FILM · 1972
The Last House on the Left
55 archived facts 6 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
All facts (55)
- #001
For the fake blood, a mixture of red and blue food coloring combined with caramel syrup was used, and unlike most "blood," it actually looks real.
- #002
When novice director Wes Craven took the film to the MPAA, they gave it an "X" rating. Wanting an R rating for a wider release, Craven returned and removed several minutes of footage, but this still was not enough and the film received an "X" rating anyway. Craven removed footage once more, but this still was not enough. In the end, Craven put all the original footage back, got an original "RATED R" approval stamp from the ratings board through a friend who rated films, and released the film.
- #003
A scene showing Mari's mother and father surviving long enough to describe the attackers was shot but cut from the film.
- #004
Wes Craven initially wanted Mari's father to kill Krug during the climactic struggle by repeatedly slashing him with a scalpel. Sean S. Cunningham insisted the fight should be more explosive and instead voted for Krug to be killed with a chainsaw.
- #005
According to Wes Craven, he never anticipated the extreme reactions audiences would have to The Last House on the Left (1972). During the film's first screenings, audiences were said to have vomited, fainted and (as reportedly happened to one unfortunate moviegoer) suffered a heart attack.
- #006
Director Wes Craven's son plays the small child whose balloon is popped by Krug Stillo's cigar.
- #007
According to various cast and crew members, particularly David Hess and Fred J. Lincoln, actress Sandra Peabody was genuinely terrified during much of the shoot and at one point walked off the set. The producers eventually caught up with her and persuaded her to return and finish the film.
- #008
The screenplay was originally written as a hardcore pornographic film, with the entire cast and crew committed to shooting it that way, but after filming began Wes Craven decided to rewrite the script to remove the explicit sex.
- #009
The film is a contemporary (for its time) remake of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring (1960).
- #010
The abandoned dollhouse seen in the woods at Phyllis's murder scene was not a prop; it was actually found at the wooded shooting location.
- #011
It was Wes Craven's directorial debut (not counting the pornographic films he had previously made under the pseudonym "Abe Snake").
- #012
Sandra Peabody had a very bad time making the film and felt she was traumatized much like her ill-fated character Mari. She was uncomfortable shooting the sex scenes, and the actors playing Krug's gang harassed her off-screen as well in an overzealous attempt at method acting. Much of the crying, horror, fear and disgust captured on screen is quite real. Another person disgusted by the whole project was Fred J. Lincoln, who played Weasel and said he regretted making the film. Both Peabody and Lincoln refuse to discuss the film in interviews. Although The Last House on the Left (2009) and David Hess, who played Phyllis and Krug respectively, were quite comfortable during the shoot, Hess spoke proudly of the film in interviews.
- #013
Martin Kove was initially considered for the role of Krug because of his size, but he turned it down in favor of the smaller comedic supporting role and instead recommended his friend David Hess. Hess wore extra-padded clothing to the audition but was still given the part, and was also offered the music score.
- #014
The house where the Collingwoods live belonged to producer Sean S. Cunningham's parents.
- #015
Pauline Kael surprisingly gave the film a great review, calling it one of the most horrifying and terrifying films ever made: "It would be fun to dismiss this as unquestionably the best film ever made in Pittsburgh, but it also happens to be one of the most horrifyingly terrifying films ever made — and when you come out of the theater you may want to be able to forget the whole terrible experience… The film's grainy, banal seriousness works for it — gives it a crude realism. Even the flatness of the amateur acting and the unfunny attempts at comic relief somehow increase the horror — there's no art to transform the dread."
- #016
The shot that originally glided across the pond after the crew washed the blood off themselves ended with an image of Mari alive and clinging to a branch. When the film was edited so that Mari's character is never found alive, the shot was changed to cut to the next scene.
- #017
In the 1980s, American video versions included extra text after the film ended: "Soon at a theater near you. From the producers of The Last House on the Left (1972) and the director of Friday the 13th Part V… The Last House on the Left, Part II. You won't believe your eyes!" No sequel ever materialized, unless you count A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) that way.
- #018
The film was banned several times in the UK by the BBFC. It was first refused a cinema certificate in 1974. In 1984 it was banned again as a "video nasty" and remained so until it was once more refused a cinema release in 2000. It was rejected and remained banned in 2001. Finally, in 2002 a video version was released with an 18 rating and roughly 30 seconds of cuts, ending a 28-year run of bans. In March 2008 it was finally passed uncut by the BBFC.
- #019
When the distributors Hallmark and Atlas International released the film in Germany, they tried to present it as a genuine "snuff" film (that is, a real murder staged for the camera).
- #020
David Hess, Fred J. Lincoln and Marc Sheffler improvised much of their dialogue.
- #021
Two future Friday the 13th directors worked on this film: Sean S. Cunningham and Steve Miner.
- #022
Ada Washington worked as a maid and nanny for producer Sean S. Cunningham's parent. This film was her only foray into screen acting.
- #023
Parents taking revenge on their children's killers or torturers is a theme Wes Craven would revisit in later films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) or Red Eye (2005).
- #024
Fred J. Lincoln helped choreograph some of the film's violent scenes.
- #025
The making of the film was such a raw experience for Wes Craven that even years later he did not enjoy watching it.
- #026
The original script included a scene in which, after killing Phyllis, Sadie would cut off one of Phyllis's breasts and begin to eat it. It was removed after Jeramie Rain, who played Sadie, told Wes Craven that it was too violent for her.
- #027
Wes Craven took Mari Collingwood's surname from his high school.
- #028
Mari's "Now I lay me down to sleep" prayer would later be used in other Wes Craven films, including the cult classics A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and The People Under the Stairs (1991).
- #029
Roger Ebert highlighted the film as a "Guilty Pleasure" in a special edition of Sneak Previews in 1981.
- #030
Producer Sean S. Cunningham's station wagon is used in the opening scenes while Lucy Grantham and Sandra Peabody are driving.
- #031
Fred J. Lincoln stated many times that he considered this the worst film he had ever made, and that he himself was a porn actor.
- #032
Director Wes Craven died on 30 August 2015, the 43rd anniversary of the film's release.
- #033
Jeramie Rain said that while she was walking on the sidewalk during the filming of the documentary, a mother and her young son saw her. The little boy pointed at Jeramie and said, "I hate you!" The boy's mother told him, "No sweetie, you hate Sadie," and the child replied, "No mommy, I hate her!"
- #034
This film predated the modern slasher trend by two years. Black Christmas (1974) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), both considered the first prototypes of modern American slashers, were released in 1974, while this film was released in 1972.
- #035
Sandra Peabody responded to a casting announcement in the trade publication Backstage for a film titled Night of Vengeance. She was initially asked to audition for the supporting role of Phyllis Stone. After meeting with producer Sean S. Cunningham, she took on the role of the seventeen-year-old protagonist Mari Collingwood.
- #036
Sean S. Cunningham said that over the years, when he told people he had produced this film, they would get up and move away from him as if he were a porn director or some kind of snuff director. (He said the same thing would happen to Wes Craven.) When Cunningham followed this film with Friday the 13th (1980), the famous film critic Gene Siskel wrote that Cunningham was "one of the most despicable creatures to ever infest the film industry… a man responsible for The Last House on the Left (1972)… a film in which we see a gang of killers force a young girl to urinate on herself." Incidentally, that scene was done with practical effects, not special effects.
- #037
Steve Miner and local friends drew a large white target symbol on the road that Krug and his friends drive along early in the film.
- #038
Director Wes Craven would later make A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), which introduced the slasher icon Freddy Krueger. Producer Sean S. Cunningham would direct Friday the 13th (1980), which introduced the slasher icon Jason Voorhees. Production assistant Steve Miner would direct Friday the 13th: Part 2 (1981), which first showed the real Jason, and Friday the 13th: Part 3 (1982), which introduced Jason's hockey mask. Both characters would eventually cross over in Freddy vs. Jason (2003).
- #039
David Hess, who played Krug, once said that while he was riding the subway, some people left out of fear of David Hess before the train even started moving.
- #040
It was included in the American Film Institute's 2001 list of 400 nominated films for the 100 Most Heart-Pounding American Films.
- #041
The film has been on Germany's index of media harmful to young people since 1983. In 2000 it was banned by the Wolfhagen court on the grounds that it glorified violence (§ 131 StGB). It took five years (2014–2019) for the license holder Turbine Medien to have the confiscation order (by the Fulda district court) overturned and the film removed from the index.
- #042
Booby traps are used to catch the villain.
- #043
Marc Sheffler, who played Junior, said in an interview that he grabbed Sandra Peabody, held her over a cliff and threatened to drop her if she did not reach the level of desperation needed for a scene she was struggling with. Scheffler said: "The scene wasn't happening. It wasn't at the level of concern it should have been. So I don't know how many times we'd done it and everyone was starting to get angry. So I said to Wes Craven, 'Let me have a minute with her.' What I did was, you can't see it in the shot, but I took her to the edge of the cliff and I put her over the cliff and I grabbed her and I said: 'If you don't do this fucking scene right now, I'm going to let you go and Wes is going to shoot it and we're going to shoot a different scene, but it's going to work because you're going to be crushed.'".
- #044
Krug has an ominous dream scene.
- #045
According to Marc Sheffler in an interview on the DVD, Sandra Peabody kept flubbing her lines in the scene with Junior and Mari by the valley. After finally getting angry at her, he claims he harshly threatened to throw her off the cliff if she made another mistake. He says she got it right on the next take.
- #046
Martin Kove, who plays one of the incompetent policemen in this film, would go on to appear for 6 seasons in Cagney & Lacey (1981), as well as in The Karate Kid (1984) and some of its sequels as the Cobra Kai sensei.
- #047
The concert the girls go to see is "Bloodlust," famous for tearing a chicken apart. Bloodlust is actually Alice Cooper. The chicken incident happened in 1969.
- #048
Lucy Grantham claimed in an interview that she actually urinated in her pants.
- #049
Fred J. Lincoln, who played the Krug gang member Weasel, said he deeply regretted making this film. Given that Lincoln appeared in pornographic films before and after The Last House on the Left (1972), this is strange, and he never said he regretted those, but those films contained no violence and were banned in many countries.
- #050
The police officers are portrayed as incompetent.
- #051
The villain of this film, the rapist-serial killer Krug, who oozes arrogant one-liners and enjoys taunting and torturing his victims before killing them, became a very similar type of villain in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), but now in ghost form. This film also has a similar villain, a loudmouth who haunts and terrorizes his victims before killing them. The surname is similar too: Krueger, an extension of Krug. The characters are very similar and their stories are very similar: both were made by vengeful parents who circumvented the law. You could almost consider A Nightmare on Elm Street a sequel to The Last House on the Left (1972), which makes sense since they are Wes Craven's two masterpieces.
- #052
The murders are committed in the suburbs.
- #053
Knives or blades are frequently used as the murder weapon.
- #054
The 1972 version of The Last House on the Left and the 2009 remake The Last House on the Left (2009) share the same basic premise (two young girls are attacked by criminals and the parents later discover the truth and want revenge), but there are several important differences in tone, style and story details. The 1972 original, directed by Wes Craven, is much rougher, more disturbing and almost documentary-like. It uses bold cinematography, unsettling realism and even dark comedy moments featuring incompetent police officers, creating a strange and chaotic tone. The violence is implied as much as shown, but the emotional brutality feels raw and shocking because of the low-budget realism. The film was largely inspired by Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring. The 2009 remake, directed by Dennis Iliadis and produced by Wes Craven, is glossier and more conventional as a modern horror thriller. It removes much of the black humor and gives the story a more serious and suspenseful tone. The violence is shown more graphically and explicitly on screen, along with stronger action-thriller elements. The remake also expands the parents' revenge scenes and makes them more detailed and cinematic. One of the biggest differences in the narrative is the girl's fate. In the 1972 film, Mari dies after the attack, making the story darker and more tragic. In the 2009 version, Mari survives, changing the emotional ending and giving the film a somewhat more hopeful air despite the violence. The criminals are also portrayed differently. In the original, they give off a chaotic, dirty and almost random violence that reflects the bold exploitation style of early 1970s horror cinema. In the remake, they are more organized and threatening in a mainstream thriller sense, especially the father figure Krug, who becomes a more calculating adversary. Visually the two films are very different. The 1972 film looks grainy and realistic, almost like a crime documentary, while the 2009 remake uses sleek cinematography, a darker blue-grey color grading and a more modern horror pacing.
- #055
Italian censorship visa # 62636 was issued on June 20, 1973.
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