The Startling Importance of 'The Last House on the Left'

The 70’s were a time of change, both in cinema as well as the landscape of society. As David Flint stated in his preface to the DVD of The Last House on the Left (1972), films such as “Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary’s Baby and Straw Dogs brought horror out of the gothic castles and into a contemporary world which was only too recognisable”. The Last House on the Left was intrinsically an exploitation film driven by the theme of violence begets violence and a desire to make money. However, it was one formed from intelligent and reflective minds that had an intension and inspiration behind the sleazy exploitation film that itself asked ‘Can A Movie Go Too Far?’

    The basis of The Last House on the Left was from the Bergman film The Virgin Spring and notably the television footage of the Vietnam War. The narrative was taken nearly verbatim, contemporary setting aside, from Bergman’s film in its salaciously themed tale of rape and revenge and the, now debatably passé and over-used, theme drawn from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s quote, “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” The film garnered more than its fair share of controversy in its troubled life and was only approved by the BBFC for public release in 2002. Despite its rapturous history, it was a film that meant something at its time. It intended to demonstrate that violence wasn’t quick and throwaway; when John Wayne shoots to kill we are left with no sense of violence or lingering horror. Ironically, the message was that violence shouldn’t be glorified and such acts were, in fact, heinous and deplorable, and vile to the upmost degree. It was this meaning and reflection, this confrontation, that was so important and it was also the reason that the film received so much criticism.

   Though the film was shunned for its still shocking brutality and violence it was the fact that the men behind it, Wes Craven and Sean Cunningham, knew the horrors their film revolved around, in a way comparable to Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), and the novelty that they produced having had, despite both working on the sex education documentary, Together, very little experience in filmmaking. The appreciation of the film is, of course, by the definition of art, entirely subjective. Whether or not one can understand the purpose that the violence serves for the film is irrelevant for those who feel simply that such exposition of violence is foul and destructive. However, the film is a statement and an artist’s refection on the time, socially and politically, they were working in, and for that it holds an importance and context that no Saw, Hostel or any number of horror remakes of today can claim to possess. As Mark Kermode notes in his review of the remake of The Last House on the Left, “the time and the place of the original were so much a part of why it was important, when you decontextualize it and turn it into something else, what you do is take away the meaning of it.”