notonlyamovie | Coverage of Sandra's treatment in academia is... also sparse

A few posts ago, I looked at how Sandra Peabody's experience on the Last House on the Left set and its knock-on effects (eg Blu-ray extras) was covered in legacy media. My conclusion was that it wasn't to any great extent. Today, I'm taking a look at how academic writing has covered the same issue.

First, I must be open about the fact that I do not have access to large academic libraries, pre-digital era texts or anything beyond the limited free tier of JSTOR. As such, I'm confined to what's available publicly online. And as my subject line suggests, this is limited to say the least.

One paper that I've already mentioned is Allison Virginia Craig's 2012 PhD dissertation (UK: thesis) for the University of Albany, State University of New York, "Only a girl like this can know what's happened to you" : traumatic subjects in contemporary American narratives. ¹ I noted this when covering David Hess's 2008 admission in Vanity Fair of threatening Sandra with rape. Craig covers this on p37, quoting the full passage:

"Night of the Living Dead "became an instant hit at drive-ins, in large part because of its extreme gore" [...] And it was not just the gore that seemed real; it was also the sexual violence. In Last House on the Left, lead actor David Hess admitted he 'was very mean to the girls [while shooting the film], so when it came to the rape scene, [Sandra Cassell] didn't have to act'"

Craig continues to reproduce the full Vanity Fair rape threat admission from Hess. As I noted in my earlier post, Craig's paper was (and remains at the time of posting) the only Google hit for Hess's words other than the original Vanity Fair article itself and a handful written by me in the last few months. However, she does not linger on Sandra's experience, quickly moving on to other movies and the author's broader argument.

One paper that does dwell a little on Sandra's treatment is another PhD submission, this time by Geneveive Newman of the University of Pittsburgh. In Of Victims and Survivors: Representing Collective and Individual Rape Trauma,² Newman introduces a section on "Sexual Violence in the Media, Off-Screen" on p4 as follows. She notes that, although many women have spoken out since the start of the #MeToo movement:

"Somewhat less has been said and written about violence, sexual and/or otherwise, on set during the production of media texts, enacted against women in particular."

She then names the four women she has chosen as examples, Tippi Hedren, Sandra Peabody, Marilyn Burns and Evan Rachel Wood. Newman first talks about Hedren's abuse by Alfred Hitchcock while making The Birds and raises the question, "whether [her] performance could equally have been achieved with a safe set and better directing."

Immediately afterwards, we get this significant passage:

"Along these lines, Sandra Peabody’s "performance" in Last House has less to do with acting by her own admission and more to do with the very real fear she experienced on set. It is difficult to track down interviews with Peabody about her experiences, or with David Hess [...] but both actors have expressed regret for having participated in the film at all."

"By her own admission" is a real stretch. Still, this is notably direct for writing about Sandra's experience on the Last House set, though as we saw with the Road to Nowhere podcast, the author doesn't seem to have known that David Szulkin's book is the only place she has spoken on the record about the film.

More problematic is the final part of the extract. Neither Sandra nor Hess have in fact explicitly said they wished they hadn't been in the film – although some sources have claimed they have – and certainly Hess was willing to chat to fans about it during the many conventions he was invited to even well after his rape threat admission.

The closest published approach I know of to confirmation that Sandra regrets participating in the movie is reported by Wes Craven on his DVD commentary track from the 2000s:

"I previously ran into Sandra Peabody when I was up in Oregon for some film conference. And I think she's now teaching acting [...] Kind of acted uncomfortable with the fact that she had ever been part of such a movie." ³

This doesn't give us anything beyond "uncomfortable" and I won't speculate further, but even that matches Sandra's consistent refusal to appear at horror conventions or related events. Indeed, she is the only member of the core personnel of Last House – by which I mean victims, villains, director and producer – never to have been interviewed on camera about the movie.

Returning to Newman's paper, she is forthright:

"Unlike [Alfred] Hitchcock, Wes Craven did not take it upon himself to torment Peabody, but rather allowed her cast-mates to do so."

There then follows a near-full and accurately worded quote of the commentary track version of Marc Sheffler's cliff threat. Newman goes on:

"The article in which this quote appears also includes a note that Hess threatened to assault Peabody in order to produce the fear reaction that the scenes called for. All of this contributes to the fact that, rather than being allowed to perform fear, anxiety, and trauma, Peabody lived those emotions with a camera pointed at her vulnerability."

The article in question is a 2018 Mary Sue piece, "7 Scream Queens Who Were Traumatized by the Directors Who Made Them Famous". This is currently bylined Dan Van Winkle, but is credited to a different name in the footnote and in Newman's citation. This article isn't the worst as listicles go, but it is still a listicle rather than an in-depth study.

Most notably, the Mary Sue entry for Sandra's experience spends most of its word count on Sheffler's cliff threat, with only a single sentence allocated to Hess's explicitly sexualised stories of abuse. The listicle's use of the common, and frankly unhelpful, US euphemism "assault" means that his rape threats don't get any explicit mention, despite Newman's paper's subject.

Newman's reliance on a secondary written source – the Mary Sue article – over a primary non-written one – the actors' DVD commentary track ⁴ – has led the author to misrepresent Hess's attitude to Last House on the Left, and arguably Sandra's too. This raises uncomfortable questions about how much academia has not yet caught up with the multimedia world, where some vital evidence is simply not available in print.

These two papers are pretty much the sum total of what I've managed to find that discuss Sandra Peabody's off-camera treatment. Stephanie Chang's "Uniquely American Symptoms": Cold War American Horror Films as Repositories of White Nationalist Affect is more concerned with racial matters, and does not talk about what happened to Sandra during the shoot, despite (on p107) citing Celluloid Crime of the Century for a brief note on Last House's budget.⁵

There are, of course, plenty of publications which talk about The Last House on the Left in terms of its impact on the horror genre, on Wes Craven's career, and on the representation of women in rape-revenge narratives. But when it comes to what Sandra Peabody went through in her own right over half a century ago, there is still a large space waiting to be filled.

¹ Craig, Allison Virginia, ""Only a girl like this can know what's happened to you" : traumatic subjects in contemporary American narratives" (2012). Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024). 535. https://doi.org/10.54014/P20D-9BFW
² Newman, Geneveive, "Of Victims and Survivors: Representing Collective and Individual Rape Trauma" (2023). University of Pittsburgh.
³ 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.
4 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.
⁵ Chang, Stephanie H., "Uniquely American Symptoms": Cold War American Horror Films as Repositories of White Nationalist Affect (2022). University of California, Los Angeles.