A New 'House' on the Horror Block

by Brett Parker

The Last House on the Left is a good-looking, well-acted practice in repulsive brutality. Here’s a film from the slasher genre that’s gripping, effective, and better than most, yet it features an unflinching rape scene, gore that’s almost too graphic, and a bleak nihilism that every audience member will feel to their core. One could condemn the film for its acts of violence, but then one would have do condemn all horror violence, when you think about it.

The film is a remake of Wes Craven’s 1972 film of the same name, which itself was a remake of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. The story follows a young girl named Mari (Sara Paxton) as she stays at her summer home by the lake with her parents, Emma (Monica Potter) and John (Tony Goldwyn). As her parents prepare for a quiet night, Mari suggests driving into town to meet up with her friend Paige (Martha MacIsaac). Mari takes the family car and visits Paige at the convenience store where she works. As they talk of trying to score weed, they are overheard by a quiet young man named Justin (Spencer Treat Clark) who says he has some good drugs at his motel room.

Mari and Emma go to Justin’s motel room and the real terror begins. It turns out that Justin is related to a family of wanted serial killers. His father, Krug (Garret Dillahunt) is the evil ring leader while his girlfriend Sadie (Riki Lindhome) and his brother Francis (Aaron Paul) make up his soldiers in sadism. The killers take the girls hostage into the woods, in which they ridicule, torture, and rape them. They stab Paige to death and put a bullet in Mari as she makes an escape into the lake.

As a storm rages outside, the killers attempt to seek shelter in a nearby house. That house happens to be Mari’s summer home, where Emma and John are holed up without power. They light candles and feed the killers without realizing who they are. However, Mari is able to crawl out of the lake wounded and make her way back to the house, allowing her parents to figure out that their current house guests tried to brutally murder their child. This sets off Emma and John on an exceedingly violent mission to obtain safety and revenge.

I’ve only seen the original Last House on the Left once, but I remember having an admiration for it. As a horror film, it evoked genuine terror that held you in its grasp the entire time. The film was done on a low budget which gave the camera a realistic, docudrama feel. The cast didn’t feel like polished actors, but rugged human types that embodied their roles perfectly (David Hess was especially effective as Krug; he sticks out most in the mind). The only missteps were the strangely distracting folk songs that plagued the soundtrack and the development of Mari’s parents: they went from loving parents to deranged killers at the flick of a switch (perhaps the film was making a point with this).

Whatever could’ve been improved in the original is in fact improved this time around. There’s no goofy folk songs anywhere on the soundtrack and Mari’s parents are given more dramatic depth and conviction, thanks in no small part to Potter and Goldwyn. Other than that, the remake is competent and entertaining, if not as much as the original. The cinematography is well-serving and appropriate, but it lacks the scrappy grittiness of the original. The killers are acted with creepy conviction, but the actors look a tad too pretty to be outcast killers. I kept thinking Dillahunt belonged at a superhero audition.

There’s no way you can talk about this film without acknowledging the film’s violence. What can be said about a film that uses rape and torture for the sake of entertainment value? While the original film acknowledged and depicted such sadism, the remake seems to linger all-too-attentively on these uneasy details. The rape scene is filmed in unflinching close-ups as well as scenes of body parts being bloodily penetrated. We feel a lot of these intimate details are unnecessary. Of course, most films in this genre are all about jazzing up nauseating slayings for a bloodthirsty audience, yet we feel very uneasy about it this time. While the original film exercised past anxieties over the Charles Manson murders, we feel this time that all of this violence is evoked to make more money off the horror crowds.

I could write on about how the rape and torture scenes violate standards of taste and decency, but doesn’t all horror violence do that anyways? I’d feel like a huge hypocrite if I condemned the film’s rape scene, but never said anything about Jason Voorhees going into a wood chipper or Michael Myers decapitating young women. Isn’t most horror violence just as depraving and sickening as the punishments Krug and his comrades dish out here? Since the genre’s origins, Horror movies have been an outlet for viewers to work out certain nightmare anxieties floating around in their subconscious. There’s a reason why slasher films have such high grosses. These films allow us to vicariously exercise our fears and anxieties about death and torture, even the kind that involves microwaving one’s head. The shower scene in Psycho, for example, is analyzed as a classic scene, but isn’t a woman being stabbed to death naked in a shower just as vile as a woman being raped in the woods?

Perhaps the success of the horror genre suggests what I think The Last House on the Left is getting at: embedded within all human nature is a dark, hostile side which is not impossible to evoke. Remember that in ancient times, crowds use to gather for public tortures and executions. So is the current Last House on the Left a public torture worth attending? Well, it’s not for the faint of heart or the easily disturbed. I’m somewhat on-the-fence about it: it’s a terrifying exercise, yet I’m in no rush to see it again. It’s a good movie, but I liked the original one a whole lot better and I think you’re better off just renting that.