Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [40]
There is no such miracle at the end of The Last House on the Left. In a godless world without redemption, it includes no struggle with faith. Instead, the senseless evil inspires just more senseless evil, adding up to a nihilism that invites no happy endings.
The movie contrasts the savage, criminal gang with a bourgeois civilized family and reveals that they share more in common than you think. The marauding criminals began as a kind of parody of a parent’s worst nightmare, but in these early scenes, Craven makes a point of showing us the dynamics within the gang to humanize them. Krug’s son Junior desperately wants his attention, and he appears stunned by his cruelty. When the family of misfits enters the well-appointed house of the Collingwoods, the parents of the victims, they immediately sense the limitations of their class. They don’t know proper etiquette at the dinner table. They are uncomfortable. Craven generates a sneaky sympathy for the killers.
The movie ends with more of a question mark than an exclamation point. We are left wondering what the director was exactly trying to say. Night of the Living Dead is a movie about a survivor battling hordes of zombies that ends on a note of nihilistic defeat. What made Rosemary’s Baby such a radical break from the past was that unlike almost every other film about the battle with the Devil, there was no fight to the finish at the end. Who knows what happened to the survivors of the zombie attack or to Rosemary after the movies end? What’s clear is that things are more uncertain than they were in the science-fiction movies of the 1950s. What connects Last House to the terror of Night of the Living Dead and Rosemary’s Baby is moral ambiguity. That point was made emphatically in the final scene.
Once they discover the terrible crime, the Collingwoods do not do the civilized thing and call the police to get the killers arrested. Instead they take the law into their own hands, attacking and killing each member of the gang in increasingly brutal ways. A character is slashed to death by an electric boat fan. One of the most humiliating scenes in Last House on the Left features the victim’s mother, played by Cynthia Carr, castrating one of the killers while giving him a blow job. Carr had it written into her contract that she would not actually have to perform fellatio on-screen.
The movie winds down to the climactic face-off between Krug and the victim’s father, the battle of the patriarchs. Craven imagined Krug to be killed with a scalpel, since the father was a doctor. Cunningham disagreed. With perfect exploitation instincts, he insisted on a chain saw. After killing Krug, the father slumps to the ground, stunned, shocked at the extent to which he had gone to avenge the death of his daughter. If the movie appears to invite the audience to revel in vigilante justice, this final shot, according to Craven, complicates it. The respectable parents have become what they most despise. The insanity of the criminal family was not so different from that found in the normal one. The original script of Last House started with this quote from Yoko Ono: “Violence is just one of those feelings that come when you’re unable to communicate. Art is communication.”
Most audiences who first saw this movie thought they were going to see a trashy good time, a few dead bodies to laugh at. But they discovered that this was a movie that was very difficult to enjoy without guilt.
To Craven, the