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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But Last House on the Left is important"

One reason why there is resistance in some quarters to serious criticism of The Last House on the Left is that the film does, undeniably, have a place in the horror pantheon. It is highly influential, along with several of its contemporaries from the 1970s, perhaps most notably Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

But acknowledged influence should not insulate a film from serious criticism when it deserves it. The aforementioned Texas Chain Saw features a plethora of ethical concerns, and Marilyn Burns' decision largely to lean into those and participate in the film's fandom does not erase them.

These range from filming in extreme heat to repeated unsafe stunts to lesser-known but perhaps even more concerning events. One was the post-production incident when Hooper deceived Burns into attending the editing suite for "a few photos" of her eyes, only to keep her there for hours, resulting in such emotional exhaustion that editor Larry Carroll, who was in attendance, was shocked:

"I think for Tobe, the performance that he wanted, about the only way he knew how to get it out of [Burns] was basically torturing her, and he did. It was horrific."¹

As with Last House, the way the production ethics of TCM get talked about tends to be limited. Noting the dangers of having a live chainsaw on set, or the legendarily harsh 26-hour dinner party shoot, those are often discussed. But the incident described above, or the moment when Gunnar Hansen briefly thought he was the murderous Leatherface, those tend to be skimmed over if mentioned at all.

A lot of fans are far more comfortable in the case of both films when the conversation turns to the movies' influence. Whatever you think of the merits of either, that they were influential on their genre is undeniable. Here, for those fans, we are back in safe territory: Last House, like TCM, is certainly "important" in that sense.

The trouble comes when that importance is used as a kind of get-out card: "Yes, bad things happened on set, and that wasn't okay, but look at what the film gave to the genre!" Given that "what happened on set" in the case of Last House was that Sandra Peabody spent weeks in fear, was driven to start hitchhiking to get away, and was threatened with being pushed off a cliff, including that "but" at the end of the sentence risks implying that Sandra's mistreatment was unfortunate but excusable.

It wasn't. What happened to Sandra was the single most important feature of the making of Last House on the Left. Especially now that we're in the 2020s and should all understand that abuse is not restricted to incidents where one person literally says, "I want to hurt this other person", centring Sandra is not an optional extra. It is fundamental to reckoning with the film in a way that begins to do justice to the woman who was harmed.

A truth that many in the horror world seem not to want to confront is that it is Wes Craven's name and later reputation that has protected Last House for many years. His later existence as a thoughtful, humane man who created films that spoke more profoundly about violence than horror historically had does not change the fact that in the early 1970s he was something very different.

Craven is protected by the air of glamour that surrounds the auteur even today, despite recent years having confronted us with the dark side of men like Alfred Hitchcock and his outright abuse of Tippi Hedren.² Unlike Hitchcock, Craven did not himself abuse his female lead – but if Marc Sheffler's description of the cliff threat is even remotely accurate, the director knew that something was happening with Sandra and yet apparently did not investigate.

Craven is indeed important to horror. But that is not a reason not to look at his first horror feature film with clear eyes. Indeed, it is a reason to do exactly that. As I have already said, a man who "got better" at handling actors must by definition have started out worse. Today, for example, we would consider his decision to allow a situation where Hess "just went at" Sandra during long, locked-off takes of Mari's rape scene to be ethically insupportable.

The Last House on the Left is indeed important to horror too. But, again, that gives us a greater responsibility to examine it critically and honestly, not less of one. Horror fandom is not always good at this: witness how Ruggero Deodato's undeniably innovative Cannibal Holocaust (1980) tends to be criticised often for its on-screen animal killings, but considerably more rarely for very serious concerns surrounding the age and level of informed consent of the indigenous girl who plays the victim of a violent gang rape.

As we have seen on this blog over an extended period, Sandra Peabody was abused in connection with Last House on the Left. We can and should recognise Last House for its influence on horror and for launching Craven's career. But as with the other films I have mentioned, this profound ethical failure must not simply be ignored because of the movie's fame or the identity of its director.

Last House on the Left is indeed important. But that is not a get-out card for those who would really prefer not to talk about its production ethics – because what happened to Sandra Peabody in its making is more important.

¹ Hansen, Gunnar. Chain Saw Confidential: How We Made the World's Most Notorious Horror Film (2013). p128.
² Specktor, Matthew. "The Baffling Cruelty of Alfred Hitchcock". The Atlantic (9 November 2023).

"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.

"You start to wonder how much you can protest violence when you're making a living from it" – Last House, Vietnam and real-world harm

The Vietnam War often comes up in discussions of The Last House on the Left, and indeed it was very much in the minds of many people in early-1970s America. There was, as Wes Craven notes in Szulkin (p15) a feeling both that the most powerful footage available was in what was coming out of South East Asia and that the full horrors of the situation were being concealed. As Craven goes on to say:

"There was a great amount of feeling that 'It's time we showed things they way they really are.' In Last House we set out to show violence the way we thought it really was, and to show the dark underbelly of the Hollywood genre film."

Szulkin notes in editorial text that the era saw films appearing with levels of graphic violence that had not been seen previously, such as 1971's A Clockwork Orange and Straw Dogs – both of which, like Last House on the Left, received particular criticism for their brutal depictions of sexual violence.

As Szulkin also tells us, the original script for Night of Vengeance contained several direct references to Vietnam – including Krug strongly implying to Mari that Weasel learned how to torture while out there. It wasn't only fiction which was affected by the war: Marc Sheffler, in his early twenties at the time, was of an age where, subject to deferments, the draft lottery might have chosen him to fight.

Contrary to some more recent assertions in horror and wider film media, Craven says (Szulkin, p16) that he does not regret making Last House – but he does acknowledge that a film like that can have real-world effects:

"I think if you spend too long working in that area, you brutalize your soul [...] You start to wonder how much you can protest violence when you're making a living from it."

This tension between the insistence that there are high-minded ideals behind the film's creation and the harsher realities of its actual production also surfaces when producer Sean Cunningham tells Szulkin (p33) that:

"[Wes Craven and I] thought it might be worth doing as a way to turn violence around on itself make people re-evaluate that which they call entertainment."

Szulkin's immediately following editorial drily observes that, "[r]egardless of this lofty rationale", there really isn't any avoiding the fact that Last House on the Left was planned as an exploitation movie first and foremost, violence and shock value being what its financial backers wanted. As I've noted, at least some of the genre's norms survived into production, with significant implications for Sandra Peabody especially.

The real problem here is that Last House only succeeded – to whatever extent you think that it did – in critiquing real-world violence by perpetrating (even if unintentionally) harm of its own. While no actor was actually shot or disemboweled, Craven's apparent belief – again, common in 1970s exploitation but disturbing in retrospect – that only physical danger was a show-stopping problem left the door open for much else.

In Sandra's case, her sometimes extreme fear was at least sometimes mined as a resource by Craven, such as in the torture/rape sequence. The director acknowledges on his commentary track that Sandra was "scared to death", but asserts that this made for "a scene that was absolutely convincing". ¹ The harm caused by letting that fear play out was often little considered in 1970s exploitation cinema.

Sandra was of course threatened with physical violence – Sheffler telling her he'd throw her over a cliff if she didn't improve and Hess's claimed threat of rape. Even though there is no evidence that any of these threats were made with intent to follow through, psychological and emotional damage are now firmly established as real and significant harms, even if the specific question of whether they qualify as violence is still debated.

However, one thing seems clear. You can have all the fine-sounding soundbites in the world about how you wish to make a statement against violence by confronting audiences with what it truly means. But if in the course of illustrating your intention – in this case by making Last House on the Left – one of your cast is herself harmed, then you have fundamentally undermined the argument you claim you wish to make.

The acknowledged facts of Sandra Peabody's real-life suffering on set include being subjected to extreme fear, threatened with physical harm and experiencing misery when acting certain scenes. These severely compromise whatever power Last House may have had to lay claim to a truly progressive justification for its harsh cinéma vérité approach and unflinching representation of violence.

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.

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.

"She was not into any of that stuff" – Sandra as odd woman out

Sandra Peabody's Last House on the Left experience included abuse and mistreatment, with even director Wes Craven later acknowledging that the production "put her through hell". One of the factors sometimes mentioned as having contributed to her broader unhappy experience was her isolation from the rest of the cast – not in terms of being deliberately kept apart, but more in terms of personality.

David Szulkin's book, Wes Craven's Last House on the Left: The Making of a Cult Classic, provides some vivid examples of this – and, as so often, we find passages that are perhaps more revealing now than they appeared to readers when the book was new more than a quarter of a century ago.

We have of course covered Mari's rape scene extensively on this blog, and we should always remember and respect Sandra's absolute refusal to talk about it: although there is the "My God... I had the feeling they really hated me" that Wes Craven reported she had said after the scene had been filmed, Sandra's only direct quote about it – anywhere – is simply "No comment". This stands apart from how anyone else has spoken about the scene.

A striking piece of editorial text by Szulkin comes on p45, very near the start of the chapter "Babes in the Woods: A Crash Course in Guerilla Film Making", which covers the filming of the movie. He says:

"Despite the demanding nature of the project and its often gruesome subject matter, most of the cast report having fun on the set."

At first sight, that reads as a reassuring note that the actors generally enjoyed making even this harsh story. At another glance, however, that "most" really stands out. When you realise that the person who was held over a cliff, the person whose fear was deliberately not calmed by her director, the person who was terrified by the rape scene and the person who walked off the set were all one and the same – Sandra Peabody – the word takes on a much darker and more troubling appearance.

Sandra has been described by several members of the Last House team in terms such as "sweet", and her fellow victim-actress Lucy Grantham says (p42) that they were very different, with Sandra being "ladylike and shy" as opposed to Grantham's rebellious personality. On p51 Grantham says:

"We were living, for the most part, in Sean's house [...] There was a lot of partying and a lot of fun."

This is backed up in the actors' commentary track. While I'm not here going to give what seem like gratuitous specifics about people's private lives, it's clear that at times the partying and fun went considerably beyond simple socialising.¹ This is nothing especially shocking for the 1970s, but it does add to the picture of a production where many personnel played hard as well as worked hard.

We don't know exactly what Sandra's own arrangements were, although she does mention (p50) travelling by train from New York to Westport at least once, presumably via the still-operational New Haven Line. However, her comment (also p50) that Hess "would come after us" (plural) "with a knife at night" shows that she can't simply have travelled home every evening of the shoot.

Steve Dwork provides an example of Sandra's attitude to Last House's material not being the same as most of her colleagues' on pp53–54 of Szulkin:

"Nobody was politically correct about [the violence]. Even with some of the sexual scenes, I don't think anybody on the set was really put off, except Sandra, who was involved in doing it. She was not into any of that stuff, professionally or otherwise—"

Here I'll pause to comment on that apparently odd "or otherwise". There are several ways it could be interpreted, but those would simply be speculation, so let's continue with Dwork's quote:

"—which was an understandable reaction on her part... I mean, if I was being stripped naked and slashed about with fifteen strangers standing around watching, I don't think I would deal with it too well!"

Fifteen is probably intended as exaggeration for effect; Craven and Sean Cunningham, on their own commentary track, come to the conclusion that even ten would likely be on the high side.²

More significantly, Dwork singles out Sandra as the only person who was "put off" by the sexual scenes – which in her case involved not only the forced lesbianism scene which made her cry, but also playing Krug's victim in a rape scene which Anne Paul described as "really graphic, bloody, nasty, horrible" and which Yvonne Hannemann described as "really quite upsetting" and "very rough".

Since Phyllis's earlier rape was off-screen, Sandra Peabody is the only person who had to portray a rape victim in real time – in a scene that as filmed was, as Marc Sheffler makes clear, both longer and harsher than the edited version we see in the final movie. She is the only person among the core cast who has never spoken on camera about the film. She is the only person who is explicitly noted as being "ladylike and shy".

Sandra is also the only person who we know was threatened with physical injury; and the only person who David Hess repeatedly and publicly talked about in sexualised, humiliating and sometimes violent ways. Not a single one of those stories was challenged or even contextualised in the same material, either at the time or on the Arrow Blu-ray release.

Of all the people who worked on Last House on the Left, Sandra Peabody stands out, not merely for her feelings about the material but for the fact that over half a century on she has still not been granted the public recognition and apology she should long ago have received for what she went through. As I say so often, because it is the truth: Sandra Peabody deserves better.

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 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.