notonlyamovie | "But I met David Hess and he was such a nice guy!"

One of the things people often do when confronted with evidence about an actor that they really don't want to be true is to fall back on personal experience with that person. Usually it's simply a case of seeing interviews or reading articles by said actor in which they come across as thoughtful and reasonable, and even generous to their co-stars past and present.

Does this remind you of anything? Yes: David Hess's Terror Trap interview. As you will recall, he was overwhelmingly pleasant to almost everyone in that long piece. Even with those he had less effusive opinions of, he generally found something to say that was no worse than neutral, or mixed good and bad as he did when discussing Wes Craven.

Sandra was the exception. Among people he spent more than a few words on, she was the only exception.

In "Junior's Story", an interview with Marc Sheffler from 2017 that's included on the Arrow Blu-ray edition of The Last House on the Left, Sheffler talks about his time sharing a residence with Hess after the movie. After offering the distinctly odd detail that his flatmate kept an ocelot in the basement and that it was "subservient" to Hess, at 11:46 on my copy Sheffler continues:

David was as flawed as person as anyone I've ever met. But one flaw he didn't have was, he was your friend forever when he was your friend.

Now, that sounds like a nice, uplifting anecdote about Hess – until you think harder about... well, most of it. The first sentence could cover a multitude of sins, and Sheffler doesn't expand. We have of course met some of Hess's sins already on this blog.

And then there are those last five words. When he was your friend. The corollary to that is that he didn't behave that way when he wasn't your friend. We saw in the Terror Trap interview what it meant for the woman who wasn't his friend: a chilling, remorse-free coldness that lasted to the very end of his life.

Although Sandra's experience is the one we're most interested in here, it wasn't only her who Hess treated poorly. Adrienne Barbeau worked with him on Swamp Thing (1982) – yes, Wes Craven invited him back a full decade after he'd terrorised his Last House co-star – and she had this to say in her memoir:

It doesn't help that the actor playing the bad guy [Hess] is a macho stuntman wannabe who throws me around like I'm an ex-girlfriend he's got a grudge against. I haven't been hit like that since Gorgeous George threw a chair at me in the ring when I was Miss Wrestling for Channel 18 in San Francisco. [...] My whole body is bruised and aching.¹

Nobody denies that Hess could come across as exactly the charming rogue you expected him to be – the image he cultivated. You only have to look at all the effusive obituaries for him from 2011 to see that. Your good experience with David Hess at a convention or a Last House on the Left festival screening means one thing and one thing only: that he was nice to you.

You weren't Sandra Peabody.

¹ Barbeau, Adrienne. (2006). There are Worse Things I Could Do. Carroll & Graf Publishers, pp194–5