The Last House On The Left (1972)

Some films feel like you MUST see them. That's doubly true when you're a horror fan. In fact, it's triple (triply??) true when you're a British horror fan who spent a number of years hearing about infamous titles that were removed from public consumption by an over-zealous BBFC. Yes, I'm on about those video nasties again, but I'm not just on about the situation here in the UK. I'm on about those moments that lead to conversations, that lead to you becoming friends with more and more horror fans, discovering the huge global community of people who have all been given the same funny looks and had the same judgements made about them as they enthusiastically rented some piece of nastiness from their local video store. Those moments lead to you hearing about, or discussing, key films. You get the undisputed classics, you get the enduring favourites, and you get films that wallow in their infamy for a short period of time, often just before their power starts to fade away.

The Last House On The Left is a film in that latter category. It is the kind of film you will most likely have a vivid memory of seeing for the first time, perhaps even something that you can deliver as an anecdote (but a different kind of anecdote from one like being taken as a child to see E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial and remembering how many other children were as wet-eyed and snot-nosed as you were while the parents wondered what they had done to upset Steven Spielberg so).

Having said that, I don't have any anecdote to put here. I saw this film as I was making my way through a lot of the horror movies I had never been able to find in my pre-internet days. This was one of the better video nasties, I knew that much as soon as I'd watched it, but it wasn't up there with the very best. Yet it stays with you. It's a film that feels dangerous in a way a lot of the others don't. It sticks to you. If some movies feel like a cosy blanket, The Last House On The Left is a layer of dust and debris that cakes your skin after a day spent in a harsh environment, the kind of thing that won't wash off without applying the kind of force to your scrubbing that will hurt.

Written and directed by Wes Craven, his feature debut, this is a savage reworking of The Virgin Spring. A young woman (Sandra Peabody) and her friend (Lucy Grantham) head to the city. They meet some bad people. Terrible things happen to them. The bad people end up at the home of the parents of the young woman (ma and pa played by Cynthia Carr and Richard Towers). Those are the plot points that you'll probably already know. I'm not going to say any more.

Craven was an angry young man when he made this film. He wanted to create something brutal and shocking, but also wanted to make it bearable (which he attempts to do with the biggest mis-step of the film, scenes involving a pair of bumbling police officers, one of whom is played by a young Martin Kove). It's a film that he would look over many years later with a critical eye, acknowledging the negative aspects while still admiring what he achieved.

And he's right to feel that way. While not quite as powerful or intense as it may have been when first released, this is a brutal piece of work, open to multiple interpretations by different viewers, from a warning about the dangers of drugs to an exploration of common nightmares to a commentary on the Vietnam War. It's also one hell of a calling card for Craven, putting out there the mastery of horror elements and obsession with the thin line between civility and barbarism that he would display repeatedly over the next few decades.

There have been major essays written about this movie. Much more than I could ever say, and in a clearer and more intelligent way. I'll just say that it's a film that you can never unsee. David Hess gives the most memorable performance of his career, playing the loathsome Krug (a role that would see him typecast that way in a few other movies), he's ably supported by Jeramie Rain, Marc Sheffler, and Fred J. Lincoln, all of them effectively nasty in a way that makes any viewer want to see them get their just desserts by the time the end credits roll.

Craven may now view this as something he would have approached differently, but horror fans can be glad that he rushed headlong into a boundary-pushing slice of exploitation nastiness that easily holds up alongside anything else we've had under that umbrella. You may not enjoy it, you may not rush to rewatch it, but it's an essential horror film, and one of a number of touchstones in the career of someone who gave us such a wide variety of scares.

8/10

You can buy the movie here.
Americans can buy the movie here.

Wes Craven (1939 - 2015)

I cannot just take back everything I've ever said about Wes Craven, so I'm not going to, but his passing made me take a moment to think about his body of work. And, DAYUM, he certainly cast one hell of a huge shadow over the horror genre. Over the years I have joined in conversations about Craven to offset some praise that I may have seen as overly enthusiastic. I referred to the man as a great craftsman, as opposed to a great artist, and I would often mention my annoyance with his obsession over booby traps and how they were so often used in his work to hammer home the point about how thin the veil can be between civility and savagery. And then there was the fact that his name was used, rightly or wrongly, to sell a lot of inferior movies to us horror fans in the past couple of decades. Hey, he's not the first and he won't be the last. It just took the shine off his reputation, and made it even easier to forget about his fantastic legacy.

Let's start at the beginning, and look at a number of his better-known works.

  
The Last House On The Left (1972) may well be a sleazy reworking of The Virgin Spring but it led to numerous horror/exploitation movies that would either wear their influence in the title (The Last House On Dead End Street) or in their obviously similar plotting (Night Train Murders AKA Late Night Trains). And that infamous tagline has also been riffed on by numerous, inferior films. Not only was Craven a startling, daring director, but he also seemed to align himself with great marketing.

And then, after a little-remembered movie entitled The Fireworks Woman (1975), came The Hills Have Eyes (1977).

Craven once again seemed to single-handedly create a new horror genre touchstone with his intense, nasty tale of inbred killers pushing a family well beyond breaking point. And he created, arguably, his second major horror icon with the help of Michael Berryman.

The next few years brought some interesting additions to Craven's filmography, including some TV work, a comic book movie (the enjoyable Swamp Thing - which benefits from a great cast and a scene in which Adrienne Barbeau bathes in jungle waters that would have made the teenage me spontaneously combust if I'd been fortunate enough to see it nearer the time of its initial release), and a much-maligned sequel to The Hills Have Eyes that features one of the most amusingly unfathomable flashback sequences ever, with the notable exception of Freaked.

Thankfully, in the very same year, Craven also served us up a very dark dream. A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984).

"If Nancy doesn't wake up screaming she won't wake up at all." ANOTHER great tagline. I think it would be redundant of me to try digging deeper into this horror classic. Most people know by now that Craven got the idea from a bizarre news story, and New Line Cinema developed in the '80s into "The House That Freddy Built." What I will tell you, that you may not know already, is that I first saw this movie when I was about 10-11 years old. And I loved it. It was the most intense horror I had ever seen at that point in my life (Halloween was already a comfortable old friend by then, and I had yet to really delve further into the genre). It had some fleeting nudity, a cute leading lady, torrents of bloodshed, and unforgettable visual flourishes. And it also had Freddy Krueger. Yes, the first movie may have kept the slasher icon (ANOTHER icon) as a darker, less talkative, character but he was still the main draw. Just waiting to see what he would do next was equally exciting and terrifying. He broke all the rules. As did I, that very night, when I ended up switching on my bedroom lamp for the duration of the night, to ward off the boogeyman (a situation that seriously displeased my mother when she came in the next morning to find that I'd been letting a bulb burn all through the night).

That would have been enough for most directors, but Craven used his success to keep delivering more interesting slices of entertainment for us horror fans. They weren't all good, but how can you not love Deadly Friend (1986) when it gave us all THIS moment? And The Serpent And The Rainbow (1988) became, for many, the only non-Romero "zombie" movie to provide scares without repeating the gore and shocks that we'd already seen so many times before. Shocker (1989) and The People Under The Stairs (1991) may remain more products of their time than actual enduring classics but I can't deny having a lot of fun with them when I first saw them. I don't think many would say the same about Vampire In Brooklyn (1995) - although, in fairness, I haven't even seen this one for myself yet; it's reputation precedes it.

A low point? Perhaps. But not for long. Because along came Scream (1996).

  
Scream took the horror genre conventions and played with them in a perfect way to blend real scares/thrills with major entertainment value in a way that had eluded Craven when he tried to explore thematically similar material (a la meta-layering) in the unjustifiably dismissed New Nightmare (1994), a film which has at least grown in stature in the years since it was first served up to unwitting, and perhaps unprepared, audiences.

Scream has divided horror fans in recent years. While it's hard to deny that it gave the horror genre a much needed shot in the arm it's equally hard to deny that it also led to some major bad habits that don't look likely to be broken any time soon (the floating head poster design being just one minus, with the pop culture riffing also sitting uneasily within scripts that aren't clever or witty enough to carry it off successfully). I've even been sucked in to the recent MTV TV show. Don't judge me.

Some of those bad habits came to the fore when Craven teamed up with screenwriter Kevin Williamson once again to refresh the werewolf movie with Cursed (2005). I am one of the few people who find Cursed to be a lot of fun. It's majorly flawed, with two of the biggest problems being poor CGI and a distinct lack of decent bloodshed (leaving the film, ironically, feeling quite toothless), but the script is fun, the central performances from Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg, Judy Greer and Milo Ventimiglia are great, and it has a clear love from the cinematic history of lycanthropy that it is springboarding from.

Didn't like Cursed? No problem. Craven showed that he could leave the CGI aside to craft some masterful suspense when he released Red Eye (2005).

Cillian Murphy and Rachel McAdams helped make Red Eye so enjoyable, but it's clear that the direction from Craven is what enables this particular piece of hokum to flat-out entertain, despite a central premise that is absolutely ludicrous when you give it even a few seconds of actual thought. Thankfully, Craven doesn't let you have any time to figure that out. He's busy letting his cast have fun in a game of cat and mouse that involves wince-inducing use of a pen, bluffery, and the constant threat of escalating violence.

My Soul To Take (2010) may not have been a great swansong for the horror master, which is why we're lucky to have Scream 4 (2011). Some may disagree, but I think it took the franchise to the next logical step, and showed that Craven could easily create new and imaginative ways for teenagers to perceive horror. Which, in a way, is what he did all the way back in that Last House On The Left.

RIP Wes Craven - check out his entire filmography at IMDb here, as I deliberately kept this piece focused on his horrors, and more specifically the horrors that I had seen, and you'll probably be tempted to watch at least one of his movies this week.