‘The Last House on the Left’ Works Because Wes Craven Barely Knew What a Horror Movie Was
The Last House on the Left is one of the most harrowing horror films ever made in America. It was the directorial debut of the legendary Wes Craven. To this day, it is an absolutely haunting watch. It goes to extremes. It pushes boundaries. It gets away with things movies almost never get away with. Unrelenting and brutal in its approach, it is never bound to any one specific tone. It never even really tells you how to feel, as it is often documentary-like in its gaze, reporting on what happens, almost as an impartial observer. It pauses to humanize villains who are doing unspeakably evil things, and it drives heroes to their breaking point. Yet it is anything but impartial, as Craven takes out his hatred of violence and his disgust toward the Vietnam war, by depicting violence with brutal realism and honesty. It breaks so many boundaries, so many rules of what should and should not be done in any kind of horror film hoping to appeal to a wide audience.
And it does these things largely because Craven didn’t know not to do them.
That’s the key to its success. Wes Craven had kind of fallen into filmmaking after falling in love with the art form as an adult, but he had never planned to be a director. He had wanted to be a novelist or a poet. He was a humanities professor and that love of classic art and literature more than any hunger to work within the genre itself truly shaped his entire career, and these influences are particularly noticeable in Last House on the Left. The movie draws the basics of its plot from Ingmar Bergman’s Virgin Spring, about a father seeking vengeance after the sexual assault and murder of his daughter in medieval Sweden. Craven took this basic plot, modernized it through the aforementioned lens of the Vietnam era, juxtaposing it with the other, very different protest art of folk music. In addition to that, rounding out a truly eclectic mix, are the larger-than-life, bumbling, humorous cops who could be plucked out of an old school Disney cartoon, which were among the only films Craven had even been allowed to watch growing up.
His upbringing had been deeply religious, his Baptist household was intensely strict and that had a humongous impact on Craven. He grappled with it in college and continued to unpack that upbringing throughout his entire career. Films were considered to be the tool of the Devil, so unless they were among the very few deemed appropriate by both the church and his mother, he had simply never seen to them. He was already a professor in college when he became taken with the power of film, mostly through documentaries. Later, Craven wound up as far from his roots as possible, living in New York City and editing adult films for Sean Cunningham. Of course, Cunningham would go on to direct Friday the 13th, but before that he produced Last House on the Left, and for that reason alone — being the movie that brought both Cunningham and Craven, respective fathers of Jason and Freddy, to the genre — it is a crucial moment in horror history.
Cunningham hired Craven to write and direct a horror film, which Craven was willing to do, but the only problem was that he didn’t really know what one was. Before making Last House, Craven had seen one horror movie, and that was George Romero’s masterpiece Night of the Living Dead. It had terrified Craven, but he had also understood the power of it. I think in retrospect it is the single most important and necessary film that Craven could have seen before making his own. Like Night of the Living Dead, Last House on the Left is not beholden to any rules. Like Night of the Living Dead it is at once blunt and real in its approach to violent and also playful and experimental in its own guerrilla way.
Craven did not know the genre at all. That is precisely why the movie works. The Last House on the Left is one of the most daring and unforgiving horror films of all time because the filmmaker didn’t know otherwise. It doesn’t hold back because he simply didn’t know that that was what he was supposed to do. The result is something that could not have been created by anyone with an ounce of caution, and an experience that can never be replicated or duplicated.
Craven’s influences of classic art and literature only make the film that much more unsettling. For the best example, take the death of what was up to that point our protagonist, Mari. She wades out into the water with absolutely nothing left, her spirit dead before her body, and waits to die. The moment lingers, but the shot comes. And that image of Mari laying face up in the water is one of the most haunting and tragic in horror history. It is also a direct homage to John Everett Millais’ classic painting Ophelia, itself based on the death of the character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The inspiration, the elegance of it, the poetry, these things only make the scene itself that much more disturbing. That is a crucial embodiment of the different perspective Craven brought to horror right out of the gate, and only because those were the inspirations that came naturally to him. He had not grown up watching horror and so Last House was simply shaped by his own artistic influences.
Part of the brilliance of Last House lies in its approach to its villains. There are killers in horror that have done infinitely less than we see — with a cold and unwavering focus, no less — Krug and his cohorts commit in this movie, that we would never ever think to humanize even for a second. Yet there is humanity in these horrible, monstrous people. It reminds the audience of the single scariest thing about these killers, which is that they are actual human beings. There’s one moment in this movie that everybody loves to bring up, that has been talked about to death, and yet I can’t not bring it up because it’s one of the absolute most crucial moments in the entire film.
After the killers have committed this horrible thing, assaulting and brutally stabbing this girl, which we are forced to witness in close proximity as though we were right on the ground with her, they sit in silence after it happens. They just sit and look at the blood on their hands as the realization of what they’ve just done and who they are washes over them. And for that one moment, they are absolutely disgusted with themselves. One moment is all you need. Anything less would be expected, anything more would be redemptive. This is just a deeply unsettling reminder that they are capable of a moment’s remorse, and they push it down, bury it, and continue to do what they do. They know what they are, and they keep going.
The Last House on the Left might be the most brutally honest depiction of revenge on film. There is a catharsis to the revenge movie, as a whole, that Craven does not provide whatsoever in Last House. There are countless action movies about getting even, picking off those who wronged you, in which the audience is meant to cheer for the violence and to root it on. Here, once vengeance has been dished out, we are left with a parallel to the killers’ own realizations of their actions. Mari’s parents have enacted vengeance on her behalf, horrified by what happened to her, overcome not even with grief — that hasn’t even had time to settle in yet — but with anger, killing the people who killed her in increasingly violent ways.
In the end, they don’t have their daughter back. They don’t have anything. They are simply left with the reality of what they have done. The bumbling cops arrive a moment too late, no longer living cartoons, shocked into realism by the horror of it all. The film does not tell you how to feel at the end, it only portrays the reality of what happened in a way few films do. Craven is simply reporting, reminding that even the most justified violence is gruesome.
Because Craven didn’t know the genre, he didn’t know that what he had created would be considered to go too far. He didn’t know it would break every taboo in the book. He didn’t know it would be all that controversial, let alone one of the most controversial horror films in history. That controversy appeared to shock him, and in many ways it followed him the rest of his life. Like Tobe Hooper with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which would be released two years later, it is the kind of movie that ties a director to a genre forever. It not only prevented him from getting work outside of horror. People in his personal life looked at him differently after the release of Last House on the Left. They wouldn’t leave him alone with their children.
In 2009, peak of the age of the over-the-top, go-for-broke gruesome horror remake, Last House was the only movie of that crop of remakes to be tamer than the original. Craven’s debut film has never lost an ounce of its power, it is just as harrowing and hard to watch now as it was then. It feels despicable, and that is its strength. It is one of the most challenging horror movies ever made, and it could not have been made by someone who didn’t know not to do what he was doing.
