Deep into the Winter Woods

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Content warning on this one for threats of sexual violence. I've deliberately put some of my own wording before the (text-only) screenshot, so you can stop reading now if you want to.

This is it. As I say, the smoking gun. If you've been following my posts about Sandra Peabody (originally credited as Sandra Cassell) and the abuse she suffered on the set of Wes Craven's early horror film, The Last House on the Left, then you'll know that one thing that's repeatedly frustrated me is how difficult the evidence is to find. It's not hidden exactly, but a lot of it's in un-Googled places like DVD commentary tracks, obscure video clips, or a making-of book that's been out of print for two decades. But now, finally, I've found something different.

This is from an actual mainstream publication: Vanity Fair. Specifically, from this article from March 2008. It's paywalled, and normally free users can't read very far down – as you may well find if you click that link – but very recently I was able to get legitimate access on some kind of very short-term mobile free trial offer. The article is called Killer Instincts, it's bylined Jason Zinoman, and it starts on p304 of the print edition. It's a long article – over 5,000 words – and the relevant part here is almost 2,000 words in, far beyond the usual paywall line. That's why I'm only reproducing the small section that's directly relevant:



It's pretty sickening stuff. If you've spent the time I have in researching what happened on this set, it's sadly not surprising that David Hess would say that. Nevertheless, it's extremely rare, possibly even unique given how difficult it was for me to find this, for him to be quoted saying something so directly repulsive in a mainstream publication. Hess is no longer around; he died in 2011. I would say "good", except that it means he'll never be held accountable.

Vanity Fair failed on that, too. After the extract I've included, without any further editorial comment, we get many paragraphs of rambly recollections from Wes Craven, the director of Last House on the Left. We get to learn all kinds of things about him, from his Baptist upbringing to the time he encountered Quentin Tarantino. What we don't get, anywhere, is Mr Zinoman actually asking Craven why he allowed behaviour like Hess's on his film set, and whether he regretted failing to protect a young and vulnerable actress.

Craven too is dead now, so that question too can never be asked. He left a more worthwhile legacy than Hess, and in his later career he does seem to have shown proper concern for his actors. But he didn't here, and as far as I'm aware he never once apologised for that. He got as far as a "She wasn't always acting" or a "We put her through hell", usually accompanied by that rueful chuckle of his, but actually saying sorry to the woman his actor terrorised was apparently a step too far.

I have serious issues with the way parts of the horror fandom still seem to idolise David Hess as "the Mad Hessian". He threatened a young woman with rape on set in autumn 1971, then spoke with no remorse about it 37 years later, and if that doesn't disqualify him then your moral radar is broken. I also have issues, more widely, with the whitewashing of Wes Craven's career. He did a lot of good things in his time, but the way he ran the Last House set wasn't one of them, and that needs to be said much more.

Sandra deserved so much better than this.

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269/365: Bromsgrove Hospital
Click for a larger, sharper image
And I do mean quick: I was in Bromsgrove Hospital for about 15-20 minutes! The annoying thing was that, even with a lift, it took forever to get to and from Bromsgrove thanks to two separate long traffic lights on the road from Kidderminster. Also, I was starving by the time we got back as I'd declined the offer of a bite, which I rather regretted! Small hospital that it is, its restaurant is only open at lunchtime, which is less than ideal if your appointment is at 16:15... anyway, I was there for routine eye screening, and I always like going to Bromsgrove for that as it has the most modern equipment and so the scans are very quick. No need for dilating eye drops these days! The photo above is exactly what you'd expect, but it does show you how small the place is. There's a small two-storey wing just to the right, but that's about all. 

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And for anyone who's seen The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, as I now have, I want to be clear: my subject line is accurate. I don't mean her character, Sally Hardesty, though she was indeed a proto-Final Girl. I mean the actress herself, Marilyn Burns.

In my recent post, I detailed three particularly nasty examples of her mistreatment while making the film, but these were far from the only ones. Among other things she was semi-accidentally hit on the head with a sledgehammer whose steel shaft hadn't been made safe, was hurt doing a six/seven-foot jump involving sugar glass that had hardened in the humid conditions (her limp near the end is genuine), smashed up both knees to be bleeding pretty badly after 17 takes of the gas station sequence (Tobe Hooper: "It was terrible, but it played very well"), was chased through dark woods with a live chainsaw (chain off, but rubber belt on), and – for just a second – was in a room with a Gunnar Hansen who literally wanted to kill her because the set conditions had driven him deluded and for that moment he thought he was Leatherface.

So, Final Girl? Let's have a look at the scorecard:

1) Moral superiority. Her safety was treated as rather a low priority by Tobe Hooper and his obsession with bloody "raw authenticity", leading to injury after injury. She was upset by neither him nor anyone else on set praising her performances. Yet in later years, while she was honest about what she'd faced, she never sounded vindictive or twisted, and she was willing to remain on good terms with Hooper, Hansen (except for a while after his knife deception was revealed) and the others. She didn't treat anyone else the way Hooper treated her. Box ticked.

2) Resourcefulness. Despite not being an experienced actress, she was able to produce a performance that is still talked about while frequently acting under extreme duress – exhaustion and overheating at best, active abuse and assault at worst. She did most of her own stunts, some of which were significantly more dangerous than those of many other actresses of the era and genre – sometimes even more reminiscent of the silent era. Box ticked.

3) Resilience. Are you kidding me? Let me remind you that she somehow made it through a shoot where, in the space of five weeks, she had been beaten to the point of unconsciousness, dripped with her own blood, assaulted with a knife, run from working chainsaws and done about 900 takes of every angle regardless of fatigue because of Tobe sodding Hooper's cavalier attitude to her safety and obsessive artistic perfectionism. Box ticked.

4) Survival. On this set, that didn't just mean getting through a tedious, tiring shoot. It literally meant what it says: survival. She could have died in several ways out there: if Hansen's delusion had lasted a little longer, if the steel-cored "broom" had caught her an unlucky blow on the temple, if the sledgehammer had been wielded a bit too hard, if she'd succumbed to the extreme heat of the dinner scene, if a chainsaw accident in the dark had severed an artery... Box ticked.

5) Overcoming her monster. The "monster" here is probably a combination of things. Tobe Hooper (yes, again), the generally appallingly unsafe set, and the brutal Texas heat. In post-production, Hooper deliberately drove her to emotional collapse for the eye close-up scene, despite being under nothing like the pressure he had been on set. The set involved genius stunts like one actor putting gunpowder on his hand and lighting a match. All this should have broken her. It didn't. Box ticked.

6) Bearing witness. Burns didn't retreat into a quiet life once TCM had finished filming. She chose to lean into her experience and engage with fans and journalists, guest at conventions, do Q&A sessions and interviews, and more besides. She was straightforward about how hard her experience had been, but she almost never crossed into bitterness or anger. Once she knew the truth about Hansen's lie, she was able to talk about it fully. Box ticked.

So there we are. A perfect full house. The whole point of the Final Girl is that she's supposed to be fictional, something impossible to recreate in real life. Yet Burns did it – and she did it without the predestined protection of the script that her fictional counterparts have. She faced moments when it was genuinely uncertain whether she would leave that movie set alive. Her treatment was unconscionable, and she should never have had to earn this title. But since she did:

Marilyn Burns. The real Final Girl.