Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [39]
Craven ruthlessly held down costs by keeping salaries low and staying, along with the young cast and crew, at Cunningham’s mother’s house in Connecticut. Inspired by documentary films of the day, Craven did not object to his star David Hess’s method-style brutality as Krug, the heartless leader of the criminal gang. Hess performed with a coiled, maniacal aggression that was as terrifying as it was unsettling to watch. On the set, it was equally uncomfortable, which he readily admits. “I was very mean to the girls, so when it came to the rape scene [Sandra Cassell] didn’t have to act,” he says, referring to the costar who played one of the victims. “I told her, ‘I’m really going to fuck you if you don’t behave yourself.’ They’ll just let the camera run.”
Craven was fascinated by the philosophy of cinema verité—the increasingly popular documentary form that insists you never turn the camera away from the action. But his movie was far too haphazardly made to stick to one style for long. A strange subplot about local law enforcement bumbling around to a sound track out of a three-ring circus reveals a silly sense of humor at odds with the rest of the movie. Horror films often use comedy to release the tension, but that’s not what was going on here, mostly because Craven was blissfully unaware of the conventions of the genre. “I had no background in horror,” he says. “I didn’t even know what a horror film was—in some sense, I kind of made it up as I went along.”
The story was a spin on Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, hardly the usual source material for exploitation films. No director connoted European artistic seriousness as much as Bergman. Made only two years after his classic The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring is based on a medieval ballad about a virginal girl abducted in the woods on her way to church. She is raped by three goatherders after her half sister invokes a pagan curse. Craven begins with the same story but instead of going to church, the young girls head to a kind of secular church for young hipsters, a rock concert in the East Village. The band performing was called Bloodlust. Craven ups the ante on the violence by making the film less about assault than about a kind of beastly humiliation.
The killers don’t just rape the girl. They make her friend watch. Last House focuses on the faces of the victims with an unbearable realism. The killings in this film are not suspenseful or elegantly shot. They are amateurish, designed to maximize the most horrible primal fears. At one point, Krug forces his victim to pee on herself. The next year a little girl does the same thing in The Exorcist, a movie that would reach (and upset) far more people. “I had sensed that it was one of the most humiliating things that happens to people,” Craven says. “There’s a really deep shame in peeing on yourself. To have someone make you do that, I knew it would be chilling, and when you do something like that, you are announcing: This is not your parents’ Pontiac. This is about nastiness on a very deep level.”
Cunningham says the in-your-face violence was a reaction to movies like Straw Dogs and Dirty Harry that use bloodshed to titillate. Precisely shot storms of bullets and blood are romantically choreographed to reveal a minimum of suffering. Not only are murders clean and quick, but they are accompanied by a variety of moral loopholes. Dustin Hoffman guns down invaders, but he is standing up for his wife; Clint Eastwood’s vigilantism is at the expense of criminals.
Craven, by contrast, claims the graphic murders were a response to the media’s delicate treatment of the Vietnam War. Since Night of the Living Dead, horror films often showcased a political subtext. Craven, like Romero, was not an overly political artist, but because of the radicalism of the counterculture, such themes were unavoidable.