Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [37]
Hallmark specialized in importing foreign movies and brought some of the work of Mario Bava to the United States market. Twitch of the Death Nerve, a giallo in which teenagers are killed in various creative ways near a bay, was one of its great successes. The crucial insight of Hallmark’s marketers was that you can get away with anything if you do it in the name of art. And nothing telegraphed artistic seriousness like European cinema.
Hallmark booked Together in shopping malls and suburban complexes. Free screenings were held for local police and civic groups. It opened in August 1971 and it ran for thirty-one weeks at the Rialto Theater in New York. By February of the next year, Craven had gone from overseeing a student film to occupying the spot right beneath the new Bond film Diamonds Are Forever on the box office charts. Together proved that porn could go mainstream, setting the stage for the blockbuster success of Deep Throat. Cunningham’s goal was to do the same thing with horror.
Cunningham agreed to produce a bloody horror movie that would be shown in only a few theaters. The point was to make a quick buck. Seeing some talent in the college professor who helped in the editing room, Cunningham asked Craven to direct. Craven told him he had hardly seen a horror movie, let alone knew how to direct one. “You were raised fundamentalist,” Cunningham assured him. “Use it!”
WES CRAVEN felt the forbidden in society needed to be explored, the sins of the fathers exposed. Cunningham wanted to see lots of blood—up to a point. Their clashing personalities are part of what made The Last House on the Left such a strange mongrel: a mix of canny marketing and confrontational art, escapism and provocation, exploitation and political statement. Its dramatic center was an excruciating rape scene.
Rape has long been a theme of horror films, usually lurking right below the surface. At the intersection of sex and violence, the precise spot where the most disturbing horror films operate, anxiety about rape is on the minds of many audience members watching a young woman being chased on a dark night. It has often been a subtext in the vampire genre. By the early seventies, it became more explicit in movies like A Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs, and Deliverance. Rape is, at least in part, being used for shock, to show off a certain edgy taboo-pushing attitude. The worst examples aim for titillation, and other dispiriting ones adopt a clinical distance.
In an effort to recapture the youth market that it was losing to exploitation movies in the early seventies, Hammer Film Productions producer James Carreras insisted that a rape scene be added to Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, made around the time that Last House was filmed. Hammer had always been known as the tasteful horror company. So in response, Terence Fisher, the most seasoned and respected director of Hammer’s stable, walked out. Eventually a compromise was struck, but the assault remained in the film and seems completely out of place in an otherwise standard costume drama. “It was horrif ying,” says Veronica Carlson, the veteran horror star playing the woman being attacked. “I never did another Hammer movie again.”
The original script for Last House included rape fantasies and a scene where the killers open up the victim’s body and feast on her intestines. The final script follows