The Last House on the Left. 1972. USA. Written and directed by Wes Craven. With Sandra Peabody, Lucy Grantham, David A. Hess, Fred Lincoln, Jeramie Rain and Marc Sheffler. 35mm. 84 min.
Wes Craven’s depraved-by-design update of the medieval Swedish ballad “Töres döttrar i Wänge” takes its inspiration from Ingmar Bergman’s *The Virgin Spring, but foregrounds the violent and sexual elements of the story that Bergman mostly alluded to. Infamous for its marketing tagline, “Can a movie go too far?,” the film was immediately controversial upon its release, and with good reason: Craven brings a Vietnam-era American’s eye to the story of young women brutally raped and murdered by a band of escaped convicts. Craven brings the violence that was on the nightly news throughout the 1960s to the big screen, purposefully graphic and without artful cutaways. Last House flips almost everything in The Virgin Spring on its head: gone are the stately frames of Sven Nykvist, replaced by shaky handheld realism, and the religiosity of the Swedish film has been co-opted by American capitalism. Blunt and effective, the film launched Craven’s career in horror.