Top 25 Greatest Halloween Films: #8 – 'The Last House on the Left' (1972)

#8: The Last House on the Left (1972)

How’d we get into the sex crime business anyway? My brother, Saul, a plumber, makes twice as much money as I do and gets three weeks’ vacation too.

There are suspense films, there are horror films, there are monster movies, thrillers, chillers, and plenty of splatter-fests… and then there’s the primal experience of watching a nightmarish assault on your own emotional senses unfold before your very eyes; a nightmare you can neither stop nor turn away from. Writer/director Wes Craven’s stunning debut with producer Sean Cunningham (“Friday the 13th”) is, believe it or not, based on Ingmar Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring,” a film set in the 14th Century about a young girl raped and killed by three murderers who unwittingly turnaround and make the mistake of asking their victim’s parents for shelter for the night. I haven’t seen this film – watching Bergman’s stillborn ruminations on death makes me long for its sweet release – but those bare bones of a plot do match “Last House,” which audaciously opens by telling us that what we’re about to see is based on a true story.

Please let that be creative invention.

On the edge of 17, Mari Collingwood (Sandra Peabody), a fetchingly wholesome and beautiful girl who lives with her loving mother and doctor father in the quiet countryside, decides to celebrate her upcoming birthday by leaving the safe confines of hearth and home for an adventure in the big bad city with her more rebellious friend Phyllis (Lucy Grantham). Like a lot of kids that age, the idea is to score a little dope and rock out the evening at a “Bloodlust” concert. No harm no foul, right? Not in Craven’s world.

The two girlfriends enjoy an ice cream and stroll through the mean streets towards the concert when they chance upon the ferret-faced, bashful and rather harmless looking Junior Stillo (Marc Sheffler), who throws off just enough of a hippie-cool vibe that the girls tentatively approach him about the weed. At first Junior isn’t interested and blows them off. But just as they’re about to walk away and escape safely into the rest of their lives — into what’s sure to be a long and idyllic existence in the suburbs shared with loving husbands and adoring children, something changes Junior’s mind and he calls them back. The drugs are inside, he informs them, and into Hell they walk.

Over the course of two days and at the hands of a gang of three utterly depraved and remorseless, sexually-twisted killers, Mari and Phyllis are degraded in unimaginable ways before being dispassionately tortured and murdered like the playthings the hulking monster of a leader Krug (David Hess), the depraved psychotic Weasel (Fred J. Lincoln), and the feral Sadie (Jermie Rain) see them as. Later and purely by coincidence (the murders take place in the woods nearby), the marauders – still flushed with the thrill of the kill – are unaware that they’ve just made up a story about car trouble to and accepted an invitation to spend the night from Mari’s own parents.

Because they’re given Mari’s bedroom, the four quickly discover the coincidence but it’s the middle-class wealth and comfort around him that raises Krug’s bloodlust. Thankfully, before the pack of predators can mount the inevitable attack they all pass out drunk. Mom and Dad eventually put the pieces together, though, and – God bless ’em – without blinking an eye decide to take care of business. Using everyday household items, this average suburban couple has no qualms about giving into their own bloodlust through the use of a nasty plan to painfully dispatch with the dirty, filthy hippies currently sleeping snugly in their murdered daughter’s bed. Shaving cream, a rusty shotgun, electricity, sexual seduction, and a chainsaw – the tools of one helluva parental reckoning.

To say “Last House on the Left” has no redeeming quality is an understatement (though watching a hippie get chainsawed does have its own particular charm). But the utter senselessness of it all is the whole point – the ultimate in horror — and not at all unique in this particular genre. Is there a moral I’m missing behind the untold number of teen slasher films released without a hint of controversy every year? And yet, “Last House” is frequently sneered at by some as nothing more than a sick snuff film, which is absurd – because it’s not a snuff film. While the relentlessly brutal and disturbing story most certainly reflects the documentary roots of its creator, what we’re watching is fiction and so the criticism is really about the film’s effectiveness, isn’t it?

What separates this nearly unwatchable masterpiece from thousands of other equally gratuitous exploitative grinders is that it works on an emotional level like nothing else I’ve ever seen. Almost every other horror film that’s tried this approach – including the stupidly over-produced 2009 remake – that’s wallowed in violent mayhem, torture and human depravity, almost immediately becomes tedious and uninvolving because the storyteller has nothing else to offer other than spectacle. Not so with “Last House.” You not only care about these two young girls but every time you revisit them something inside you hopes against hope that Junior won’t call Mari and Phyllis back; that some unseen hand will reach into the godawfulness of it all and just make it stop.

But it never does. No matter how many times you watch, Junior always calls those beautiful young girls back and then it happens – the big, wet, heavy black ball of dread sitting in your stomach grows even larger like some sort of cancer that eats away at your insides. You want to look away, you want to turn it off, but you can’t. You keep watching and waiting for a miracle that never comes.

That’s horror.