Not Only a Movie

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.

We're back to Celluloid Crime of the Century once more, but this time David Hess is in the spotlight. Yes, again. Around 18 minutes into the documentary, Hess says this about his co-star: 

Sandra was your archetype upper middle class Protestant–repressed Protestant, you know, and how do you deal with that? How do you deal with it? Well, you try to find ways of stabbing her and her repression. 

I'll let you decide how likely it is that the star of Voices of Desire – released mere months after Last House – would be "repressed". If she was indeed "nervous, and uptight, and squeezed", as Marc Sheffler suggests on the actors' commentary track,¹ then it probably wasn't because she couldn't deal with sexual content. Hess's "stabbing" metaphor is slightly concerning for a man playing a violent thug, though.

Immediately after this, there's a separately recorded insert from producer Sean S. Cunningham, who acknowledges the difficulty of this scene from the perspective of the actress playing Mari: 

So, when somebody is shaking you and threatening to rape you and carve his initials on your chest, and you’re lying on the ground and this person is over you it’s kind of a terrifying, ugly place to be. 

Cunningham's words are straightforward and empathetic, conveying the situation for a woman who has that difficult role. But straight after that we're back to Hess, who decides what we really all need to know is this: 

I scared the living shit out of her, man. She really thought I might—I started to pull her pants down, and grab her tits and everything, and I mean she really, I mean she—and I looked up at Wes [Craven] at one point, and I said, ‘Can I?’ And then she freaked. 

Given everything we've seen of David Hess's approach to Sandra already, this further escalation is perhaps not enormously surprising. The rough physical aspects of this treatment of his co-star were present in his music featurette story too. But this time there is an additional aspect to his anecdote: the question.

The way in which Hess relates his story strongly implies that Sandra was already frightened before the question was asked. If she "really thought [he] might" then being scared would not be in the least surprising. Hess then reacted to that not by stopping what he was doing or reassuring his screen victim, but by asking Craven "Can I?" At which point, using Hess's startlingly casual term, she "freaked".

We can assume this happened during rehearsal, as asking that question would be completely out of character for Krug. It's not clear exactly what Hess was actually asking permission for, or even whether it was a genuine request or merely performative. This would not have been clear to Sandra in the moment, either.

Hess's story does at least give us the information that one man (Hess) was asking another man (Craven) what else he could do to a woman (Sandra) – and a woman who Hess was already being physically rough with in a sexualised way.

Is it any wonder that Sandra "freaked" at this point? We don't know exactly what went through her head at that moment, and it is not our place to speculate. But it was an absolutely valid and rational reaction. On the video Hess seems almost surprised that Sandra reacted so strongly. Given what we already know about her experience of the Last House on the Left set, he really shouldn't have been.

And then there's the matter of Wes Craven. Hess does not tell us what Craven responded to Hess's extraordinary question; perhaps he perceived it as a tasteless joke. However, for Hess even to have been able to ask tells us that Craven was close by – unsurprising for the director, of course – and must have noticed all the physicality that Hess was putting into his Krug. If as Hess implies Sandra was already clearly scared, then Craven must have seen that, too.

It's possible that Craven both gave a very clear "No" and strongly reprimanded Hess for even asking the question, despite having apparently allowed the rough physical contact that was already in progress. Today the question itself would be seen as a catastrophic ethical failure and would bring immediate and very forceful intervention. In the woods in 1971, an awful lot more depended on the director being strong enough to keep his actors from crossing lines. We must hope that Craven was.

Regardless, this incident – like the music featurette one – related to the filming of Mari's rape scene. Sandra therefore endured objectification and intimidation from the same man multiple times during production of this highly sensitive scene.

To be able to continue when Hess had implied that her bodily safety depended on another man's will and not her own consent only underlines the immense courage, resilience and professionalism Sandra displayed in completing the scene, and indeed the movie as a whole, at all.

¹ 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.