Earlier this month I made this post about the necessity of sometimes allowing uncomfortable questions. Since then, a couple of people have contacted me privately asking about the framing I used, which dealt with Sandra Peabody's abuse on the set of the 1972 horror film The Last House on the Left. I'm now making one of my very rare non-Pony posts on this blog to explain myself.
Fair warning: This is an upsetting and anger-inducing story. I won't be including specific details of the abuse in this post, but I will be linking at the foot of the post to somewhere you can read about it if you do want to. That image at the head of this post will give you a clue.
Anyway, for a little while now I've been researching what happened – or, to a large extent, what people say happened, as there's often no corroboration. In short? Sandra Peabody was apparently victimised in real life, just as her character Mari was in the film. Not in terms of the physical torture that Mari endured, but psychologically and emotionally Peabody seems to have been put through hell.
What's really striking about this case is that the large majority of the evidence comes from the men who did it. And Exhibit A here is a DVD/Blu-ray commentary track from around 2002 (still available on the current Arrow disc) featuring the three male villain actors: David Hess, Marc Sheffler and Fred Lincoln. On this track they quite openly chat about what they did to prompt/coerce the reaction they wanted (fear, usually) from Peabody for the film. Her co-star Lucy Grantham, who played Phyllis, may have been a victim of one of the incidents, too.
As I said, I won't give graphic details of what's on that commentary track here, but I will link at the bottom. Suffice to say for this post that the men claim, among other things, that they threatened Peabody with bodily harm – and we're not talking just slapping her face here. There is absolutely no indication on the commentary track from these men, who by the time they went into the commentary booth were in their fifties and sixties, that they felt remorse or shame for what they did.
What's become clearer and clearer as I've looked into this is the near-total collapse of any kind of accountability or speaking truth to power. None of the men ever seem to have been challenged by the horror or cinema media. Neither does the director, Wes Craven. The studio's legal team signed off on this. The distributors judged it fit for release. DVD/Blu-ray reviewers mention this very track but omit the graphic details. It goes on and on and on.
So in the end, I got fed up and started to mention it myself. Review comments on Letterboxd, answers to Quora questions, you get the idea. Never just copy/paste jobs, but actual human-written answers. Always aiming to put Sandra Peabody first and never speak for her. There's no point in attempting to grant her peace by simply keeping quiet, because the (wrong) usual story that she was just overwhelmed and unable to cope with difficult material is already loud.
I spoke up on Reddit the other day, picking the r/horror subreddit to make my post. I thought one of three things would likely happen. One, my post would be ignored and get maybe two upvotes and one comment before disappearing. Two, my post would get downvoted to hell by defensive fans of David Hess and (especially) Wes Craven. Three, the post would get deleted altogether for breaking some obscure sub rule by a mod who was feeling grumpy that day.
What actually happened was, as you'll see when I link in a moment, completely different. Over 900 upvotes. Over 400 shares. And, the one that really took me aback: 96.9% upvote percentage. It turned out that "Here's what these men said, this is really disturbing" wasn't really controversial at all. People just hadn't seen it before – because most people now watch on streaming, and even most people who buy physical media don't slog through all the extras.
The comments section bore this out. The usual couple of idiots, but overwhelmingly thoughtful, interesting and supportive. Near-universal agreement that what the male actors said was done to Sandra Peabody was abuse. Quite a few "I like Wes Craven's films, but this is not okay" comments. And one person who'd met Hess at a con in 2010, found he was still glorying in terrifying his co-star after almost 40 years, and to this day – they now work in the industry – finds that encounter "seared into [their] mind" and when they think of it it prompts them to go and check the women on set are okay.
There are still a hell of a lot of questions that need asking, and who knows how many of them are actually ever going to be answered? Especially with so much of the cast and crew now dead and Peabody herself having given only one interview about the movie in fifty years and spending her time in more productive pursuits, like making children's TV on minuscule budgets or teaching young actors the Meisner technique she learned from the man himself as a student.
Here's my Reddit post. Again, be warned that what it describes is disturbing.
