by: Letitia
Posted on 12.20.09 in All Horror Films > Cult/Erotic > Exploitation
Release Date: 1972

Wes Craven’s first movie, Last House on the Left, begins with an idyllic shot of ducks on a lake, a cozily autumnal country road, and then a shot of a solidly middle-class house. The camera then focuses on a girl, Mari, our main character, as she showers. The camera work here is gauzy and romantic, much like the opening of Brian DePalma’s Carrie, where the camera lingers lovingly on girls’ bodies. In Carrie, the blood and horror soon start, jarring you from the hazy scene, but in this film, we spend almost a solid half-hour with the characters before anything even remotely violent happens.

As Mari, our main character, emerges from the bathroom, we meet her parents, a handsome middle-aged couple, seemingly good-hearted and concerned about their daughter. Although none of the actors seem like professionals, they have a decency about them that the gives the move a documentary-like feel. The very 70’s banter of the opening scenes, where Mari’s parents express mild disapproval of her shirt, which is a little too revealing, and warn her to be careful at the rock concert she is about to attend, is charming because the family seems to be amused to be in front of a camera. This strange realism of this amateur acting creates a queasy, uncertain tone right at the beginning of the movie. It’s clear something awful will happen, but the viewer doesn’t know when or how.

In addition, the cheerful score throughout the film adds to this strangeness. This being the 70’s, we have some cheesy singer-songwriter fare, but also some jarringly happy banjo music during crucial scenes. As a viewer in 2009, knowing that this film is a famous horror/exploitation flick, I was waiting in dread for something awful to happen to the characters, and the naiveté of the film’s characters and music left me completely unsettled. Craven’s choice to let the viewer linger so long in this wistful 70’s almost-innocence is one of the many reasons why Last House on the Left rises above its exploitation flick status. By the time Mari and her friend Phyllis make it to the city, we are thoroughly on board with them as characters.

In a particularly skillful transition, as Mari and Phyllis drive to the city for the concert they hear a radio report about an escaped murderer and rapist, Krug, and his band of cronies: the knife-happy Weasel, his son Junior (a heroine addict), and an “animal-like” woman named Sadie. As the report plays, the scene cuts to an apartment building where Krug, Weasel, Sadie, and Junior are hiding out, watching television and drinking beer.

Krug (one of the best villains in movie history, in my opinion) is played with a sexy menace by David Hess. The other actors, though they do not rise to his level of magnetism, are excellent: Junior is endearing, as he is basically a good person with an addiction that keeps him bound to Krug; Weasel works through the scenes with a subtle, quiet menace; and Sadie, with her thick eyeliner and teased hair, is the high school bad-girl from hell. When the girls go looking for some weed before the concert, they meet Junior, who has been sent out by Krug to snare some prey. When the girls meet Krug and his gang, it’s clear that they won’t make it out. As the audience, we know this, but they do not; this makes their pleading, their reasonable arguments, all the more painful.

At this point, it’s probably time to mention that this film roughly follows the plot of Virgin Spring, a 1960 film by Ingmar Bergman about the rape and murder of a young girl and her murderers who take refuge in her family’s house, only to be murdered themselves by the girl’s father. Although there has been some debate about how seriously one should take this imitation (after all, Bergman’s film is considered a “serious” movie and Craven’s was an “exploitation” movie, terms that affect critical reception, if nothing else), I think that Craven’s film is interested in completely different aspects of this basic set-up. In Bergman’s movie, the girl is much younger, twelve or thirteen, and is more of a symbol of purity than a real person. In Craven’s movie, the girls aren’t angels—Mari and Phyllis are out to score pot before they see a rock band. They are aware of their sexuality—in scenes before they leave for the concert, they discuss sex and romance, and Phyllis dismisses Mari’s childish ideas about sex. In this movie, the girls are human and complex, and therefore more personally compelling than Bergman’s allegorical girl could ever be. They could be any normal teenage girls, and they are targeted simply because they are beautiful and curious.

This movie is famous for being bloody and graphic. Although it is more graphic and bloody than any regular thriller, it’s not really the blood or gore that is disturbing—it’s the acts that the girls are forced to perform, the terror and hope that flits across their faces as they perform humiliating acts, and the hope that they just might escape (a hope that is never realized), that makes the movie tense and distressing. During the protracted scene where the girls are taken to the woods (just across the road from Mari’s house), made to perform humiliating sexual acts, then murdered (in Phyllis’ case) and raped and murdered (in Mari’s case), the cheap, documentary-style film making really work to Craven’s benefit—the movie looks cheap, and dirty, and real, which makes it terrifying.

Another remarkable aspect of this film is the complexity of the villains. They are indeed villains, and they take real joy in the terrible things they do, but they also express remorse. In the case of Junior, who does not participate in the murders, we have a complete innocent who is bound to his father by love and by his addiction. In one pivotal scene, after Krug and the others (excluding Junior) have raped Mari, the gang look away as she gets on her hands and knees and vomits. We get closeups of Krug, Weasel, and Sadie picking grass from their hands, trying to compose their faces and ignore the sound of her gagging.

The most famous scenes in the movie involve the revenge that Mari’s parents take on Krug and his gang after they figure out that Mari was murdered. The elaborate, bloody ways that they kill Krug, Weasel, Sadie, and ultimately Junior are satisfying—at this point, the viewer wants something to happen to them, for some kind of justice to be meted out–but they are also terrible. They transform Mari’s parents, two decent and normal people, into sadistic murderers, and this is difficult to see.

Although I think this movie is a classic and one of the best examples of the genre, it does have some less than stellar moments. The most glaring error in the movie was Craven’s choice to include a bumbling sheriff and deputy in the movie. They are supposed to be for comic effect, I suppose, but whenever they show up in the movie, it feels like we have suddenly been thrown into an episode of Dukes of Hazzard.

Overall, this movie creates a tightly-wound, distressing, and alarmingly realistic picture of murder and revenge. Craven showed in this movie that he could both terrify his audience and make them think about what it means to view humiliation and death. The movie leaves its audience disturbed and haunted.

• ★★★★★

  Acting:

• ★★★★★

  Blood:

• ★★★★★

  Violence:

• ★★★★★

  Partying:

• ★★★★★

  Language:

• ★★★★★

  Humor:

• ★★★★★

  Predictable:

• ★★★★★

  Girls:

• ★★★★★

  Gore:

• ★★★★★

  Sexuality:

• ★★★★★

  Torture:

• ★★★★★

  Overall:

good movie from the seventies

Good to see you reference Bergman's "The Virgin Spring" and you're right to mention the symbolic way that Bergman's film works. Craven's is totally devoid of symbolism, opting instead for brutal realism instead of abstraction. Of course Last House itself has been somewhat recuperated by its own apparent allegorical nature - in this case a reflection of attitudes to violence during the Vietnam conflict (or is this just a case of Craven - who likes to think of himself as an arty cut above the rest's attempt to make his film more than the vile exploitation film it is?). I think the one major weakness of the film is a narrative that hinges on a totally contrived coincidence - what are the chances of the gang of scum bags actually happening upon the home of their victim?