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By Root 758 0

revenge at the end of Last House was designed to leave audiences disgusted, not exhilarated. It was the reverse of the morally cleansing conclusion of The Virgin Spring. The revenge was evidence that we all have a savage side and there was nothing to learn from that but that violence begets more violence. Not everyone bought this interpretation. Most critics saw this violence as merely appealing to the basest dreams of teenage male thrill-seekers. Part of the reason for this tension lies in how the movie was made. Cunningham thought it was too angry, disturbing, and difficult to enjoy. Horror, to him, is “a roller-coaster ride.” When you design a roller coaster, you want something sturdy, tested, and reliable. It has to scare people but not so much that they won’t feel safe. “In [Craven’s] mind, the parents had become that which they were trying to eradicate,” Cunningham says. “I’m not so sure. I think for most people it was just revenge.”

Cunningham was concerned about exhibitors rejecting the movie. When it started getting picked up by theaters, moving from city to city in short runs, he tried to cut out some of the more disturbing scenes to satisfy local theaters unhappy about the content of the movie. “Sean had very different opinions about the movie in general,” Craven says. “Once it was made, Sean thought it was disgusting and that we shouldn’t have done it.”

Craven stood by the film, defending it among friends. But he wasn’t always sure of himself. “It’s not an easy place to be—to write a horror film,” he says. “It’s hard. You go down the stairs to the dark to find these characters. It’s not a place that anyone can go, and sometimes it’s not a place that you want to go.” More than any other director of the era, Craven returned to this dark basement again and again, not just kicking off his career in horror, but building one in it.

The Last House on the Left shifted the horror movie away from children’s entertainment and toward extreme adult scares. It was treated as a genre movie, but it was something much more personal. It’s probably a good thing that Caroline Craven never saw The Last House on the Left, or, for that matter, any of the rest of her son’s scary movies. “For all her genuine love toward me, I never felt like she loved who I really was,” Craven says, looking back, glassy-eyed. “Maybe Last House was just flying in the face of my mother’s judgment. You want to see violent? You want to see sick? Here it is!”

Reviewers were apoplectic and often didn’t treat the movie as horror at all. In the early seventies, the most disturbingly violent movies belonged to other genres. Sam Peckinpah’s highbrow rape-revenge movie Straw Dogs and John Boorman’s survivalist tragedy Deliverance were dark dramas that did not traffic in the fantastic but suggested that the essence of man, in extreme circumstances, reverts to something beastly.

There were very few prints of The Last House on the Left, and it traveled from town to town, leaving controversy and splenetic reviews in its wake. The Hartford Courant called it “a horrible, sick film.” The critic from The Boston Globe didn’t even show up. The New York Times reviewer walked out. “We even had a bomb threat,” Cunningham says. “‘This film was so violent that we’re gong to bomb your theater.’”

When Craven told people what movie he had directed, cocktail party conversations abruptly ended. Even his cast was embarrassed: Jeramie Rain recalls seeing the movie and thinking it “was the worst movie ever made.” David Cameron, Craven’s old student, refused to see it. After Harry Chapin, the brother of Steve, read the script, he called up Bonnie and asked: “All I want to know is this: what was your sex life like?” Bonnie was herself deeply horrified. Later on, she would go to a college reunion after she and Craven had divorced and the question she heard from an old boyfriend, a missionary, rankled her: “What was it like to be married to Wes Craven?” She had no response, but her son did. “I remember in school a kid making fun of me because my dad was on a double bill with I Drink