the strength to stand up for one's ethical beliefs regardless of adversity. That is exactly what Sandra Peabody displays here. As we will see, it is not the only example of this throughout her life.