Not Only a Movie

Despite the highly concerning evidence already presented about Sandra Peabody's experience while making The Last House on the Left, it shouldn't be imagined that the set was a place of unrelieved fear and unhappiness. There were plenty of people involved who were simply doing their jobs as well as they could on minuscule resources, and several who stood out in more positive ways.

We've already met assistant director Yvonne Hannemann, whose compassion in the wake of Sandra's distress at filming Mari's rape scene contrasted with David Hess's recollections in particular. Again contrasting with Hess was producer Sean Cunningham's empathetic note about the "terrifying, ugly place to be" that was Mari's actress's position during the torture and rape sequence.

Sandra herself tells us via Szulkin (p47) that she got on well with the cinematographer, Vic Hurwitz: 

[He] was one of the better people on that set. That guy was great. He told me, "Have something else in your life besides acting, because it's a terrible business." He was a real fatherly kind of guy to me. 

Sandra's opening sentence praises him only in relative terms, which perhaps reveals more about how she saw the set itself than it does about Hurwitz. Nevertheless, she goes on to make it clear that her view of him was genuinely positive. Her choice of the adjective "fatherly" is striking.

Sandra ends her recollection by lamenting Hurwitz's death in a bicycle accident just a few years after the film was released. Her liking for the cinematographer makes Marc Sheffler's implication in his commentary track threat that Hurwitz would keep filming if Sheffler dropped her from the cliff feel particularly distressing.

Lucy Grantham had a special position in Last House as Phyllis, Mari's fellow victim of Krug's gang. Hannemann remembers (Szulkin, p51) that "[t]he girls sort of huddled together". However, as Grantham herself points out in Szulkin (p39), the two young actresses were different in reality as well as in fiction: 

Sandra was this sweet, rather naive "good girl", and I was much more rebellious in my personality [...] Sandra and I were really going in two very different directions [so] there was no sense of competition between us. In fact, Sandra was very much like the character she played in the movie, and so was I. 

We don't get a quote from Sandra about Lucy, but it was Grantham who, in the scene where the gang force the girls to strip and perform sexually for their amusement, recognised that Sandra's distress went beyond her character's and took the initiative. As Wes Craven put it in his DVD commentary track,¹ Grantham who was "more experienced just in the world in general" than Sandra: 

improvised, on the spot, and [it] was I think completely real because Sandra was scared shitless here and it was Lucy just saying, just, we’ll get through this scene, um, it’s just the two of us you know, stripped naked. 

This refers to the moment where, shortly after the girls have been stripped, Phyllis holds Mari and says quietly to her, "It's just you and me here, nobody else." This already poignant moment becomes deeply moving when you know that it was ad-libbed by one actress to help another get through a very difficult scene – one which Szulkin (p74) notes had more material filmed than was eventually released.

Steve Miner, who went on to become a notable horror director but was a lowly 20-year-old production assistant on Last House, praised Sandra in the It's Only a Movie documentary as being "a real trooper" despite her being "freaked out" by the scene where Mari walks into the lake. He adds a human touch by noting that Sandra took "a long shower" afterwards.

Miner is notable as being someone from this film who Sandra would work with again. Just before she left exploitation for good and foreshadowing her long and successful career behind the camera, she was script supervisor on the sexploitation comedy Video Vixens, for which Miner was assistant editor.

Returning to Last House on the Left: with David Hess holding character for weeks on end and apparently enjoying the fear he engendered in Sandra, it is a relief to know that most people on this scrappy exploitation set in the woods got through the Last House shoot without resorting to threats and intimidation towards her.

Sandra Peabody deserved these displays of respect and kindness. But they should have been universal.

¹ 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.