PublicMarc Sheffler's cliff threat was a clear-cut case of targeted abuse of Sandra Peabody, committed in order to coerce a more emotional reaction out of her for the following scene. I've recently got hold of a DVD of
The Last House on the Left which includes the full commentary track that features him telling a differently phrased version of it (I paid £5 in a CeX) which I'll come to in a future post, and what that's revealed is that the
targeted abuse wasn't the only concern. Here's an example that seems quite wildly reckless to us looking at it in 2025, and would correctly be considered totally unacceptable in modern movie-making, but which wasn't targeted at Sandra Peabody alone:
In the film, there's a scene where Mari (Peabody) and her friend Phyllis (Lucy Grantham) are kidnapped by Krug's gang. Their hands are bound (in front) and they're gagged with cloths while drugged, then carried down the fire escape from the flat where they're caught, stuffed into a large car boot (=US trunk) and driven off to the Connecticut woods. I already knew from David Szulkin's book¹ that the fire escape scene wasn't done with camera tricks, dummies or stunt doubles. Peabody was genuinely carried over David Hess's (Krug) shoulder while tied and gagged as he ran down two storeys on a rather rickety fire escape and threw her into the car along with Phyllis who was already there.
¹ Wes Craven's Last House on the Left: The Making of a Cult Classic, 2nd edition 2000.This kind of thing wouldn't have been shocking at all to people in the same world of ultra-low-budget exploitation. Doing your own stunts saved money, and that mattered. And bluntly, young women acting in this world were often seen more as props than partners. What I
didn't know beforehand was what happened
after the filmed scene ended. Here's Fred Lincoln, one of the villain actors, giving a brief comment about it on the DVD commentary track:
Transcript
LINCOLN: I thought we really pushed it because we really left ‘em in the car till we got to Connecticut. But that was because we didn’t have enough money to buy another car. We only had room for that many people.
As far as I know, that's the only time this fact is mentioned in a public source. The disc has a second, more conventional commentary from director Wes Craven and producer Sean S. Cunningham, and they say nothing at all over this scene. Szulkin's book doesn't mention it, either. So this
is based on a single source, although one who was definitely there – you can see his character in the car in the movie. The
details of exactly how this transport happened are not certain. But the
impression Lincoln leaves is that they drove straight to their Connecticut location (about an hour's drive away) with the two women bound and gagged in the boot the whole time. Quite possibly without even a basic safety check (stop car, open boot, check women aren't in serious trouble, close boot, drive off) along the way – though that part is a
possibly, not a
probably.
This seems completely astonishing to us today – but 1971 exploitation was not us today. The crew didn't quite trust entirely to luck – Lincoln already knew Peabody to some extent from previous work together, and none of the personnel were at the level of callousness where they'd have accepted a significant risk of the actresses being seriously injured or worse at the end of the drive. But they probably didn't think much beyond "We'll get there in about an hour, and there's plenty of air for them in that trunk." Discomfort and anxiety were not widely considered unethical in that world of movie-making at that time.
So in the early 1970s, in ultra-low-budget exploitation movie filming by a crew who were mostly highly inexperienced, this
wasn't astonishing. It wasn't absolutely routine, but "We didn't have the money for a second car"
would have been accepted as a rationale for transporting the women in the boot, and "We needed to get out fast as we didn't have permits" (which
was routine for such crews) would have been accepted as rationale for not stopping to untie them first. These would not have been modern prop restraints, so doing that wouldn't have been a near-instant task. Also, the route would have taken I-95 (already in existence) and stopping on that to take bound women out of the boot and untie them would have attracted a lot of attention, something they didn't want.
Lincoln's "really pushed it" comment may well also refer to a second factor that I as a Brit didn't initially think of. They were driving from the outskirts of New York City to Connecticut – crossing state lines. For that era's crews, the biggest risk might have been thought to be not that something would go disastrously wrong for the actresses bound in the boot (that risk
was small, even if potentially catastrophic) but that they might be stopped by a patrol for some unrelated reason. A patrolman requiring to see in the boot and finding two bound and gagged women there, on an interstate trip, could mean
huge trouble for the crew, since a suspected kidnapping crossing state lines becomes a suspected
federal offence. It might even bring FBI involvement. That couldn't be smoothed over with "we're just making a film" in a way a purely state-level stop might have been.
The fact that Grantham was in the boot as well is important for this particular incident. She is consistently spoken of as being easy-going and popular with the crews, and there is no story anything like as serious as the Sheffler cliff one relating to her. That, together with Lincoln's quote on the commentary track, makes me pretty comfortable with believing that his explanation that extreme cost-cutting was the primary motivation was true. In this case, the men didn't
aim to mistreat Sandra Peabody. They simply thought that leaving her (and Grantham) bound and gagged in the boot was acceptable in the context of the way they were operating – and that thinking wouldn't have been wildly out of line with how others thought at the time.
Finally, there's the issue of consent. In these productions, consent was often treated as a "one and done" thing: ie "You signed up for this film, you read the script, so if we need to make things a little rougher than we initially told you in order to get it done, then that's just part of this business." So long as nobody was actually seriously hurt, it was likely to be considered within the bounds of acceptability. And remember, in 1971 not merely social attitudes but the actual law supported this in some cases. A woman agreeing to marry a man had to say yes of her own free will – but after she was married, then she quite literally lost the ability to say no to her husband. Marital rape was not criminalised in all US states and the UK until the early 1990s.¹
¹ And some states still have glaring exceptions, eg Mississippi requires aggravated force to have been used.
So "one and done" was baked into the law in that case, meaning it was easier for film crews to rationalise it as being acceptable here as well. We can't be sure that the women explicitly consented to spending an hour like that, and there's at least a non-negligible chance that they didn't – that it would have been seen as being folded into the consent they were seen as having granted by signing up to this kind of movie. It's possible, for example, that they were told something like "We'll tie you up, carry you down the fire escape, throw you into the car trunk, close the lid and drive off" – but not the specific detail that they'd be in there for the full 40-mile drive. Again, this sounds astounding to us in 2025, but to people working in this part of the movie industry in 1971, far less so.
My point of writing all this is that this incident can be seen as a
baseline in the
Last House shoot. It wasn't absolutely routine, as Lincoln's "really pushed it" shows, but it wouldn't have inspired outrage, not within that world in the early 1970s. When I write about
abuse on this set, I mean things that
go
beyond that, such as Marc Sheffler's cliff threat – where the actual physical danger lasted much less time but was much more severe and, crucially, was inflicted
because of the effect on Peabody. "It was the 1970s" doesn't excuse that even if you understand the baseline of unsafe and degrading corner-cutting and risk tolerance that the car boot drive demonstrates. (Not that it excuses this either, but the two things are different kinds of unacceptable.)
One final point. Sheffler's threat at the cliff was made in a place where just he and Peabody could hear. Wes Craven knew he was up to
something, but didn't know the details – and Peabody might well have avoided telling him about it. But with this car boot trip? I find it very hard to believe he wouldn't have known. He was right there, as the director of a shoot with a tiny crew count. So Craven accepted the idea of these two young women being driven for an hour, quite possibly still bound and gagged, in a car boot. Yet as far as I know, he never acknowledged it publicly. That aspect is on him as the man in charge of the set (totally in charge on a non-union shoot that small), and I don't care how much of a horror icon he later became. That aspect is on him.
I don't have an audio clip to link to for this specific incident, so I hope you'll accept my assertion that my transcript above is accurate: I made it myself after listening to Lincoln's comment several times.
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loganberrybunny
