by Rebecca Kemp
The Slasher movie's debt to Wes Craven's Last House on the Left
In the early 1970s when most people were listening to The Osmonds, discovering the pocket calculator and watching Hello Dolly!, an unknown film director was penning his first hardcore-hardgore movie. Wes Craven's screenplay, known at the time as 'Night of Vengeance', would go on to become Last House on the Left , a ground-breaking, repulsive work that challenged conventional rules of film-making, spawned a whole history of copy-cats and remains one of the most influential movies of the last century.
"A lot of it was based on things I was reading that were going on in Vietnam , you know, cutting off the ears and carving the unit name into the dead Cong's chest," Craven said in interview, and there was a good deal going on in the world at the time. The New York Times was printing the Pentagon Papers, 11 Israeli athletes were killed at the Munich Olympic Games, Watergate was about to break and US racial tensions were high.
Against this backdrop of condoned violence, deceit and intolerance grew the seeds of a film that presented all these failings in full glorious technicolor. Craven had seen Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring (1960) and immediately felt compelled by its story of shattered innocence and retribution. Set in 14th century Sweden , the film concerns a young peasant girl who is brutally raped and murdered by a group of shepherds. The killers take shelter with the dead girl's parents, who discover the truth and set about slaughtering them . Last House on the Left follows the same pattern of events, moving the action to present-day 1970s America and involving two innocent young girls and a group of criminals, as well as copious amounts of blood and the odd severed limb.
Craven was born the son of strict fundamentalist Baptists, and as a child he wasn't allowed to play cards, dance or go swimming, let alone go to the theatre or cinema. His father died when he was five by which time, he told the New York Times in 1997, "I'd been exposed to a lot of anger and death." As an adult Craven was involved in a mostly academic career, moving to film shortly before he met Last House producer Sean Cunningham (who would later go on to produce Friday the 13th ). They worked on a few skin flicks together and a sex education film before deciding to turn their attentions to horror. Both men felt that films had never portrayed death realistically or shown what it was like to die.
Their budget was small, and Craven and Cunningham ended up making Last House for a mere $100,000. The cast were unknowns, and in the cases of Sandra Cassel (Mari Collingwood), Lucy Grantham (Phyllis Stone) and Fred Lincoln (Weasel) they had mainly been involved in adult films (Lincoln still makes a good living producing adult movies). The film was shot in Sean's backyard in Connecticut , using his mum's house, his family graveyard and his own car. A documentary filmmaking crew, complete with a single cameraman, was hired to give the film an authentic newsreel atmosphere.
This group of unknown actors performed their hearts out, literally in the case of Grantham whose character Phyllis is disembowelled, for Craven and Cunningham who by their own admission knew nothing about moviemaking. Whether it was carefully crafted or the result of serendipitous production techniques, this very mix of documentary back-garden rape included all the ingredients that horror filmmakers have used so much since we take it for granted.
Before Last House the horror genre consisted mainly of monsters, hauntings or the occult. Audiences had to make do with the Hammer horror films of the 1950s which paved the way for the likes of Blood Feast (1963) followed by Two-Thousand Maniacs (1964) and Color Me Blood Red (1965). These gore-fests could be said to be the first splatter or slasher movies - a term that is used in relation to Last House and one where the majority of the production budget is spent on fake human blood and animal organs.
Slashers were mostly American-made and looked longingly back to its puritan past where the home and family were sanctified and its pioneers tamed the wilderness. It emerged out of the peace-loving 1960s at a time when the free-love ethos was being replaced by the more materialist and conservative ideas of the 1970s and eighties. Slashers embraced this popular philosophy, peddling black and white morals where subversive teens who indulged in casual sex and drugs bring on death and destruction.
Outside America , Italy was also a prolific slasher producer with the giallo, meaning yellow after the pulp crime tales that were published mostly in Italy with yellow covers. Its foremost protagonists were Mario Bava and Dario Argento. Bava's occult horror Black Sunday (1960) is said to have influenced Bob Clark's Black Christmas (1973) an early sorority house slasher complete with an anonymous phone caller. Argento regarded Bava as a mentor and went on to make the equally chilling Susperia (1976). Other notable film-makers were ex-medical student Lucio Fulci and Joe D'Amato, the king of the Italian cannibal sub-genre. By the end of the 1980s these films had largely died out due to their increasingly disgusting plot and content.
Last House was released in the US in 1972, offending viewers and critics alike. Submitted for release in the UK in 1975 it was refused certification by the BBFC until 1981 when it briefly appeared on video, soon to became a victim of the 1985 Video Recordings Act which banned a whole host of 'video nasties'. Craven and Cunningham remained unrepentant - by 1982 the film had grossed $18m.
Last House has clearly influenced the massacre-slasher-splatter movie in many ways. The first, and most obvious, is the lack of monster or the supernatural. Those doing the slashing are regular looking guys and gals, if a little crazy - the monster is repressed in them instead of external to them. Krug and the other killers, as well as Mari's parents, wear no disguises, the film doesn't incorporate elaborate special effects, make-up, or scenery. It takes place in broad daylight, in the woods - just beyond Mari's backgarden, and involves actors who look like everyday people. It proudly displays its lack of need for stars such as Cushing or Price, bringing horror to the home, the high school and the house next door.
The film is not based on a nihilistic, Armageddon scenario, like many previous horrors, particularly George Romero's zombie films, or high-brow affairs like Psycho (1960) and Rosemary's Baby (1968). Craven set the trend for low-budget, accessible stories of every-day folk finding themselves in unbearable situations and using garden implements to fight their way out.
Realism came from the film's low-budget, an effect not previously seen in horror. "It was much more like a documentary, a lot of continuous takes with multiple coverage. We'd stage a scene three times and cover it from three angles," Craven has said in interview. David Hess who played Krug Stillo (Craven was later to expand this name to Krueger for his Nightmare series) was in character on and off set, and spent much of the time in brooding anger, stirring up trouble with the girls so that many of their expressions of terror, disgust and final resignation were apparently real. The Blair Witch Project (1999) has perhaps taken this to its furthest extreme with their film student documentary purported to be real footage of a deathly few days in the woods. But Craven had got there first. To make Last House seem even more realistic, a caption appears at the beginning telling the audience that the film is based on a true story. This of course is a lie, but helped the credibility of the film enormously and increased the hype surrounding it. Later 'snuff' movies carried this one step further with their claim to include real killings, but this has never been proved. Texas Chain Saw Massacre has also used this true story idea with great success despite being only very loosely based on the US serial killer Ed Gein.
Last House takes place not in the fantastic future or weird medieval past, but in the present, in a familiar environment. The juxtaposition of the woods/wilderness and the town is a prevalent theme in many slasher movies. In Last House the two victims face their ordeal in the countryside by a beautiful lake and waterfall. Much is made of their surroundings with long landscape shots accompanied by the film's beautifully folksy score (penned by David Hess). Enter the criminals who turn nature around on the innocents and corrupt it, making it hostile rather than friendly as it initially appears.
In this sense, slashers have a black and white view of the country and city. The city is rich and sophisticated whereas the country is poor and ignorant. In the city people have good professional jobs, in the country they either do menial work or sit around doing nothing. Once in the woods or country normal laws don't apply and new rules are written, based on the premise that the city has exploited the countryside, raping it of its natural wealth for its own profit and the country is getting its revenge.
Another 'video nasty' I Spit On Your Grave (1978) starts off in the city, where high-heeled, coiffeured Jennifer is heading to the country to write her novel. She first meets her rapists at a gas station where one works and the others hang around. Like Last House (and also filmed in Connecticut ) there are plenty of nature shots, disturbed by the group of country boys intent on teaching this city girl a lesson. In Friday the 13th a group of teens drive out to a summer camp (by a lake) where they are picked off one by one. In Texas Chain Saw Massacre a group of hippies are attacked by a family who used to work in the slaughterhouse, now displaced by corporate mechanisation they make a new living from sausages made from the human meat of city folk which they then sell back to the city. In Sam Raimi's Evil Dead (1982) a group of college kids find themselves trapped in a house in the woods, and one of the girls is even molested by tree branches. In Pumpkinhead (1988) a group of city kids take a trip to the country and accidentally kill the son of the local storekeeper, who summons a demon called Pumpkinhead to kill them.
Revenge and retribution cannot be ignored in Last House. Mr and Mrs Collingwood's decision to take the law into their own hands when they learn of their new houseguests' connection with their daughter turns out to be an extreme one, but we hardly feel sorry for their murderous, blood-lovin' victims. Similarly, Jennifer in ISPYG takes revenge on her rapists in a variety of gore infested ways, but she remains triumphant, holding an axe high above her head as she rides Boudica-like in a speedboat. Later films shifted this theme into that of a killer coming back from the dead/past to take revenge for a previous event. Freddy Kruger in the first Nightmare on Elm Street (1985) comes back to haunt the children of the parents who burned him alive, in I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) an unknown figure seeks revenge on teens after they accidentally run someone over, in My Bloody Valentine (1981) a killer wreaks havoc once more after absent security guards fail to stop a fatal accident, in Friday the 13th a mother takes revenge on teens who try to reopen the summer camp where her son died in an accident.
Last House's Collingwoods are a regular family driven to brutal deeds by the world outside, a theme that reoccurs in Craven's films. The dark side of the nuclear family crops up in The Hills Have Eyes (1977) with a family who are victims of radiation poisoning, in The People Under the Stairs (1991) with the abusive money-mad sibling-parents, also Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974/2003) features a family who resort to cannibalism after their business folds, Carrie (1976) a religiously obsessed single mother, and Fridaythe 13th (1980) a murdering mom.
By the 1980s Hollywood had become interested in the slasher/massacre genre and moved it away from the realm of the independent film-maker and broke fewer rules. Talking about Last House , Craven said in interview, "the original concept was to make a film that broke barriers, and we broke too many." Finding this hard to stomach, Hollywood created its own more muted version of the 'cinema-vomitif', which had its heyday in the late seventies and early eighties. They created their own signatures, such as bad houses (originally in Psycho , but later in Nightmare on Elm Street - Freddy's boiler room is in Nancy Thompson's Elm Street house, the Sawyer family residence in Texas Chain Saw Massacre , Laurie's babysitting venue in Halloween also revisited in Scream , and the house in the woods in Evil Dead ). Modern technology mostly proves useless: cars won't start, telephone lines go dead and mobiles don't work. Innocence and virginity are taken with relish by the killers and teens indulging in pre-marital sex are usually the first to go under the knife. But riding high is the lone female, who despite being trapped by her house, car or typecasting, makes mincemeat of her attacker and lives to see another day.
The slasher movie is currently undergoing somewhat of a renaissance with the remake of Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the release of House of 1000 Corpses, Wrong Turn, and now The Devil's Rejects. They contain the familiar storyline of teens getting lost and stumbling upon a family of inbred maniacs. Darkness Falls (2003) went for the revenge theme with its unjustly lynched witch in the woods, as does the inevitable Craven-Cunningham collaboration in Freddy vs Jason . These films have moved away from the bleakly realistic rape-revenge of Last House on the Left , but traces of its legacy still remain. These are no-big-name films, about teenagers who face human demons in grippingly gore-filled fashion. Rather than rehashing the old, these new films are a homage to the movie-makers of the early seventies who went out on a limb, slogged their guts out and gave us a genre to die for.
Slasher signatures
An empty house with lots of doors
A car that won't start with a big back seat
An anonymous telephone caller
Lustful teens
Lustful teens nailed to the back of a door
Knives
A thud like steak being tenderised
Screaming
Anniversaries, birthdays and any kind of memorable - soon to be indelible - date
The far too lonely depths of the woods
Practical jokes that back fire
"Wait there, I'll be back in a minute"
Long, flicked back hair (boys and girls)
A whole host of actors you are likely never to see again
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