Here’s the tagline to Wes Craven’s controversial 1972 horror movie The Last House on the Left: “To avoid fainting, keep repeating, ‘It’s only a movie … Only a movie … Only a movie …”
And here’s the epigraph: “The events you are about to witness are true. Names and locations have been changed to protect those individuals still living.”
That second quote about the film’s supposed veracity is a little William Castle-style gimmicky, like putting buzzers under theater seats. But before the first image even appeared on the screen, audiences 50 years ago were asked to brace themselves for an experience they weren’t used to having, even in other exploitation films. What Craven was offering was an exercise in real horror, a rape-revenge story that’s as unvarnished as possible in depicting violation, trauma, desperation and human terror. That Craven and his producer Sean S Cunningham – who would go on to make Friday the 13th – were young, inexperienced and short on resources would become an ironic asset. The more amateurish the film gets, the more you find yourself repeating, “It’s only a movie … it’s only a movie …”
Over the years, The Last House on the Left has gained a reputation that’s as queasily polarized as its own swings between savage violence and slapstick comedy. On the one hand, it’s a high-minded debasement of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, as much a throbbing counterculture hangover as the Rolling Stones’ Altamont documentary Gimme Shelter was two years before. On the other, it’s a film full of such pitiless sadism that UK censors refused to certify the film for cinema release, and in the 1980s it was placed on a list of potentially obscene “video nasties” – it then remained unavailable in uncut form in Britain until 2008. It took that long for the film to not be understood as a mere obscenity, without redeeming value. And it still has the power to shock and repulse.
On the eve of her 17th birthday, Mari (Sandra Peabody) has blossomed into liberated womanhood, but she’s about to step into a world of burnouts and lowlifes that are eager to take advantage. Though her parents (Eleanor Shaw and Richard Towers) are concerned about her vulgar friend Phyllis (Lucy Grantham) driving her from their country home to an urban “slum” to see a rock concert, they reluctantly respect the fact that she’s growing up. Once they get to the city, however, Phyllis tries to procure a little “grass” from a young junkie on a stoop and she and Mari are led straight to the lion’s den. Before they know it, they’re trapped in a room with a gang of recent prison escapees, led by Krug (David A Hess), a rapist and serial killer.
From there, The Last House on the Left gazes blankly as the two young women are bound and gagged, driven out to the woods and subjected to abhorrent acts of violence and sexual abuse. Their struggle for survival is made all the more unnerving by the fact that the woods are right outside Mari’s home and the Keystone Cops her parents have summoned to search for her can do nothing about it. This sets the stage for the “revenge” part of the rape-revenge scenario, when the gang, having bloodily dispatched the two women, hole up at a nearby home they’re late to realize is Mari’s. What follows is another messy fight to the death, this time between the grieving parents and their vile guests.
Though some critics stepped up to defend the film at the time – notably Roger Ebert, who described an audience anticipating exploitation as “rocked back on its psychic heels” instead – The Last House on the Left wouldn’t gain much appreciation until much later, after The Texas Chainsaw Massacre affirmed the power of horror realism and Craven proved himself to be more than a one-trick pony. Once you get past that initial revulsion – what kind of sicko would even want to see a movie like this? – the soul-sickening dread and panic that underscore the film’s images have a way of seeping into your system for ever. Rarely has there been so little distance between an audience and the raw emotion a film’s characters are experiencing on screen. It feels like a uniquely tactile nightmare.
Craven has said that The Last House on the Left was inspired, in part, by the explicit footage that was piped into news segments on Vietnam war, but wasn’t reflected by the horror and action films being produced at the time. The country was willing to send its young people off to war, but it couldn’t confront the same violence and death in a theater. It’s hard to define the film’s political point of view, other than a prevailing feeling that wars were being fought at home, too, and that the idealism of the love generation had curdled into bad vibes. It may not be a film about America or Vietnam per se, but it’s an essential mood ring of the early 70s.
Though Craven would certainly learn more about film-making craft as his career evolved through The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream, the rough-hewn staging of The Last House on the Left masks a more adventurous film than it seems. It feels like tonal whiplash for Craven to cut from sequences of Mari and Phyllis getting tortured to scenes of Mari’s parents setting up 17th birthday party decorations or the cops bungling around like characters in a Benny Hill sketch. But the overall effect heightens the discomfort: we’re not used to getting jostled around so crudely, for one, but each cut away from these doomed young women is a reminder that others are either too oblivious or too incompetent to come to their rescue. Craven’s seeming artlessness results in a pervasive feeling of helplessness. We might wish it were only a movie, but it’s not so easily shaken.
• This article was amended on 30 August 2022 to clarify details about the historical availability of The Last House on the Left in the UK.
