"But aren't you just judging the 1970s by 2020s standards?"

A point that sometimes comes up to writing today about events that happened some decades in the past is that it's not fair to judge – in the case of the Last House on the Left shoot – 1971 by the standards of 2025. On the face of it, that sounds like a reasonable objection, but in fact things are rather more nuanced than the common "it was another time" line might suggest.

There are certainly aspects of 1970s film-making that have changed a lot since then but which it would be unreasonable to criticise a shoot for. An obvious example is the absence of intimacy coordinators, which were unknown in cinema back then. And, indeed, for a good deal longer: the remake of Last House in 2009 did not use them, although by the standards of the day the film was made ethically and Sara Paxton (who played Mari) was treated well.

On the other hand, some things can still be criticised even at over half a century's distance. David Hess's admitted threat of rape to Sandra Peabody was not acceptable in the 1970s any more than it is today. There was never a time when threatening sexual violence was a legitimate acting technique, method or otherwise. What Hess did, or at least claims he did, was wrong in 1971 just as much as it would be in 2025.

Film-making in what might be called the "long 1970s" – between the collapse of the Hays Code in 1968 and the Twilight Zone tragedy in 1982 – was often rough-edged, all the more so in low-budget exploitation cinema. Many things that happened then would not be tolerated now, ranging from pressures on actresses for increased nudity to corner-cutting on stunt safety. But there were still lines beyond which almost no production went.

The main difference today is that any actor threatening sexual violence in the way Hess claims to have done would face immediate and very strong consequences. They would be removed from the set, production would halt, the authorities might well be informed – and, crucially, the victim of the abuse would receive professional care and protection, with their safety treated as a higher priority than completing the film.

Another response to the question in the title is that Hess did not tell his various stories in the 1970s. All of those I have covered here, ranging from the "Krug Conquers England" monologue to the Terror Trap interview, and including both the Vanity Fair and commentary track admissions of threatening Sandra with rape, as well as David Szulkin's book were recorded and published between the late 1990s and 2011.

Although the first decade or so of the 21st century had not yet seen the level of understanding of ethical issues in film-making that #MeToo and similar movements brought from the mid-2010s onwards, the old "anything for the shot" approach of some 1970s film-makers was already being seen as unacceptable. The understanding that a film set was a workplace, and that consent and safety mattered there as much as in any other job, had developed considerably since the exploitation era.

So the answer to the question is that yes, to some extent I am judging 1971's Last House on the Left set by today's standards – but so do all of us. Eugenics was widely considered respectable in the 1930s, yet almost everybody condemns it as dangerous pseudoscience today. Besides, as I noted above, when it comes to actively threatening a co-star with sexual violence, as Hess says he did, no amount of historical context can make that acceptable.

"You probably won't die, but you might get cracked up" – 2018 and 2022 versions of Marc Sheffler's cliff threat

We've already covered several versions of the story Last House on the Left star Marc Sheffler has told on multiple occasions, in which he took Sandra Peabody, held her over a cliff or ledge, and threatened to drop or throw her over as a way of getting her to produce the level of anxiety required for the scene in which Mari tries to get Junior to release her.

We've looked at the Celluloid Crime of the Century version, the harsher commentary track version and the brief allusion to the incident in Szulkin (pp75–76) and Sheffler's 2020 statement on what happened. Today, we'll consider two further tellings by Sheffler, one from a 2018 interview for Without Your Head, and one from a 2022 interview with Hollywood Wade. ¹ ²

Looking at the earlier interview first, the host says he's been asked by someone to ask Sheffler whether the cliff story is true. Sheffler immediately answers, "Yes, that is true," and the host laughs. Sheffler then explains the setup of the scene and continues:

"Wes shoots my single, which is me alone in the frame [...] and sets up to do the reverse, which is her [Sandra] and she's not rising to the level of tension [...] she's not pushing me hard enough, she's not scared."

He then continues with the story we've heard before, about him getting the idea to tell Wes Craven to watch for a signal and to start filming when he gets it. Sheffler states once again that he grabbed her and put her "[a] little over the cliff" and then:

"And she got scared, you know, anybody would be scared at that."

If Sheffler believes anybody would be scared at that, it implies that this wasn't a minor drop, and indeed he gives an estimate of the distance in the next part of the quote:

"If you don't do this then I'm [...] gonna just push you. I'm crazy, I'm on drugs, I'm crazy, I'm gonna push you. And, um, you know, it's not that far, it's 10, 15 feet, 20 feet, you probably won't die, but you might get cracked up."

The drug reference is odd; perhaps it was intended as a reference to Junior's heroin addiction. As we've previously seen, a fall from even the lowest figure given – ten feet – is sufficient to activate trauma protocols, ³ and 15–20 feet can easily lead to broken bones. "You probably won't die" is not reassuring wording, either.

At this point, the host laughs and Sheffler continues, presenting his version of what Sandra said in response to his threat:

"She's, 'No no please don't no no please no no please don't come on you're cr- don't don't.'"

Those are not the words of a woman who is slightly nervous; they are those of a woman who is genuinely fearful for her safety. Sheffler then finishes by saying what we've heard before: that he picks her up and gives Craven the signal, then the director starts the take that is in the film. The host laughs – again – and says, "It all worked out for the best, right?" which feels somewhat insensitive.

The 2022 Hollywood Wade interview is a little different in tone. At 35:43, Sheffler talks about Sandra's walk-off and her fear of David Hess. Notably, he calls Sandra "sweet", "nice", "kind [and] harmless" which is considerably more sympathetic and less grumpy than his "She was a pain in the ass" on the actors' DVD commentary track.

Then, at 37:04, the host brings up the cliff threat story, albeit slightly indirectly, to which Sheffler responds:

"Yeah, that's got all blown out of proportion."

It might be asked whether the person who had earlier claimed he'd told Sandra she'd be "fucking mangled" might just perhaps have been doing some of that "blow[ing] out of proportion" himself, but still. The host says he figured, but would like Sheffler's take.

Sheffler says, as he did in the 2020 statement, that it was late and the light was going. Again he estimates the height as:

"I dunno 10 feet, something, 20 feet, not high enough that anyone could get really hurt if they fell, but it looked like that, right, and it was all like sand on the bottom."

Once again: that is high enough to get "really hurt", and while sand might have a slight cushioning effect it certainly wouldn't make the drop harmless. Anyway, Sheffler goes through the part about telling Craven about his signal, then says:

"So I looked at her [Sandra] and I said, 'Look, I could push you over here' or something along those lines. And she got scared, right, and she said, 'You wouldn't do that' and I said, 'Well, I might, if you don't get this right. We gotta get going.'"

This is a milder version than 2017's above, and much milder than the commentary track version. "You wouldn't do that" is also a very different reported response from the panicky-sounding one from the interview five years earlier.

Sheffler goes through the usual comment about how Sandra was worked up, how he gave Craven the signal, and how the scene in the film is "that disturbing 'cause that's when she's the most upset". However, he adds an extra portion that wasn't in the earlier interview:

"[T]hrough no fault of her own, it was just experience—"

It's worth noting here that Sheffler himself was only in his early twenties at the time. He goes on:

"—she wasn't getting upset, it wasn't reading real, right? [...] So in a safe manner, without really meaning her any actual harm... I need to say that these days, because I didn't—it's not me, but I just wanna make that very clear, I helped another actor achieve a much better performance."

There's never been any serious suggestion that Sheffler actually intended to hurt Sandra. But lack of malice alone does not make an action right. Certainly today, whether such an action is unethical is generally defined by what the victim credibly believes, not simply the private intentions of the person making the threat.

The host jokes, rather insensitively, "She just needed a little push", then Sheffler closes by acknowledging that:

"I think I've said that the most PC I've ever said that."

Certainly in the five versions of this particular Last House anecdote I've come across (six if you count the brief allusion in Szulkin) this 2022 version is the one where Sheffler spends the most time reassuring his audience that Sandra was not in real danger, and telling them that he was doing it to help her acting.

The core of the story – consistent across two decades – always includes some form of threat and Sandra being frightened by it. The story also always features some justification or explanation from Sheffler for what he did, based around the pressure of the clock and/or the need for Sandra to act convincingly scared and anxious for the scene.

What I have so far not found is any public expression of regret or apology to Sandra for how he scared her. Given the number of times Marc Sheffler has told this story, and given his willingness in more recent years to call Sandra "sweet" and "kind", that absence of something beyond mere acknowledgement of her fear is particularly disappointing.

Here, too, Sandra Peabody deserves better. 

¹ "Marc Sheffler of Wes Craven's Last House on the Left interview". withoutyourhead, 4 Apr 2018. Timestamp 24:34
² "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 37:04
³ Nau C, Leiblein M, Verboket RD, Hörauf JA, Sturm R, Marzi I, Störmann P. Falls from Great Heights: Risk to Sustain Severe Thoracic and Pelvic Injuries Increases with Height of the Fall. J Clin Med. 2021 May 25;10(11):2307. doi: 10.3390/jcm10112307. PMID: 34070640; PMCID: PMC8199183.

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.

Filmed, cut, exploited – the forced oral sex scene

Cropped screenshot showing clapperboard during a cut sequence described below

In my last post, I talked about Sandra Peabody walking out of a pre-release screening of The Last House on the Left. I included her quote in which she said that she thought "the most upsetting scene for [her] was the one in the woods" and noted that Sandra had told Szulkin (p73) that she had found the sequence where Mari and Phyllis are forced to strip and perform sex acts on each other distressing to film.

Today, we'll look at that section of Last House in more detail. On p73, after having introduced the sequence, Szulkin gives us some unusually strong editorial text:

"This stark and ugly sequence is arguably the most disturbing portion of the entire movie. The sickos' snickering commentary [...] was all unscripted. The obviously improvised dialogue, combined with shaky, documentary-like camerawork and a lack of music throughout most of the scene, makes this sequence especially creepy and all too real."

By the time of this scene Mari and Phyllis's bonds have been removed, but their gags still hang loosely around their necks, a disturbing reminder of their captivity. As I said last time, Wes Craven acknowledged on his commentary track that Sandra "was scared shitless" while making this part of the movie. ¹

What isn't mentioned in that commentary is how far the filming of this sequence exceeded what made it to Last House's final cut, something which might help explain why Sandra was so upset. Szulkin hints at it when he says on p74 that "some softcore footage of the forced lesbianism later hit the cutting-room floor" but in fact there was a great deal more.

The Arrow Blu-ray contains about 48 minutes of outtakes and dailies (rushes) which are presented without sound. Most of the last few minutes is taken up with parts of this sequence that are not in the finished film, most notably an extended and more explicit nude section in which Krug's gang force Mari to receive oral sex from first Phyllis and then Sadie.

The soundless nature of this material makes it feel even more like snatched security camera footage than the final sequence, and this is one place where Szulkin's reminder (p15) that "Last House was first and foremost an exploitation flick" really does show. It could certainly be argued that including these particular outtakes as a Blu-ray extra for entertainment purposes is exploitative in itself.

This feeling is heightened when you see the clapperboards at the start of some of these takes. The still at the top of this post is from very near the end of the Blu-ray extra. I've deliberately cropped it closely to show only the clapperboard, but the full still shows the naked Mari lying on her back in the woods with Phyllis kneeling over her during the oral sex sequence. Sadie, Krug and Weasel kneel behind, enjoying what they're forcing the girls to do.

Note the take count: eleven. It's only fair to acknowledge that Craven and company were not experienced film-makers and so may have counted takes or scene numbers in a different way to what one might expect. Even so, eleven does seem a high number for a scene involving full nudity and simulated forced sexual content in front of an audience, all the more so when funds and time were tight.

Unusually for the generally easygoing Lucy Grantham, Phyllis's actress did not enjoy filming this part of the movie, as she tells Szulkin on p73:

"I hated that scene. [...] I worried that it would set the tone for the whole movie [...] I knew it was an important part of the movie, in terms of showing how vicious and cruel the villains were, but I remember thinking that I'd rather not be expressing the cruelty in that way. But that was how it was and I didn't question it."

That last sentence is perhaps revealing of early 1970s exploitation gender dynamics, but when one remembers that Grantham had worked in adult movies and so understood the feeling of being expected to perform naked before a largely male audience, it's striking how strong her dislike for the scene is.

Marc Sheffler, in his 2017 interview for Without Your Head, also touches on this:

"I don't think she was very happy at the scene between Jeramie [Rain] and her, you know, when when Jeramie was telling Lucy [Grantham] to to go down on her. I don't think she was real happy with that, but you know, she soldiered on through it and it is what it is." ²

That last line is reminiscent of Sheffler's "you do what you do" over a decade before in another context. In Celluloid Crime of the Century, Craven also touches on the improvised line Lucy Grantham came up with ("It's just you and me here, nobody else") to comfort Sandra when she realised her co-actor was frightened and unhappy:

"Lucy said something to the younger, more naive girl [Sandra] of, there's just you and me here, there's nobody else here, which was totally improvised right on the spot. And it was so moving, so touching."

Craven does not comment on whether filming should have continued on such a sensitive scene with an actress in clear distress, but Sandra's own words to Szulkin (p73 again) are unequivocal and notably strong for a woman whose quotes to him are generally fairly restrained:

"That was probably the scene that bothered me the most, especially the way it was originally written. The whole thing really freaked me out... in fact, I actually cried a lot during that scene. I don't know how that scene came off, probably horribly, but it was very upsetting for me to do it."

Sandra doesn't explain whether "the way it was originally written" meant the original, hardcore script that was never filmed, or the forced oral sex sequence that we now see in the Blu-ray outtakes and dailies. If the latter, then it's a salutary reminder that cutting a scene before release doesn't erase the fact that the actors had to perform it in the first place.

In the case of this particular cut section, it was enough to disturb even the normally relaxed Lucy Grantham – and to deeply upset Sandra Peabody. 

¹ Commentary track featuring director Wes Craven and producer Sean S. Cunningham, available on multiple DVD and Blu-ray releases of The Last House on the Left.
² "Marc Sheffler of Wes Craven's Last House on the Left interview". withoutyourhead, 4 Apr 2018. Timestamp 29:14

"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.

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.

"David was... brutal with her" – Marc Sheffler on Sandra's fear of David Hess

Today I'm looking at another of the extras on my Arrow Blu-ray of The Last House on th Left. This is "Junior's Story", a 15-minute piece that's billed as an interview with Marc Sheffler but is more of an edited monologue as we never hear the questions. This was recorded in 2017 and directed by none other than David Szulkin.

Sheffler talks about his early acting experiences and how he got on board with Last House in the first place, but the part we're interested in here – the part about Sandra Peabody – starts at 08:10 on my disc. He confirms that David Hess really did stay in character the entire time they were filming:

"[Hess] became Krug on set and off set. Twenty-four hours a day, all Krug, all the time."

Indeed, Yvonne Hannemann corroborates this in Szulkin (p51) when she says:

"[The actors] stayed in those characters for a few weeks! [...] David Hess was really fearsome. David truly was this menacing character throughout the shoot." 

At 08:22 in the interview, Sheffler talks about Mari's rape scene. He provides vivid and frankly disturbing detail of how this was filmed, starting with this:

"The rape scene is what freaked Sandra out the most, I mean, because... David was... brutal with her."

We know from both Wes Craven and Hannemann in Szulkin (p79) that the scene was very rough, that it was distressing and that Sandra needed consoling, but Sheffler goes a step further and calls Hess's playing of the scene "brutal". He then explains how Craven's directing allowed Hess to behave as he did:

"the way Wes covered it, he pretty much locked off the camera and let it play, and David knew that. You know, so he wasn't trying to hit marks or anything, with movement, so he just went at her."

The director himself, speaking in Celluloid Crime of the Century, concentrated on the technical side of this approach rather than its human impact. He said that he had taken a "documentarian" decision in deciding how to film the scene:

"[I] essentially said, I'm going to stage, we're going to shoot this three times. We're going to take it from beginning to end, and I'm going to put the camera in three different places, just as if I were had three documentarian cameras at a real event. And then somehow I'll cut it together."

The result was that Sandra was expected to endure Hess's aggressive interpretation of Krug's assault for unbroken minutes at a time. Hess himself told Szulkin (p79) that he "got pretty physical with her" and that she "couldn't back off when the camera was running". Sheffler is quite open about the effect this had on Sandra:

"[A] lot of what you see from her is real. Because she was scared shitless, and I don't blame her."

This is notably empathetic – although as far as I can tell, nobody on Last House's cast or crew has ever publicly expressed regret at how the rape scene was staged or how frightened Sandra was. But Sheffler's comment, along with Craven's own observations on her fear, make it clear that she isn't just acting terrified on screen when you watch that sequence: she is terrified.

Sheffler goes on to talk about Sandra leaving the set and hitch-hiking back to New York City; he further corroborates what we already know in terms of Fred Lincoln going after her and "convinc[ing] her that he would make sure nothing bad ever happened to her." Sadly Lincoln was not able to control Hess's comments about Sandra on DVD and Blu-ray extras in the 2000s.

Slightly oddly, Sheffler says "it got to be such" that Sandra walked off, which phrasing might imply that this happened later on in filming – except that we already know from Lincoln in Szulkin (p50) that it was perhaps only a day or two into the Connecticut portion of the shoot. There's no specific evidence either way about whether Sandra was already frightened during the earlier-shot scenes, such as those with Mari interacting with her parents.

What is certain is that Sheffler talks about how Sandra's fear led to her walk-off, and the way he describes it goes well beyond mere nervousness:

"She couldn't take it. She couldn't take Hess. She was... frightened of Hess to the core of her existence. She couldn't... be in the same room with him without her blood pressure going up. She was utterly intimidated."

As with his choice of the word "brutal", this is very strong language from Sheffler. If an actress was frightened of a co-star "to the core of her existence" today, it would be grounds for immediate intervention. In early 1970s exploitation film-making, things were often very different, even when as in this case the director was no monster.

Marc Sheffler's interview solidifies the view that the way the rape scene was shot left Sandra vulnerable, with only minimal protection from the man playing Mari's rapist. Even without Hess's own claim on the commentary track that he threatened her with actual rape, the scene was enough to leave a man only partially involved (Junior stands uncomfortably on the sidelines) sympathising with Sandra Peabody's terror.

Sheffler doesn't blame Sandra for being terrified at Hess's behaviour during the rape scene. I don't blame her either.