notonlyamovie | "I had so much fun with Sandra" – Hess, Lincoln and the "boys' club" commentary

We now return to the 2000s DVD commentary track featuring the three male villain actors.¹ This is the location of Marc Sheffler's strongest version of the cliff threat, but that's not all that the track contains. Here's a short but revealing exchange from only around six minutes into proceedings:

"HESS: I had so much fun with Sandra, [word indistinct], ‘cause you remember I held character with her for four weeks until she like… she wanted to run away!
LINCOLN: She did run away, the night before shooting, I had to go get her! […] We lost our girl the night before, she was walkin’ down the goddamn road in the middle of Connecticut. She was goin' home, she was so scared of us.
HESS: She was so frightened. So frightened.
LINCOLN: She was so scared of us. And I knew her for eight years, and she was afraid of me!"

We've already established that Lincoln's "eight years" is almost inconceivable and that the "three [or] four years" he gives in the It's Only a Movie documentary is much more reasonable. We can assume this is merely a slip of the tongue, and it's far from the most important part anyway.

What stands out at once is Hess's opening quote. In the very first part of it, he tells us that not only did he frighten Sandra deliberately – something he said in his Terror Trap interview – but that he had "so much fun" doing it. This is another escalation: the first time we've seen Hess openly stating that he enjoyed scaring Sandra.

Hess also confirms that he did indeed hold character for the duration of filming, or at least nearly so. Once Mari is shot by Krug, she only appears again in Junior's dream, apart from the brief section in the Krug & Company cut where her parents find her alive by the lakeside. Hess's statement is backed up by Marc Sheffler, who has already told us that Hess "was in character 24/7 the entire shoot".²

Hess goes on to say – brag, really – that he did this to such effect that Sandra "wanted to run away!" Lincoln intervenes to point out that not only did Sandra actually leave the set, but that it happened much earlier. He gives "the night before shooting", the same time he provides in Celluloid Crime of the Century. Lincoln's recollection to Szulkin (p50) was "after one or two days", but the walk-off's placement very early in filming is consistent. Early in the Connecticut section of the shoot, that is, as Lincoln makes clear with his "walking down the road" comment.

Hess underlines that Sandra was "so frightened", and Lincoln closes proceedings by corroborating that her fear existed, and by expressing slight incredulity that she was scared of him despite having known her for some years. As he notes in It's Only a Movie, they shared an agent.

Lincoln is most significant here in his backing up of the level of fear Sandra had of the men. Listening to the entire commentary track for remarks about her, there seems to be a kind of rough hierarchy of fear, with Hess very much at the top, then Lincoln, and Sheffler – despite his cliff threat – only mentioning her fear once, in connection with that incident. (In connection with this: Lincoln does mention Sandra being "afraid of Jeramie [Rain]" as well as himself and Hess in Celluloid Crime of the Century. but he does not mention Sheffler.)

In the relaxed and perhaps performative "boys' club" atmosphere of the commentary booth twenty or so years ago, it was Hess who made the comments that may be the most revealing. As his Terror Trap interview shows would remain the case even in the final year of his life and into his seventies, Hess shows no remorse or regret for scaring a young actress so badly that she "ran away" from the set.

In fact, here he shows quite the reverse. Hess's "I had so much fun with Sandra" cannot reasonably be read as anything other than the words of a man actively revelling in having created her fear. And, with his rape threats and night-time knife stalking, in having also created an environment where it was entirely reasonable for Sandra to feel that way.

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 sits down w/ Hollywood Wade to discuss the infamous Horror film Last house on the Left", Hollywood Wade | Crime & Entertainment, 4 Sep 2022. Timestamp 35:06