Not Only a Movie

As we've seen, coverage of Sandra Peabody's experience when filming The Last House on the Left in legacy media is extremely thin. While there is rather more mention of on-set events in online sources, these often treat Sandra's mistreatment lightly, framing it in terms of "Did you know?" pieces or even as trivia. We will return to look at that in more depth in a future post. Today, though, I want to highlight an exception.

Horror-themed podcasts are common, and inevitably I haven't been able to listen to all those that have covered Last House. The only podcast I have personally heard that covers what happened to Sandra in any depth at all is the four-part Road to Nowhere series, produced by the Anatomy of a Scream Pod Squad in summer 2021. This is available on both Amazon and Apple platforms: 

Amazon episodes: one, two, three, four.
Apple episodes: one, two, three, four. 

The overall running time well exceeds two hours, and many aspects of Last House on the Left are covered, ranging from Wes Craven's early life to a look at postmodernism in horror. However, just over a minute into episode one there is a sign that Road to Nowhere will be covering Sandra: 

"I will be covering the harrowing accounts by crew members of when pantomime violence turned into actual assault." 

("Pantomime" here is used in the US English sense. ) Still, only near the end of episode two, "The Swingin’ ‘60s & Horror Nihilism", do we see that Road to Nowhere will break from the pack in covering Last House's making. At 30:16 comes a note by the podcaster that they are themselves a sexual assault survivor, and that transgressive horror can be cathartic, followed by: 

"But it would be irresponsible of me to only throw praise at and study the film without exploring how dangerous a set this was for the people working on it, particularly the women. The film, no matter how loud a statement against violence it may be, still ended up inflicting real violence on at least one of its leads." 

The host notes that Sandra walked out of a screening of the movie, something confirmed by the actress herself in Szulkin (p117). This we will also return to in a future post. The Road to Nowhere podcaster finishes by noting the difficulty of finding Sandra talking about Last House – though not explicitly that Szulkin is the only source – but adds that "given what she went through, it's not surprising".

Episode three is titled simply "Sandra Peabody", a rare centring of Sandra in horror media coverage. The first half of the 23-minute episode is devoted entirely to her, with Jara drawing on David Szulkin's book. There is the odd error, such as saying that Yvonne Hannemann needed consoling during production when in fact she had said Sandra needed consoling after the rape scene, but mostly things are solid.

Jara offers a biographical introduction to Sandra Peabody, including her early low-budget films and her study under Sanford Meisner, as well as her "fateful" decision to respond to a casting call for what was then called Night of Vengeance. Jara's statement that "from the beginning, the dark energy surrounding the film created an oppressive work environment" is a stretch, but after Jeramie Rain's comment on how Phyllis's death scene put her off eating meat, at 03:53 the podcaster says: 

"This blurring of reality and fiction caught Sandra off-guard, despite her American Playhouse training. [...] It is a gross exaggeration, however, to blame her for any of the film's missteps, especially since she was being asked to act her way through real instances of abuse."  

There follows a fairly lengthy extract from Celluloid Crime of the Century, disappointingly uncredited and with its speakers unnamed. It's from the middle part of the documentary which contains a dense series of Sandra-related events, including David Hess's "Can I?" anecdote, Wes Craven and Fred Lincoln talking about Sandra's fear, and the base version of Marc Sheffler's cliff threat.

Jara returns to editorial comment at 06:53, saying: 

"Learning about Sandra's on-set abuse makes it all the more heartbreaking to watch her character walk numbingly into the lake [...] where she is then shot."  

We're then told briefly of Sandra's move from acting to children's TV production, followed by her roles as talent agent and acting coach. Jara does however suggests that her role in Voices of Desire, released only slightly after Last House on the Left, "struck a haunting note" during research. We're played a short extract of a scene where Sandra's character is running through an apparently haunted house, to which the podcaster says: 

"What is unnerving about the film is just how closely it follows the narrative of a woman attempting to recover from a long period of abuse. It is difficult not to see parallels between her experience on the set of The Last House on the Left and this nightmarish sequence." 

After this, Jara makes a striking comment, drawing on personal experience as a survivor: 

"The difficulty [...] has always been reconciling this film's significance to me and to a breadth of works in the horror genre with Sandra Peabody's abuse." 

This is a profoundly important point, and it's a bit of a shame that it's not explored in any real depth thereafter, even in the near-hour-long fourth episode in which the podcaster talks to writer and musician Ten Backe as the latter gives her own perspective on the film. Still, the segment's closing words are clear and direct: 

"My final thoughts on Sandra rest with the hope that she and anyone else who was impacted by the abuse on this set was able to find peace in the 50 years since. No amount of criticism can absolve the production as a site of real-life abuse, however, and I reject the kind of film-making which endangers cast members to a point of inflicting trauma. I do not see putting your cast and crew in harm's way as aspirational in the slightest."

Whether or not her Last House experience "inflict[ed] trauma" on Sandra Peabody is not for me to say, and of course the filming did see multiple people show empathy and kindness to her. Nonetheless, Jara's expressed wish that Sandra has been able to find peace is strong and compassionate, and Road to Nowhere shows a rare and significant concern for her not merely as Mari's actress but as a person.

It's been more than twenty years now since the David Hess, Marc Sheffler and Fred Lincoln commentary track for The Last House on the Left was first released on DVD. You know, the one which includes Sheffler telling a particularly harsh version of the cliff threat story and Hess gleefully recounting how he threatened to rape Sandra. That same commentary track exists intact on the Arrow Blu-ray you can still buy off the shelf in HMV.

You might think, therefore, that those physical media reviewers who actually go through the extras – which is by no means all of them, granted – would be sure to have something to say about these anecdotes. A few sentences in passing, at least. Any words at all, really.

You would be wrong.

Here is a representative sample of ten reviews whose writers do more than simply list the track as one of the included extras.

DVD Talk, 2009: This reviewer calls it "quite a compelling track" with "plenty of funny and interesting anecdotes and insights". The piece adds that "these grizzled veterans may not be the classiest guys walking--shortly after the rape sequence, Sheffler notes (somewhat tangentially) that the film 'got me laid a lot.'"

Blu-ray.com, 2011: Comparing it to the Craven/Cunningham track, the reviewer states simply that the actors' one is "a looser, more candid roundtable".

Rock! Shock! Pop! Forums, 2018: Another restrained comment here, simply that it's "an interesting commentary that really does give a pretty decent look at the picture's production from the point of the three core villains".

Horror Cult Films, 2018: In this review we're informed that the track is "very lively, in fact quite raucous and even foul mouthed". This is followed by "Unfortunately Hess [sic] becomes rather dislikable when he thinks it’s funny that he held Grantham [sic] over a cliff and threatened to let her go unless she played a scene properly", which doesn't give enormous confidence that the reviewer was listening particularly hard. They end with "Overall great fun though."

HK and Cult Film News, 2009: This is a review from 2009, with comments from 2012, reposted in 2025. It's significant, though, for saying this: 

The only thing I find hard to watch--the rape scene--comes not from what's happening in the story but from what went on during the filming of it. As David Hess relates during the commentary, he had the already nervous Sandra Cassel so distraught and fearful of him that much of her humiliation and distress during the scene are real. Marc Sheffler also tells of actually grabbing her and threatening to push her over a precipice if she didn't stop fouling up take after take of their main scene together. For me, these two accounts are the creepiest thing about the movie. 

This reviewer still shies away from laying out exactly what they mean with the Hess point, but at least they reference it at all. Bizarrely, though, this very same review later informs us that "[f]ans of the film will no doubt enjoy the yakky, argumentative, and funny commentary track featuring Hess, Lincoln, and Sheffler."

High-Def Digest, 2011 – The actors' commentary is apparently an "amusing conversation" where "the men clearly enjoy each other's company" and "overall, the comments and discussion are light-hearted and entertaining".

Kendall Lacey's Webworld, 2018 – Here we read the commentary "is a joy", and the "guys get on great and their track is fantastic."

The Mercenary Journal, 2022 – This one isn't a conventional disc review, more an essay about commentary tracks in general. Still, we get the Last House actors' track listed first in the author's list of favourites: "They joke, poke fun at each other and banter as they debate the merits of the film. At times you get the impression their personalities in real life weren’t all that different from the characters they played in that film. It’s lots of fun."  

DVDCompare, 2011 – This reviewer states that compared with the Craven/Cunningham effort, the Hess/Sheffler/Lincoln affair "is the party track, with each of the guys telling story after story, often in an attempt to one-up each other." And "Even if you've heard Hess tell the same stories a hundred times, they never get old."

Given what Hess actually says on the track, I seriously dispute that final point. More importantly, I can think of at least one person they got old for after the very first experience. Because she was there, on that Connecticut set, being subjected to David Hess's behaviour in person.

In the final analysis, I've found ten reviewers, spanning a period of years, who've written enough about the Hess/Sheffler/Lincoln commentary track that they've presumably actually listened to it – meaning listened, not just skipped through the first ten minutes. And here's the scorecard:

• Actually engaging with the two most unpleasant anecdotes: 1
• Mentioning one of them, albeit with significant errors: 1 
• Ignoring both the stories completely: 8

This is not the greatest final tally in the universe, is it, horror media reviewers? Even the two reviews that do make it out of the "ignore the cliff and rape threats altogether" category have problems: HK and Cult Film News adds a supplementary sentence that reads like it came from a completely different reviewer, while Horror Cult Films makes a ridiculously basic error with actors' names.

The HK reviewer comes the closest to naming what matters, and it's notable that the review originated in 2009 – a time when Hess was still being invited to guest at conventions. Even that piece, though, while it describes Sheffler's cliff threat openly, still reduces the severe abuse Hess wallows in inflicting on Sandra to her being "distraught and fearful" resulting in "humiliation and distress". True, but incomplete.

In terms of saying out loud, in clear language, that the commentary track contains David Hess recounting in explicit terms a threat of sexual violence made against Sandra Peabody on the set of Last House on the Left, the number of the ten reviewers who make it that far is... zero.