notonlyamovie | "But aren't you just judging the 1970s by 2020s standards?"

A point that sometimes comes up to writing today about events that happened some decades in the past is that it's not fair to judge – in the case of the Last House on the Left shoot – 1971 by the standards of 2025. On the face of it, that sounds like a reasonable objection, but in fact things are rather more nuanced than the common "it was another time" line might suggest.

There are certainly aspects of 1970s film-making that have changed a lot since then but which it would be unreasonable to criticise a shoot for. An obvious example is the absence of intimacy coordinators, which were unknown in cinema back then. And, indeed, for a good deal longer: the remake of Last House in 2009 did not use them, although by the standards of the day the film was made ethically and Sara Paxton (who played Mari) was treated well.

On the other hand, some things can still be criticised even at over half a century's distance. David Hess's admitted threat of rape to Sandra Peabody was not acceptable in the 1970s any more than it is today. There was never a time when threatening sexual violence was a legitimate acting technique, method or otherwise. What Hess did, or at least claims he did, was wrong in 1971 just as much as it would be in 2025.

Film-making in what might be called the "long 1970s" – between the collapse of the Hays Code in 1968 and the Twilight Zone tragedy in 1982 – was often rough-edged, all the more so in low-budget exploitation cinema. Many things that happened then would not be tolerated now, ranging from pressures on actresses for increased nudity to corner-cutting on stunt safety. But there were still lines beyond which almost no production went.

The main difference today is that any actor threatening sexual violence in the way Hess claims to have done would face immediate and very strong consequences. They would be removed from the set, production would halt, the authorities might well be informed – and, crucially, the victim of the abuse would receive professional care and protection, with their safety treated as a higher priority than completing the film.

Another response to the question in the title is that Hess did not tell his various stories in the 1970s. All of those I have covered here, ranging from the "Krug Conquers England" monologue to the Terror Trap interview, and including both the Vanity Fair and commentary track admissions of threatening Sandra with rape, as well as David Szulkin's book were recorded and published between the late 1990s and 2011.

Although the first decade or so of the 21st century had not yet seen the level of understanding of ethical issues in film-making that #MeToo and similar movements brought from the mid-2010s onwards, the old "anything for the shot" approach of some 1970s film-makers was already being seen as unacceptable. The understanding that a film set was a workplace, and that consent and safety mattered there as much as in any other job, had developed considerably since the exploitation era.

So the answer to the question is that yes, to some extent I am judging 1971's Last House on the Left set by today's standards – but so do all of us. Eugenics was widely considered respectable in the 1930s, yet almost everybody condemns it as dangerous pseudoscience today. Besides, as I noted above, when it comes to actively threatening a co-star with sexual violence, as Hess says he did, no amount of historical context can make that acceptable.