Halloween Horror: The Last House on the Left (1972)

Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left is one of cinema’s most uncomfortable horror films. Filmed on grainy, low-rent 16mm and performed by unpolished actors, the film has a formal verisimilitude that makes the stomach-churning content all the more uncomfortable. Thus, it’s understandable if you don’t want to subject yourself to this violent content presented in this realistic manner. But the boldness of the material is essential to the film’s impact because it makes it impossible to watch the movie and remain detached. When you watch The Last House on the Left, you feel like you’re witnessing real-life crimes, and therein lies the film’s horrific power.

Craven draws most of the plot details from Ingmar Bergman’s medieval classic The Virgin Spring and transposes it to New York and Connecticut in 1972. It’s Mari Collingwood’s (Sandra Peabody) seventeenth birthday and she’s heading to a concert in the city with her friend Phyllis Stone (Lucy Grantham). Her parents (Richard Towers and Eleanor Shaw) are supportive and have a big birthday celebration planned for when she returns. But she never returns. Unfortunately, she falls prey to a gang of escaped killers and rapists: the serial rapist Krug (David A. Hess), his junkie son Junior (Marc Sheffler), his sadistic girlfriend Sadie (Jeramie Rain), and his pedophile buddy Weasel (Fred Lincoln). 

I guess it’s a spoiler to say that Krug and his gang kidnap the girls, take them to the country, rape them, and eventually kill them, but this aspect of the film has been infamous since its release in 1972 and has made it a notorious icon of 1970s exploitation cinema. Furthermore, the inevitability of this outcome for viewers in the know only makes it that more excruciating to watch. You know Mari and Phyllis are doomed the moment Krug locks the door on them when they’re trying to buy pot. From there on out, it’s only a matter of time before their evil will consume the girls, with the audience bearing witness to the gang’s crimes.

Wes Craven intended the film to strip all the glamour from violent American pictures of the time and depict some actions that other horror films only implied. He succeeds in spades as the film lacks any of the prurience that is typical of most horror movies of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Apart from an early scene where Craven’s camera drinks in the youthful beauty of Mari as she prepares for her big day, the filmmaking never sexualizes the performers or seeks to titillate the viewer. 

For instance, the infamous rape scene at the film’s midpoint is horrifying; it’s not depicted “tastefully” in the way that the scene is in Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, but Craven doesn’t use the action on screen as an excuse to leer at the actresses in their undress or align the camera with the killer, thus giving the viewer an excuse to thrill at the crimes he’s committing. Instead, he keeps his camera focused on the faces of the characters—on the girls, to keep their pain front and centre and to fuel the viewer’s rage at their abuse, and on the killers, to show the monstrosity of their emotions. Again, it may prove too much for many viewers, but it’s hardly exploitative in the way many other rape-revenge fantasies of the 1970s are, such as I Spit on Your Grave.

Furthermore, Craven goes one step further than simply horrifying the viewer with the detestable actions on screen. He continues the film past the girls’ deaths and follows the killers as they show up at Mari’s home, pretending to be travellers whose car broke down. The parents graciously let them stay the night and we assume that a similar fate will befall the parents, but not so. As in Bergman’s film, Craven’s film turns into a fantasy of revenge, where we watch the parents realize the strangers killed their daughter and unleash their violent fantasies upon the killers. 

As in other films of his, especially The Hills Have Eyes, Craven is showing how violence begets violence, and how one catastrophic act of evil can ripple out and poison everyone in its orbit. Craven is forcing the viewer to sympathize with the parents and thrill at their revenge; he focuses on the pain of the girls in the rape scene to align the viewer’s passion with the parents’ passion in this later scene. He then critiques such bloodlust, showing how it continues the cycle of violence. Thus, the film’s moral approach is far more complex than a simple exploitation film.

While this complex moral approach and horrifying on-screen content makes The Last House on the Left a horror classic, it doesn’t rise to the level of Craven’s later films, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream. It was his directorial debut and so some of his artistic choices are questionable. For one, he often incorporates folk tunes from Stephen Chapin and David A. Hess (who also plays the villain, Krug), which plays counter to the events on screen, but proves more bewildering than clever in this instance. Craven also follows a bumbling sheriff (Marshall Anker) and his deputy (Martin Kove) as they try to respond to the crime scene, getting into a series of mishaps along the way. Again, Craven is trying to contrast the bumbling ineffectiveness of law enforcement with the calculated evil of the killers, but the sequences with the cops seem like outtakes from an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard, and not of a piece with the horrifying main plot thread of The Last House on the Left.

The Last House on the Left has many of the hallmarks of an important directorial debut. It’s artistically rough and has some unfruitful narrative avenues, but the staggering confidence of the vision at its centre shows what a talent Craven was from his very first film. For some viewers, the violent content of The Last House on the Left may prove to be too repulsive to handle. But the content is undeniably effective. It’s horrifying in the moment and lingers after the credits roll because it shows just how pathetically evil human beings can be.

8 out of 10

The Last House on the Left (1972, USA)

Written and directed by Wes Craven; starring Sandra Peabody, Lucy Grantham, David A. Hess, Fred Lincoln, Jeramie Rain, March Sheffler, Eleanor Shaw, Richard Towers, Marshall Anker, Martin Kove.

Related Posts