PublicIt depends on who reads this from outside Dreamwidth World, but it's possible one or two will who may remember me, in a very different context a few weeks ago, being unusually if briefly vehement in my negative opinion of David Hess. Well, today you get to find out why. Some of it, at any rate. This isn't everything. I'll get there.
As for the details: to copy/paste my intro comment from last time, the forty-minute documentary
Celluloid Crime of the Century, which has a copyright date of 2002 but was released in 2003, is included as an extra on many collectors' editions of the
The Last House on the Left. That's the documentary featuring Marc Sheffler's cliff threat,
which I've already covered. Well, in the very same video we get David Hess, who played Krug, the sadistic leader of the gang, talking about his actions in the rape scene. In which, let me remind you, he played the rapist and Peabody played Mari, his victim. Between the two segments of Hess's interview is a short section from producer Sean S. Cunningham, which is simply descriptive of Krug's terrifying nature, so I've left that out of the transcript. Here's what Hess said:
Transcript
HESS: [Sandra was your] archetype upper-middle class Protestant – repressed Protestant – you know. And how do you deal with that? How do you deal with it? Well, you try to find ways of stabbing her and her repression.
[CUNNINGHAM comments briefly.]
HESS: I scared the living shit out of her, man. She really thought I might—I started to pull her pants down, and grab her tits and everything, and I mean she really, I mean... and I looked up at Wes [Craven] at one point and I said, "Can I?" And then she freaked.
And yes, you are reading that right. No, that was not in the script. Yes, he was improvising while filming a rape scene. Yes, like that. So, in this interview segment, does Hess apologise for doing this to Peabody? Does he say it was wrong? Does he go even as far as expressing mild regret and saying he maybe wouldn't have done the same these days (ie in 2002)? Well, what do you think? Of course he doesn't. He just tells the story as another "tale from the set".
One of my extremely rare content warnings for the below video: this one is
not simply done with Hess on camera and little else. This segment is specifically about Mari's rape scene, and so there are several stills of her character in and around that part of the film. It's not possible to cut the video to avoid these. There is also a short video clip of part of the rape scene that ends immediately before Hess's comments begin. You don't actually
need the visuals, though, so if you want to just listen to the audio you'll still hear everything that matters.
Video of Hess recounting this storyCelluloid Crime of the Century (YouTube) – time stamp set to start of Hess's anecdote at 18:23
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fandom_checkin2025-09-26 06:15 pm
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