Last House on the Left is among a rare breed of cult classic horror films along with Night of the Living Dead, which are so effective in part because they stood inside of themselves and looked out. They saw their audience as they were seeing them. That’s where the horror lies, people were so fascinated and sickened by these films because they were essentially watching themselves, or at least the bleak social realism of the world they lived in.
Night of the Living Dead was so powerful because it was filmed the very same year that American troops entered the Vietnamese village of My Lai and destroyed everything in site, thus the horror was shifted. Suddenly that limp American flag hanging in the cemetery of the opening scene was much scarier than then walking dead that surrounded it.
Defining True Evil
Similarly, Last House on the Left sets out primarily to define true evil during a time when teenagers practiced peace and love. “I thought you’re supped to be the love generation” the main character’s mother says after hearing that her daughter is going to a concert to see a band called Bloodlust. If she only knew how deceiving surfaces can be.
The Story
The story is simple. After the concert, two rebellious teenaged girls go looking to score some grass. They stumble upon Junior who is the junkie son of Krug, an escaped murderer who is hiding out with another escapee and his girl.
Junior, promising the girls a sweet deal, lures them back to the filthy apartment where the convicts are hiding. During this sequence Wes Craven (who wrote, directed and edited) cuts between this sad, desolate space and back to one of the girls' homes in which her parents, in their conservative, bourgeois living space, set up for their daughter’s birthday.
Upon arrival the girls are mocked, abused, harassed and tortured. They are then rounded up in the morning and driven into a remote country area where the criminals’ car breaks down and the sexual and physical torture of these girls continues in the nearby woods until both are murdered.
A Brilliant Scene of Terror
Then something ironic happens which leads to a brilliant scene of terror. Not knowing their surroundings, the killers clean themselves, change their clothes and head to the nearest house where they can spend the night until getting their car fixed in the morning. Turns out the house belongs to the parents of one of the girls they killed, who, after discovering what these people did to their daughter, exact their revenge.
Directed by Wes Craven
Last House on the Left, based on Ignmar Bergman's Virgin Spring, explores depravity in a way that Craven would never return to over the course of his highly successful career. Maybe that’s for the better. The film has a rawness that is unparalleled even to this day. Horror films have come to a point in time where they are all gloss and shine, and where violence exists more as a special effect than a product of evil. Here was a film that existed at ground level and unflinchingly showed acts of violence and torture as if we are a very part of the story's process.
Last House on the Left is so penetrating in part because it takes responsibility for the evil that it shows. It is sickened by the state of American depravity that existed underneath its surface image of peace and love. This is a contrast that Craven makes in the mentioned scene, between the normal American household and the criminal underbelly.
The truth is that evil can penetrate any space, even the bourgeois household, which is why the parents take their revenge: not as part of a horror movie climax, but because evil is not defined by surfaces, it can lurk just below even the most conservative looking of spaces. Now that’s a scary thought.
