notonlyamovie | "Chilled us all to the bone" – Anne Paul remembers Mari's rape scene

One of the extras on the Arrow Blu-ray of The Last House on the Left is Blood and Guts, a fifteen-minute interview with Anne Paul, the makeup artist on the film. She talks about how she came to be involved – she'd originally auditioned for one of the girls, but felt that if Lucy Grantham got the role the she (Paul) had no chance as their faces were too similar for them both to be cast. So she pretended she had makeup experience she did not, and won the crew role.

Paul notes that she already knew Grantham via the latter's work in adult movies. (Grantham acted in Loops, which was first released the same year as Last House on the Left and also featured Fred Lincoln.¹) Paul talks for a little while about her and some of the other Last House cast members. She really doesn't say a lot about Sandra Peabody, merely noting that she had not previously known her and that Sandra was:

"A sweet girl. Young and sweet. A little skittish, you know? Who wouldn't be?"

As we've seen, Grantham also used the word "sweet" to describe Sandra. "Skittish" is a word with several meanings, from playful through jumpy to easily scared, so we don't know exactly what Paul meant there. The most straightforward interpretation is that Sandra was nervous because of the nature of her part in the film, rather than because she was scared of David Hess – although Sandra herself told Szulkin (p50) that she was.

Paul only once otherwise touches on a scene directly involving Sandra, but it's a very significant one: Mari's rape by Krug. Paul concentrates entirely on her own feelings about that day, mentioning nobody else by name – not even Sandra, not even Hess. Paul describes it vividly:

"a really graphic, bloody, nasty, horrible scene, and it kind of chilled us all to the bone."

She then talks about needing to return to the spot later that day to retrieve an item of clothing she'd left behind, and noting that she remembers "to this day" (the interview dates from 2018) how frightening it had been to return to the spot, how it filled you with "this sheer kind of... horror."

Anne Paul went on to enjoy a very successful career in makeup, working for many years at the United Nations and making up important visitors and world leaders alike. When this interview was made, she was at the point of retirement, but she clearly still remembers that day in the woods with some vividness. She ends by saying:

"The rape scene... was particularly difficult."

The camera lingers on her face for a couple of seconds after that, and while I won't guess what she was thinking, the atmosphere is very different from the more light-hearted recollections Paul provides elsewhere in the interview. Given the nature of the scene, the recollections of those women present – Yvonne Hannemann and (to a very limited extent) Sandra herself being the others I have quoted – seem particularly significant.

Anne Paul's interview doesn't provide any particularly new information regarding Sandra Peabody's experience during the filming of her character's rape. It does however underline the effects that day's shooting had even on crew members, let alone the "young and sweet" actress lying in the grass beneath David Hess.

¹ "1705. Loops" in Martinko, Jason S. (2013). The XXX Filmography, 1968-1988. McFarland, Incorporated, Publishers. p173.