State of the Art

Last House on the Left

by Peg Aloi

Before Scream, before Nightmare on Elm Street, before Friday the 13th, there was Wes Craven's much-maligned directorial debut, Last House on the Left, which nonetheless achieved instant cult status upon its 1972 release. Controversial? More like incendiary. The New York Times called it "sickening tripe," The Boston Herald-Traveler found it "loathsome" and "repulsive," and the Boston Globe refused to review it at all. So volatile were the criticisms that the film has rarely been shown uncut; even the numerous versions available on video are heavily edited.

The plot? Two teenage hippies, Phyllis and Mari, on their way to see a rock concert are kidnapped, then graphically tortured, raped, and murdered by two escaped convicts and their female accomplice -- after which Mari's parents exact revenge upon the killers. Along the way there's disemboweling, a chainsaw decapitation, and a castration, among other atrocities. A schlock horror exploitation film or a misunderstood, groundbreaking cinematic tour de force? You decide.

For help in making your decision, check out David Szulkin's impressive user's guide, Wes Craven's Last House on the Left: The Making of a Cult Classic. Better yet, come hear Szulkin talk about his book when he introduces the film this Tuesday at the Harvard Film Archive. Szulkin, a Framingham native, was too young to see the film in the 1970s, but he became obsessed with it while studying at NYU. That's where he met Roy Frumkes, filmmaker and publisher of the wonderful cinemag Films in Review, who in turn introduced him to Craven. Szulkin recalls, "I found the story behind it fascinating: how this low-budget, underground film has proved to be a historic event of its genre."

Frumkes saw Last House the week it opened with two film-industry friends, who walked out. He explains, "To me it went far beyond the sort of campy, unimaginative gore that had been seen before, like in Herschell Gordon Lewis's Blood Feast. It was totally unsettling and affecting; that's why my friends walked out." Frumkes then wrote Craven to say how much he admired the film. He received a brief reply -- "If you like it, you can have it!" -- along with a box containing all of the outtakes. (Szulkin has generously agreed to allow the Harvard Film Archive to show his 16mm uncut print, which he purchased from Frumkes; the only other such print belongs to Craven.)

Originally intended as a soft-core porn flick (the porn stars pulled out prior to shooting), Last House drew from Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring (on which Craven based his screenplay) as well as the collapse of the '60s flower-power ideal and television coverage of Vietnam. The murky lighting and newsreel-style cinematography created a cinéma-vérité look -- in fact, some of the film's unreleased outtakes were later passed off as actual snuff-film footage. As Frumkes tells it: "Craven got spit on at screenings, threatened by people; he was mortified. But in retrospect, he feels that Last House's raw power transcends any of the work he has done in Hollywood."

Szulkin once asked Craven about the film's extraordinary violence against women -- George Mansour, an independent film booker who sat in on some of the Craven-Frumkes editing sessions, still remembers an outtake in which a woman was sexually assaulted by a rat. Craven replied, "It's not misogynistic; it's misanthropic in every way. That's the point."

Last House on the Left will screen at the Harvard Film Archive in the Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy Street in Harvard Square, this Tuesday, May 25, at 8 p.m., to benefit the local cinezine Video Eyeball. David Szulkin and George Mansour will be present. Call 495-4700.