notonlyamovie | "I'm wanting to get something from her which wasn't coming"

One of the extras which features on my Last House on the Left Metrodome DVD set but not my Arrow Blu-ray – it is on the three-disc limited edition – is "Krug Conquers England". As a caption at the start of the video informs us, this covers the first public screening of Last House in the UK, at the Phoenix Arts Centre in Leicester, on 25th June 2000. The interview was packaged and released as a featurette in 2003 by Divine Productions.

Much of the featurette is pretty straightforward stuff, including the expected comments about BBFC censorship and some guitar playing by Hess. Inside the first minute he tells us that "I've never hurt anybody in my life, that I know of", but that leads straight into the opening credits.

But later, about 13 minutes in, Hess starts to talk about the scene in Last House where Krug rapes Mari. He first tells us, "It was a difficult scene for me to do." As so often for Hess, the idea that it might perhaps have been an even more difficult scene for Sandra Peabody doesn't get a mention.

Hess then goes off on a bizarre tangent about how he's never paid for sex and how allowing yourself the vulnerability inherent in making love and "having a real relationship" is hard, and "something we all need to work for". But then there's this:

"In this scene... um... she was like a lox [dead fish]. She… there was no reaction at all from, from, from… from Sandra Cassell. For, for, for… for hours we tried to film this scene."

Hess mostly tells this story fairly straightforwardly, but when he says "hours" he raises his voice for a moment and shows real emotion, a flash of anger, even. I'll merely observe that most people on seeing a woman emotionally unresponsive to a scene as traumatic as this would be concerned for her well-being. You didn't need an intimacy coordinator to tell you that. Hess, however, wants to tell us about his solution:

"So… the reaction that you see on the screen is that I scared her. I ripped her pants off during the filming... and she probably thought that I was gonna penetrate her. I had no intention of doing that, absolutely not."

I'll pause briefly here to allow you all to ponder on what it says that a man needs to specifically tell us that he wasn't about to rape his co-star on camera. But let's continue:

"But that's the reaction you see on the screen, and that's why people react to it so much in terms of the violation of a woman. But at the same time, it's… it’s, it’s, it’s a film. It's a film. I'm, I’m, you know, I’m an actor that, you know, and I'm wanting to get something from her which wasn't coming."

So was Krug.

"I mean, you either do it or you cut the scene."

This sentence is the other time in the interview where Hess gets really animated. There were apparently no other options he could think of. Collaborative acting, perhaps? Just a thought.

Hess rounds off his complaint with:

"There’s no point, there’s no point to making it if you can’t do it the way it should be done."

This whole thing lasts around a minute. Hess was clearly still nursing a grievance about all this almost 29 years after Last House had wrapped. I'd pick the red flags out of it, except that there's scarcely a word of it that would remain.

By coincidence, this interview with Hess was recorded in the very same month (June 2000) that the second edition of David Szulkin's book appeared. As far as I know, it's the earliest of any of the multiple public comments by Hess on this rape scene that are included on commercial Blu-rays today.

Sandra Peabody herself appears only in this monologue as an obstacle to Hess's acting genius, an object to be manipulated, a prop to be forced until she breaks. She never once appears as a partner in a scene.

David Hess was not the person having clothing torn off without warning or consent. David Hess was not the person being put in fear of the simulated scene becoming real. David Hess was not the person being forced into genuine terror to produce a realistic image of "the violation of a woman".

Sandra was all of those things. It is her who comes out of all this with her dignity intact, with her character unsullied, with her courage unquestioned. The most important person in a rape scene is the person playing the victim.

Sandra Peabody deserves that to be known and understood.

Sandra Peabody deserves better.

The "Krug Conquers England" featurette is available on YouTube at the time of writing, albeit under a different name. The section I've covered in this post is at 13:51 in that video and can be watched here.