Films: 1970s
(1972) The Last House on the Left
Thursday, January 01, 2015
The Last House on the Left
Director: Wes Craven
Release: 1972
Wes Craven made his bones in movies prior to "A Nightmare on Elm Street," and he made his mark with "A Nightmare on Elm Street" in 1984, but he made, with 1972's "The Last House on the Left" an angry, revolting, sad and nearly perfect film.
A station wagon brings the mailman (Ray Edwards) and the mailman introduces us to Mari Collingwood (Sandra Cassel), on her 17th birthday. Mari is a perfect and virginal image, an impasto shape of Venus behind shower glass as the title credits play to a 1970s soul-rock soundtrack.
Craven introduces his audience to two separate families. One is the Collingwoods. Father and mother, Dr. John and Estelle (Gaylord St. James and Cynthia Carr), are idyllic, stern but fair, ready to give their daughter a bittersweet sendoff towards adulthood that 17 represents.
Meanwhile, across town, a very different family unit makes the airwaves. Krug Stillo (David Hess) and his son Junior (Marc Sheffler) are hiding out from the law with child molester Fred "Weasel" Podowski (Fred Lincoln) and Krug's nominal girlfriend Sadie (Jeramie Rain). The Stillo gang is a soiled opposite of the Collingwoods. Hardly well-adjusted and future-minded, the Krug clan are rapists and heroin-addict murderers at each other and the world's throats. While John Collingwood is a moral and flexible patriarch, Krug is jealous and possessive (he's hooked Junior on junk to control him). While Mari is pure and mature, Sadie is a bratty and conflicted creature, described as strong, hairy and animalistic by the media and eager to play father and son against each other from the bathtub.
The two families are destined to meet.
Mari is bound for a night on the town with her friend Phyllis Stone (Lucy Grantham) to see rock band Bloodlust. John and Estelle aren't sure they approve of either friend or band, but they are trying to let go of their child-daughter and promote her new adult identity. They give Mari a peace-sign necklace and see her off into the world.
Phyllis and Mari spend some time reveling in the sunshine, drinking from a bottle and then hit the rough part of town in which the concert is held. Trying to score some weed prior to the show, they run into Junior and Junior leads them to Krug and company. The girls are kidnapped, raped and killed over a day and a half, practically in the Collingwoods' backyard, where, despite the odds, they have selected a stretch of woods in which to do their deeds.
"The Last House on the Left" transforms yet again when the Krug gang climb out of the woods and seek refuge in the nearest home - the Collingwoods'. While John and Estelle play host to what initially seem a strange but needy foursome - Estelle soon sees the peace-sign necklace on Junior and the mother and father hatch a brutal plan of revenge that blurs the line - and reduces the distance - between the opposites that the two families initially represent.
Craven is working on so many levels in "The Last House on the Left" that it is difficult to identify a primary theme. On the macro level, he's unpacking basic good and evil within a sociological context.
In the wake of the 1960s, from which the Collingwoods have emerged believing their daughter is part of a "love generation" (she started her teen years after all, in the heady 1967-1969 idealism), and that some illusory purpose still adheres to the American youth. While destined for something very different, Mari represents that very flower of hope and truthful living. She is on a mission to the "bad part of town" where she shall dance and sing. What she is going to see is no flower-power band, though, but a clear indication the times are a'changing. Bloodlust is rumored to kill animals during their show. Mari blooms at the edge of darker times.
Meanwhile, the Krug family is a post-hippy death-trip come to life. Refugees of the drugged years that preceded, the lawless but safe world now gone wrong, Krug is fresh out of jail and Junior is a junky with early tooth-decay. Free love is captive; Sadie is strung out and full of conflict - not straight, not lesbian, not aligned with any one cause but bent on beer and kicks. The family is set on slow implode.
Craven is digging through the innards of the hippy experience, mutating the drifting peacenik ideal into a foul reversal. Whereas in the dream-world of Woodstock, Mari would have found a new family like Phyllis, a pond-side, sun-drenched, wine-soaked marijuana "rebellion," she finds in 1972 a negative image of that experience. The Krug family are hooked, outcast and hungry for prey.
In the process of building towards its dark climax, Craven plays with atmosphere and the audience's relationship with characters. At times, the Krug family is threatening but hip in their destructiveness. Not until Krug and Weasel decide to point their ship toward murder does the sequence in the woods begin to slice into the viewers' psyches.
Making Phyllis urinate herself on threat of injury to Mari shifts "The Last House on the Left" into decidedly troublesome territory, and Craven ups the ante until the final double murder - in which Sadie actually rips the vitals (the symbolic womb) from Phyllis and Krug rapes and shoots Mari in front of his companions.
In between, Craven runs his characters through a gauntlet, causing them to confront themselves through the hideous nature of the Krug family's crimes. they face their own shadows, and their own ingredients: lesbianism, sisterhood, new friends breaking the child from the paternal mold, death of ego, shame and - chiefly - faith. Craven explore faith in leaders, faith in the essential goodness universe, faith in the protection of friends.
And he explores literal faith. During the violence, Craven layers religious imagery into the film.
There are two ablutions in the story. Both follow Mari's rape. In the first "washing", Mari stumbles away from the scene of her violation and walks into the water, awaiting final judgment. Once she is dispatched, the Krug family is oddly silent. Some corner has been turned. There is no joy left in them.
So they wash. Stripping their clothes away, the Krugs plunge into the same water, but they cannot get clean easily. The girls' blood sticks to them.
From that point, "The Last House on the Left" mounts a final ascent to its symbolic peak. In a kind of Last Supper, the Krugs join the still-ignorant Collingwoods for dinner. Sadie betrays details of their true nature by guzzling wine, which John notices. Junior plays Judas by crying out from his withdrawal-wracked-sleep, and then reveals Mari's jewelry during his drug-sick session in the bathroom.
The Collingwoods shift into a kind of Biblical vengeance.
First they fetch Mari from the water and lay her on the living room couch. Then, while the perpetrators sleep, John prepares the house with traps and weapons. What follows is a collision of light and dark. The Collingwoods and the Krug family perform a kind of fusion-dance, in which they act out drippingly twisted versions of family activities.
Estelle leads Weasel back to the pond, feeding his ego with sexual fantasy until she dramatically un-mans him with her teeth. "Mother and father" make love, but the encounter ends with castration.
Back at the house, John confronts Krug. A threefold father-son/ alpha-beta struggle ensues.
First Krug and John punch and wrestle in the living room, the evil son and the good father at war. Krug mocks John in the manner of conquering male over the household daughter - describing to John how he murdered Mari.
Junior intervenes, a sort of Oedipal revolt. Krug and Junior then complete their destiny in a different way though, as Krug commands his own son to commit suicide the very handgun used on Mari. Junior shoots himself and the father thus extinguishes his own line - a mythic reversal of the Greek story.
Last, John gains the upper hand with Krug, employing a chainsaw. The father destroys the son for a second time in Craven's film, simultaneously destroying the phallic predatory threat - too late, but importantly - eliminating the outsider seeking the first daughter of the family.
Outside, symbolic "mother" and "daughter" enact a shadow-mockery of domestic bliss. Estelle and Sadie tear at each other in the leaves. If the scene were devoid of soundtrack and context, a viewer might associate their tumbling as autumnal fun.
Next, Sadie falls into the pool. Again, a family activity of play is acted out - employing the visual cues of normal yard fun, but when the story is followed it ends in death. The "mother" kills the "daughter" (in a reversal of basic Electra story and mirroring Mari's death in the pond).
A girl reaches maturity, a family lets go, the 1960s dump fruitless death into the 1970s and the American household becomes an evil mirror universe. Craven simultaneously depicts and shatters the television-fed world of family, collapsing "The Brady Bunch" into a black hole that swallows every character in "The Last House on the Left" and ejects them as strange dark matter.
Enormously influential, charting the course of future family-themed efforts by writer/directors such as Rob Zombie (see "The Devil's Rejects," in particular), "The Last House on the Left" is a mournful and aggressive American nightmare predicating Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" by a full two years.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
The Last House on the Left, 1972
There are two ablutions in the story. Both follow Mari's rape. In the first "washing", Mari stumbles away from the scene of her violation and walks into the water, awaiting final judgment.
