To avoid fainting, keep repeating "It's only a movie...It's only a movie..."
(tagline for Last House 1972)
If bad people hurt someone you love, how far would you go to hurt them back?
(tagline for Last House 2009)
Introduction
The taglines for The Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972; hereafter Last House 1972) and its 2009 remake of the same name, directed by Dennis Iliadis (hereafter Last House 2009), encapsulate the films’ key sites of difference: their relationships to violence and their relationships to their respective cultural contexts. The famous and frequently imitated tagline for Last House 1972 flags a disparity between the films’ uses of violence and horror: where the original teased potential audiences with the realism of the violence, challenging them to withstand a viewing and to confront its allegorical engagement with historical trauma, the remake makes it very clear that the violence is that of ‘only a movie’ by presenting pleasurable spectacles of cartoonish and gory violence (which contrasts with the news photography aesthetic of Last House 1972). Last House 1972 also begins with a ‘true story’ epigraph, unimaginable in a remake: ‘The events you are about to witness are true. Names and locations have been changed to protect those individuals still living.’ The advertising and the original’s epigraph set up different modes of viewer reception between the two films. From the outset, Last House 1972 signals to the audience that they should expect a challenge and confrontation, and while the remake similarly promises to push viewers’ boundaries, this time it is in terms of the pleasures of a Hollywood patriarchal revenge fantasy and the spectacle of screen violence. While the remake is on the surface a faithful one, a closer look reveals distinct ideological agendas between these two versions of the canonical rape-revenge tale. At the level of cultural allegory, the remake’s spectacles of violent vengeance seem recuperative as opposed to critical—celebrating rather than condemning violence, and reassuring the audience rather than implicating them in ethical questions raised by American actions in the ‘war on terror’. These factors related to the particular cultural/political moment are shored up at the level of genre—the imperative for revenge and the spectacle of violence are strong generic demands in the rape-revenge genre, which can undermine socio-political critique around issues of sexual violence and (allegorically) around issues of retribution and torture in the ‘war on terror’.
Last House 1972 is a story in two parts, both with climactic, brutal scenes of violence. In the first half, Mari Collingwood (Sandra Cassell) heads to a concert in the city with her friend, Phyllis Stone (Lucy Grantheim), on her seventeenth birthday. The Stillo gang—Krug (David A. Hess), Weasel (Fred Lincoln), Sadie (Jeramie Rain) and Junior (Marc Sheffler)—kidnap the girls, and then, when their car breaks down by the woods near Mari’s home, they continue to intimidate, humiliate, and rape Phyllis and Mari, and finally murder them. In the second half of the film, the gang goes to the Collingwoods’ home seeking help. Dr and Mrs Collingwood (Gaylord St. James and Cynthia Carr) welcome them in, but then discover that the gang have murdered their daughter and proceed to take their violent revenge.
Last House 2009 replicates this plot, with a few minor but illuminating changes. Perhaps the most significant of these is that both Mari (Sara Paxton) and Junior, renamed Justin (Spencer Treat Clark), survive. Although Mari is too badly injured to play any role in the revenge of the second half, both her and Justin’s survival (and his switch to the good guys’ side) gives the film a more uplifting and redemptive ending. While Last House 1972 ends on a bleak and bloody freeze-frame of Mari’s parents after they have killed the gang, Last House 2009 ends an image of the family—Mom (Monica Potter), Dad (Tony Goldwyn), Mari, and their new surrogate son Justin—restored and heading to safety on their boat over the lake. The contrasts between the two versions are encapsulated by a significant icon change in the remake: Mari wears a necklace from her dead brother Ben (inscribed ‘Always Go For Gold Your Big Bro BEN’) rather than the peace symbol necklace she wears in the original (an emblem of the original’s engagement with its cultural context, particularly the counterculture and opposition to the Vietnam War). This necklace represents a shift from Mari’s as a sexually curious teenager in the original to a mourning sister in the remake, serving as a marker of the remake’s broader depoliticization and return to family values.
The remake is a product of the political and generic changes in the intervening decades traced by Tony Williams:
Whereas many 1970s horror films exhibit a productive crisis revealing tensions between socio-historical chaos and bankrupt systems of meaning, their 1980s descendants attempt to assert patriarchal power by stifling the genre’s relationship to its crisis-ridden cultural context. The poverty of meaning contained in many of the prolific slasher/stalker films echoes an era turning away toward conservative ideologies.[1]
The remake displays traces of this 1980s conservative turn in horror, similarly reasserting patriarchal values. Further, there is a return to the moral absolutism of The Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman, 1960)—the film upon which Craven based his Last House 1972—which finds a home in the contemporary American cultural context of the ‘war on terror’ and the prominence of the religious right in public life. In the following sections, I will analyse key scenes of rape and revenge, and the contrasting endings of Last House 1972 and Last House 2009, focusing on their representations of violence and the positioning of the spectator in relation to this violence. Closely comparing the two versions and contextualizing their differences in relation to political, ideological and genre shifts will point to some of the broader changes in rape-revenge and spectatorial engagement with screen violence.
Rape Scenes: Realism and Relief Vs. Conventions and Cuts
In the original, the rape scene in the woods escalates from humiliation to rape, stabbing, dismemberment, mutilation, more rape, and finally a shooting. The depiction of these acts of violence have been variously described as realistic and brutal, raw and unflinching. Joe Tompkins argues that ‘the film’s unrepentant, intensely graphic depictions of torture and rape run directly in the face of traditional stylistic codes for representing screen violence’[2], which I suggest significantly contributes to the force of the scene.
In his book on Wes Craven, John Kenneth Muir describes the scene’s realism and its consequences:
The controversial rape scene, the centrepiece of this powerful film, was purposely edited not with over-the-top “horror” film lingo (extreme high and low angles, crazy close-ups and Wagnerian music pumping on the soundtrack). Instead it was photographed and cut together from the perspective of an observer watching the events in medium and long shots. The rape was determinedly not stylish and Craven never backed away from the intrinsic horror of the events… Instead of flinching and cutting away to reaction shots or a scene more palatable, Craven let audience members fully experience the events as if they were indeed participants. As a result, the film simultaneously caused feelings of voyeurism, shame and rage in its viewers.[3]
Although Muir describes the camera’s gaze as unflinching, it is not true that the film resists cutting away to more palatable scenes. One of the most interesting aspects of the rape scene is its intratextual acknowledgement of how difficult it is to watch, which self-consciously provides relief for the viewer with music and crosscutting to humorous scenes of the bumbling cops. For example, a melancholy song accompanies the scene in which the girls are commanded to ‘make it with each other’ and Phyllis helps Mari to undress and comforts her as she cries. The torment conveyed in this scene might be unbearable but for this song, which changes the tone and is foregrounded on the soundtrack to remind the viewer ‘it’s only a movie’. The song’s lyrics are about the search for love, finding someone to ‘guide you, protect you, hold you and love you’, which conveys the tragedy of Mari’s experience after talking to Phyllis earlier about how she imagined that ‘making it’ with the members of Bloodlust would be ‘just really soft, like in a whole bunch of cotton… soft and gentle… really sensitive, not wild and gory’. The disjunction between the popular folk songs and the brutal events on screen has a similar effect to the crosscutting between the rape scene and the comedy cop scenes (in which the two ineffectual cops eat cake, play checkers, and attempt to get a lift after their car runs out of gas). These sitcom-parody scenes offer respite between the acts of violence in the woods, and also truncate the violence. For instance, a conversation at the police station is inserted between the scene of the girls undressing and Phyllis’ request for permission to put her clothes back on, in effect censoring seeing the girls ‘make it with each other’. This technique circumvents both the voyeurism and the horror the spectator might have experienced in viewing the full scene, which Muir describes above.
However, I suggest that these techniques should not be considered distancing devices which release the spectator from implication or negative affects such as shame; rather, the film thwarts its own nature as an ‘exploitation’ film and increases viewers’ empathy with Mari by underscoring the brutality of rape through the contrasts (music/visuals; rape scene/bumbling cop scene). The music and crosscutting do not undermine or trivialize the impact of the scene’s violence, rather they underscore the impact of it by self-consciously providing temporary relief from the painful scene it is representing. Neither of these techniques are replicated in the remake, which creates significant structural and tonal differences between the two films, and points to a different relationship with the spectator.
The remake retains the chase and stabbing of Paige/Phyllis and the rape and shooting of Mari but dispenses with other acts of violence in the rape scene that were cut from Last House 1972 in the British Board of Film Classification’s (BBFC) 2002 decision, including Krug commanding Phyllis to ‘piss [her] pants’, Sadie handling Phyllis’ internal organs after she is stabbed to death, and Krug carving his name into Mari’s chest with a knife. However, although the remake met the approval of the BBFC, I disagree with their assessment that it does not eroticize sexual assault and positively conveys the girls’ anguish.[4] The camerawork and editing fragment Mari’s body, objectifying her during her rape rather than conveying the experience of her terror. The camera voyeuristically roves up and down her body, lingering on her naked flesh—it seems to be taking cues from pornography conventions as much as horror. The visuals are stylized and rhythmic, and are accompanied by a porn soundtrack: Mari’s cries and a slapping sound and no music. The original’s brutal violence makes it difficult to watch, but the remake’s failure to convey, and thereby acknowledge, the violence of rape in its stylized montage makes it a more objectionable representation. The remake’s representation of rape is in line with Adam Lowenstein’s findings about the renouncing of politics within:
the horror remake phenomenon of the 2000s. The new Nightmare and its brethren (particularly the reduxes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Last House on the Left) often remember the genre-coded sensations of horror generated by the originals, but just as often forget how that horror was embedded in ideas of community that provided the films with a cultural and political urgency.[5]
Conveying the horror of rape is crucial in rape-revenge films because it motivates and attempts to justify the protagonist’s brutal acts of revenge in the later scenes. The failure to either induce or convey the horror of rape is both a generic and feminist political failure.
The American theatrical and unrated versions illustrate how even minor edits between versions can shift looking relations, identification, meaning, and embodied spectatorship in a rape scene. The American theatrical version of Last House 2009 retains Mari’s point-of-view shot during the rape which is omitted from the unrated version. This point-of-view shot shows Paige lying on the ground in the distance and is out of focus around the edges of the frame, perhaps conveying the trauma of Mari’s experience and the potential for losing consciousness during it. Instead of cutting between Mari’s anguished face and her point-of-view shot of Paige, the unrated version cuts between Mari’s anguished face and shots of Francis, Krug, and Sadie watching her.[6] This change is revealing and significant, as it illustrates how an acceptable portrayal of rape is one that conveys the experience from the victim’s perspective, rather than one which structures the victim as object, watched by rapists and spectators alike. However, this one point-of-view shot in the theatrical version is tokenistic, and it is important to note that the primary function of point-of-view shots in Last House (both original and remake) is not to direct the spectator to empathize with the victim. For instance, the original has several shots from Phyllis’ point-of-view—from her position in the boot of the car when Krug opens it and she bites him, and when she is running through the forest to escape the gang (the latter replicated in the remake)—but there is also a point-of-view shot from Sadie’s position when Phyllis hits her with a rock. This suggests that the point-of-view shots are not necessarily used to align the spectator with the victim, but simply to heighten the shock moments of horror by using a more embodied/subjective perspective. There are parallels here with Lowenstein’s reading of Hostel’s severed hand scene, where the director uses multiple point-of-view shots to establish identification with Paxton (a protagonist escaping his torturers) but then ‘abandons identification for attractions’.[7] This transition from identification to spectacle horror is a challenging aspect of torture porn, and of the articulation of rape-revenge in this mode. Depicting rape as a carnivalesque attraction counters the rape-revenge convention of developing the spectator’s identification with, or empathy for, the rape victim—an important step in the rape-revenge narrative for motivating the revenge section of the film.
Revenge Scenes: Castrate vs. Insinkerate
Mrs Collingwood’s contrasting methods of revenge against Weasel (renamed Francis in the remake) highlight changes in the genre and in representations of violence between 1970s exploitation and post-2000 torture porn films. There is an amping up of both the comedy and the gore, the latter usefully defined by Isabel Cristina Pinedo as ‘the explicit depiction of dismemberment, evisceration, putrefaction, and myriad other forms of boundary violations with copious amounts of blood’.[8] In one of the most notorious scenes in Last House 1972, Weasel is lured outside to the lake by Mrs Collingwood, where she castrates him with her teeth while fellating him. Although subtle in terms of what is shown on screen, the moment is shocking, particularly because, as K. A. Laity points out, ‘Turning the tables of sexual violence on men seldom happened in films at this time’.[9] Interestingly, although the castration is a notorious and climactic moment in the original, and a convention of contemporary rape-revenge, it is excised from the remake. Instead, Mrs Collingwood stabs Weasel with a kitchen knife and they struggle, then Dr Collingwood enters and re-breaks Francis’ broken nose. This is a comic moment, delicious in its revenge, because it was set up earlier in the film when Dr Collingwood kindly reset Francis’ broken nose after the gang arrived at their house saying they had been in a car accident. This nose-breaking is a transitional point in the scene—a moment of visceral violence mixed with comedy, it leads into the comic modality of the rest of the scene.
This revenge scene in the remake develops into increasingly extreme yet cartoonish violence, becoming a kind of live action version of a Tom and Jerry cartoon, or The Itchy and Scratchy Show, or the animated opening scene of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (Robert Zemeckis, 1988) in which Roger Rabbit endures all manner of violent kitchen accidents. Dr and Mrs Collingwood try to drown Francis in the dishwater, creating humour through the incongruence of brutal violence and the homely middle-class domestic sphere. They turn on the InSinkErator and blood fills the dishwater as Francis’ hand is churned up. Francis shakes and screams and finally Dr Collingwood finishes him off by spearing a hammer into the back of his head. This gruesome end to Francis’ torture is so excessive and camp that it prompts the viewer to laugh with both incredulity and relief. According to Geoff King, the spectacle of violence in contemporary Hollywood cinema is often accompanied by ‘distancing frameworks’ such as genre conventions, comedy, or ‘the exaggeration and/or -–..heavily-stylized aestheticization of violence’ to make it palatable or pleasurable.[10] The comic modality, and other distancing techniques, ‘can permit the viewer to remain detached, to enjoy the spectacle of violent antics or violent destruction without any feeling of implication’.[11] The remake’s establishment of a comic modality and a style of extreme yet cartoonish violence allows any sense of implication (in either the film’s cultural allegory or the represented rape trauma) to be abandoned for other generic pleasures of vengeance, violence, and spectacle.
The socio-political criticism (ostensibly) behind the violence in the original is not remade—indeed cannot be remade—in the 2009 version. The use of gore as metaphor in the original derived its effectiveness from a particular social and cinematic period, as Craven points out:
There was an initial stage in horror cinema, during which The Last House on the Left was made, where gore stood for everything that was hidden in society. Guts stood for issues that were being repressed, so the sight of a body being eviscerated was exhilarating to an audience, because they felt, “Thank God, it’s finally out in the open and slopping around on the floor”. But that gets very old very fast…[12]
Is the ‘war on terror’ to torture porn what the Vietnam War was to late 1960s/early 1970s American horror cinema? Just as ‘Vietnam lurks as an absent factor that structures Last House’s violent excessiveness’[13], the ‘war on terror’ correspondingly lurks as an absent factor that structures the remake’s violent excessiveness. However, I suggest that these contexts structure the spectacles of violence in distinct ways. The difference is that while Craven sought to condemn this violence and confront the audience with it, Iliadis celebrates violence and reassures his audience with it. To quote Craven’s stated intention: ‘At the moment it gets violent, I wanted to make it very real, not swerving away… but just looking right at people at the moment they did it. That was very subversive and very threatening to people’.[14] While the violence in the remake is graphic and gory, it is less confrontational than the original because it lacks realism and the implication of the spectator. The remake’s challenge to the audience is not one of witnessing traumatic violence but one of spectating a gory display of violence. In its allusion to American military retaliation and torture through torture porn conventions, the treatment of violence can be understood to serve a conservative cultural or political function, affectively making this violence seem both justified and palatable rather than disturbing and ethically problematic. The allegorical violence reassures the audience because it is an entertaining spectacle supported by narrative justification and closure. The torture porn genre does have the capacity for social/national critique in its allusions to the ‘war on terror’—for example, Jason Middleton reads Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005) as ‘a form of cultural problem solving’ [15]—but ultimately this is not the purpose of the spectacle of excessive violence in Last House 2009. The remake does not follow Craven’s lead in problematising violence, rather, as Sight & Sound’s Stephen Thrower points out:
Iliadis (reflecting a very different US war experience?) goes in the opposite direction here, turning violent retribution into a punch-the-air affirmation of right and virility. His finale’s morally repugnant ‘up’ note owes little to Craven’s original and more to such masturbatory vengeance fantasies as Michael Winner’s Death Wish.[16]
As Thrower’s review suggests, this contrast between the two versions is further accentuated in their final moments.
The Endings: The Road Leads to Nowhere
The remake’s comedy of violence in the middle-class home I described above does echo the parents’ revenge in the original, in that they booby-trapped the house, used excessive weapons (like a chainsaw) and had theatrical showdowns between Mr Collingwood and Krug, and Mrs Collingwood and Sadie. However, the original’s revenge half builds not towards comedy or catharsis but, through the crosscutting of these two battles, towards a bleak condemnation of violence.
After Weasel’s castration, it is Mr Collingwood’s turn to take revenge on a gang member, and he has a fist fight with Krug in the living room. During this fight, Junior enters and shoots at his father but misses. Krug bullies his crying and shaking son into turning the gun on himself, yelling repeatedly ‘Blow your brains out!’ until Junior does so. The two remaining gang members face off with the two parents: Mrs Collingwood wrestles with Sadie in the autumn leaves outside and then slashes Sadie’s face, forcing her to sink under the water of the pool; and Mr Collingwood chases Krug around the living room with a chainsaw. Last House 1972 crosscuts between these two climactic struggles, and at the moment before the parents kill the gang members those two bumbling cops enter the house and shout to Mr Collingwood, ‘Don’t! For God’s sake, don’t!’. The film ends on a freeze frame of the Collingwoods embracing and covered in blood.
This ending has been discussed as a key revision of the text that Craven’s film remakes: Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960). Lowenstein argues that Craven ‘brings Bergman to mind in order to present, but then explode, the possibility of recuperating Last House’s violence through the redemptive mechanisms present in The Virgin Spring’.[17] The virgin spring of the title appears at the end of Bergman’s film for Dr Tore, the avenging father of the raped and murdered Karin, metaphorically washing the blood from his hands; however, in Last House 1972, Mari’s parents are not redeemed. As John Kenneth Muir writes, ‘Where The Virgin Spring takes Dr Tore and his wife off-the-hook for their violence by allowing God to forgive their violent trespasses, The Last House on the Left makes the Collingwoods responsible for their actions’.[18] Last House 2009 revokes Craven’s condemnation of violence and returns to the moral schematic of the source text, The Virgin Spring. Bergman said of his motivation in making The Virgin Spring: ‘I needed a severe and schematic conception of the world to get away from the formless, the vague and the obscure in which I was stuck. So I turned to the dogmatic Christianity of the Middle Ages with its clear dividing lines between Good and Evil’.[19] The remake replicates these clear dividing lines, which Last House 1972 had made an effort to blur. In the remake there are clear, conservative lines between good and evil, whereas Craven made an effort to show the humanity of the baddies and the devastating ease with which the good guys could slip into violent vengeance. Craven stated that his aim was to throw the ‘whole moral compass… out the window’, or as Laity puts it, ‘He deconstructs the moral absolutism of The Virgin Spring’.[20] This moral absolutism returns in Last House 2009, with an ending that reasserts family values and celebrates rather than condemns violence. Again this may be related to the influence of conservative ideologies regarding American military actions that play out in the torture porn genre that Last House 2009 taps into. Such contrasting ideologies or moral perspectives underpinning the two Last House films points to the flexibility of the rape-revenge template, and its potential to endure beyond specific socio-political contexts or national moods (for example, second-wave feminism or anti-Vietnam War sentiment).
The remake’s revenge sequence takes joy in the spectacle of violence (including semi-naked bodies on display as they struggle for their lives), and the spectacularised exhibition of contemporary horror special effects. The physical struggle between Mr Collingwood and Krug is analogous to the climactic showdown in a Hollywood action film (similarly often motivated by paternal family protection or revenge). It recalls the characters played by Bruce Willis in Die Hard 4.0 (Len Wiseman, 2007) and Sin City (Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez, 2005), Arnold Schwarzenegger in Collateral Damage (Andrew Davis, 2002) and Commando (Mark L. Lester, 1985), Liam Neeson in Rob Roy (Michael Caton-Jones, 1995) and Taken (Pierre Morel, 2008), and John Travolta in The General’s Daughter (Simon West, 1999). This fight presents a spectacle of buff men in action and their verbal exchange sums up the essence of this display:
Krug: You want to hear how tight your little homecoming queen was?
Mr Collingwood: No, I want to hear you beg for your fucking life.
The spectator’s pleasure in watching this action is echoed by Mr Collingwood’s one-liner, which points to the spectator’s alignment with the good guys—the parents who defend the honour and chastity of their daughter. In a moment when Krug is about to kill Mr Collingwood, Justin cocks a gun behind Krug’s head. He shoots but the gun does not work and then Krug stabs Justin with a fire poker. This stabbing is less powerful and tragic than the way Krug makes his son kill himself in Last House 1972, and indicates a shift in tone. Junior’s suicide is a bleak, nihilistic moment in the original, whereas in the remake Justin ‘sweetens the conclusion with an act of personal redemption’.[21] The switch of Justin, the junior member of the Stillo gang, to the good guys side, is emblematic of the remake’s emphasis on family values. In helping Mr Collingwood, Justin secures his position on the side of Good rather than Evil and is admitted into the Collingwood family as their replacement son. The contrast between Last House 1972 and Last House 2009 that I am identifying here echoes the contrast between The Virgin Spring and Last House 1972 as Robin Wood sees it: ‘the crucial difference is in the film-spectator relationship, especially with reference to the presentation of violence’.[22] Wood argues that empathy has been repressed and disowned in The Virgin Spring, and the detailing of rape and carnage is distasteful ‘because Bergman seems to deny his involvement without annihilating it, and to communicate that position to the spectator’. This is another way in which Last House 2009 returns to The Virgin Spring rather than to Craven’s film.
The remake is focused on family revenge; it is driven by the desire to protect the family. This cannot be attributed to Craven’s legacy, considering that, ‘In one way or another, the majority of Craven’s films focus on the collapse of the family in modern America’.[23] More broadly too, during the 1970s, the institution of the family underwent assault in Hollywood representations. The horror genre in particular has dissected and critiqued the family, made it the source of horror. Last House 2009 does the opposite, making the family the source of safety and survival, an institution to be protected against external threat. This reflects political and generic transitions in the interim period, in which the conservative family values of the Reagan and Bush eras became reflected in horror and thriller films (think Cape Fear [Martin Scorsese, 1991], Fatal Attraction [Adrian Lyne, 1987], The Hand that Rocks the Cradle [Curtis Hanson, 1992], for example). Into the 1990s, horror made metaphoric connections between American military action and family values, where ‘Homeland protection means defence of the family from violation. The enemy is a demonized “other”’.[25] This legacy has continued in Hollywood cinema into the twenty-first century, particularly revitalized by the impact of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
In this trajectory, Last House 2009 can be understood as part of a contemporary neoconservative attempt to reassert clear ideological divisions and family values. For example, in the opening scene of Last House 2009, the Stillo gang is established as a threat to the nuclear family when Krug strangles a cop while showing the cop a photo of his two young blonde daughters. The cop’s blood drips onto the photo and Krug tells him that he will never see them again. Note that the horror of this violence does not require sympathy with the victim, since the cops are established as misogynists who also cruelly deny Krug a toilet break. Rather, we are directed from this establishing scene to feel horror at the destruction of family, the separation of a father and his daughters. The emphasis on family values, and its analogy with American politics, also plays out through the character of Emma Collingwood. She is both a model of femininity and a defender of family values, epitomized when she makes hot chocolate for Justin and tells the gang, ‘You’re all safe, you’re together, that’s what counts.’
When the parents discover Mari has been raped and surmise that the gang are the culprits, Mr Collingwood says to his wife, ‘We have to be ready to do anything.’ This position reflects mainstream American ideology in the ‘war on terror’, in which the threat of terrorism to Americans and American values is used to justify pre-emptive and retaliatory violence towards Others. Such a political dynamic easily maps on to the rape-revenge template, which is also structured around retaliatory violence against Others, although traditionally on gender, class, and country/city axes (as Carol Clover established in her seminal book, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film). In the remake’s convergence of torture porn and rape-revenge genres, the latter’s imperative for revenge tempers the social/political critique and ethical implication of the spectator. The demand for revenge is an added generic factor to support how a torture porn film such as Hostel recuperates its own political criticism and ultimately ‘reaffirms a (neo)conservative view of the necessity for American aggression in what is represented as a corrupt and dangerous world’.[xxv] The development of the rape-revenge genre in the years between Last House’s original and remake allows for the original’s political stance to be inverted via the genre’s conventions, with the remake becoming an exploitation film of a different sort—not only ‘exploiting’ the success and marketing power of the original, but also using the rape-revenge narrative, the expectation and delight in revenge, and its gore violence, to more conservative political ends.
The critics who admire Last House 1972 tend to do so for the film’s condemnation of violence, and the implication of the spectator in this violence. The remake adds an epilogue which conveys a different position on violence, highlights its spectacle of violent revenge and horror SFX, and lets the spectator off the hook in terms of implication. The scene occurs after the family have left the house in their boat in the morning light, and in a location we have not seen previously (perhaps the interior of the Collingwood’s’ shed), giving it a dislocated feel suggesting it could perhaps be a fantasy or a flashback. Mr Collingwood has paralysed Krug from the neck down, and rested his head in a microwave. He turns on the microwave and Krug’s head starts to fry, then explodes on screen in the film’s climactic gore moment. This ending is the film’s punch line of excess and spectacle. The narrative has already reached closure, so this functions as just one last fun blast to remember the film by. This leaves the spectator in a very different position to the end of the original. Tony Williams argues that in Last House 1972, ‘the audience’s emotional involvement with violent actions leads not to catharsis but self-disgust and self-awareness… Last House condemns any audience member who complies with excessive violent displays’.[26] Last House 2009 does not condemn but in fact rewards the audience member who takes pleasure in its excessive violent displays; the final scene is a final pay-off of spectacular violence, free of punishment or implication. Indeed, the use of SFX here might be understood as securing against spectatorial implication. This is again in contrast to the original in which Craven ‘allows viewers neither sensory pleasure nor distancing special effects. He depicts the total ugliness and brutality of violence without using the distancing spectacular mechanisms present in most horror films’.[27] Krug’s exploding head is cartoon violence impressively created in live action with modern SFX. This spectacular splatter set piece, situated in a dream-like space, provides distancing at the film’s end, even to some extent disallowing us the possibility of leaving the cinema contemplating the implications of violence or the ethics of revenge.
Analogous to Lowenstein’s finding that attractions tend to trump identification in the spectatorship mode of ‘spectacle horror’[28], we find that in Last House 2009, spectatorial expectation revolves not so much around the question of how far the victim-avenger will go in taking revenge, but around the more genre-savvy and spectacle-hungry question of how far the filmmakers will go in depicting it. In a post-9/11 American context, rape-revenge remakes are adopted as a format for working through ideological and ethical issues around revenge, retribution, and family values. This case study of The Last House on the Left demonstrates how the format can be shaped to align with an American political neoconservative trend towards promoting family values and clear ideological divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This ideological timeliness converges with rape-revenge’s generic and aesthetic currency in contemporary cinema to help explain the revival of the genre’s popularity in American cinema. Through a close examination of Last House 1972’s and Last House 2009’s violent spectacles in both rape and revenge scenes, this article has shown how the two versions of the text confront and challenge the spectator in slightly different ways and how they have been modified to fit their specific socio-political and cinematic contexts.
Footnotes
[1] Williams, T. (1996) Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses. 211.
[2] Tompkins, J. (2010) “Pop Goes the Horror Score: Left Alone in The Last House on the Left”, In: Lerner, N. (ed.), Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear. New York: Routledge. 98.
[3] Muir, J. K. (1998) Wes Craven: The Art of Horror. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc. 11-12.
[4] In contrast to the original’s long battle with the BBFC, the remake was passed ‘18’ ‘for strong bloody violence and strong sexual violence’, uncut because ‘the focus on the girl’s anguish and the lack of sexualised nudity or graphic sexual detail means that the scene did not “eroticise or endorse sexual assault” and therefore did not require intervention beyond the ‘18’ category’. The BBFC’s classification decision on Last House 2009 is available on their website: https://www.bbfc.co.uk/AFF256738.
[5] Lowenstein, A. (2010) “Alone on Elm Street”, Film Quarterly, 64 (1), 18.
[6] Details of the different versions of Last House 2009, accompanied by film stills illustrating the censorship cuts, are available on the Movie-Censorship.com website: https://movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=4659443.
[7] Lowenstein, A. (2011) “Spectacle Horror and Hostel: Why ‘Torture Porn’ Does Not Exist”, Critical Quarterly, 53 (1), 45.
[8] Pinedo, I. C. (1997) Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. Albany: State University of New York Press. 18.
[9] Laity, K. A. (2007) "The Virgin Victim: Reimagining a Medieval Folk Ballad in the Virgin Spring and the Last House on the Left", In: Sherman S. R. and Koven, M. J. (eds), Folklore /Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press.192.
[10] King, G. (2004) ‘“Killingly Funny’: Mixing Modalities in New Hollywood's Comedy-with-Violence”, In: Schneider, S. J. (ed.), New Hollywood Violence. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 129.
[11] King. 130.
[12] Craven quoted in Robb, B. J. (1998) Screams & Nightmares: The Films of Wes Craven. London: Titan Books. 24.
[13] Williams. 138.
[14] Craven quoted in Robb 1998. 25.
[15] Middleton, J. (2010) “The Subject of Torture: Regarding the Pain of Americans in Hostel”, Cinema Journal, 49 (4). 1.
[16] Thrower. 70.
[17] Lowenstein, A. (2005) “Only a Movie: Specters of Vietnam in Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left”, In: Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film. Columbia University Press; New York. 138.
[18] Muir. 49.
[19] Bergman quoted in Laity. 183.
[20] Laity. 189
[21] Thrower, S. (2009) “The Last House on the Left [review]”, Sight & Sound, 19 (7),70.
[22] Wood. 110.
[23] Muir. 299.
[24] Williams. 130.
[25] Middleton. 1.
[26] Williams. 137.
[27] Williams. 140.
[28] Lowenstein, “Spectacle Horror and Hostel”. 43-44.
[1] Williams, T. (1996) Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses. 211.
[2] Tompkins, J. (2010) “Pop Goes the Horror Score: Left Alone in The Last House on the Left”, In: Lerner, N. (ed.), Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear. New York: Routledge. 98.
[3] Muir, J. K. (1998) Wes Craven: The Art of Horror. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc. 11-12.
[4] In contrast to the original’s long battle with the BBFC, the remake was passed ‘18’ ‘for strong bloody violence and strong sexual violence’, uncut because ‘the focus on the girl’s anguish and the lack of sexualised nudity or graphic sexual detail means that the scene did not “eroticise or endorse sexual assault” and therefore did not require intervention beyond the ‘18’ category’. The BBFC’s classification decision on Last House 2009 is available on their website: https://www.bbfc.co.uk/AFF256738.
[5] Lowenstein, A. (2010) “Alone on Elm Street”, Film Quarterly, 64 (1), 18.
[6] Details of the different versions of Last House 2009, accompanied by film stills illustrating the censorship cuts, are available on the Movie-Censorship.com website: https://movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=4659443.
[7] Lowenstein, A. (2011) “Spectacle Horror and Hostel: Why ‘Torture Porn’ Does Not Exist”, Critical Quarterly, 53 (1), 45.
[8] Pinedo, I. C. (1997) Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. Albany: State University of New York Press. 18.
[9] Laity, K. A. (2007) "The Virgin Victim: Reimagining a Medieval Folk Ballad in the Virgin Spring and the Last House on the Left", In: Sherman S. R. and Koven, M. J. (eds), Folklore /Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press.192.
[10] King, G. (2004) ‘“Killingly Funny’: Mixing Modalities in New Hollywood's Comedy-with-Violence”, In: Schneider, S. J. (ed.), New Hollywood Violence. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 129.
[11] King. 130.
[12] Craven quoted in Robb, B. J. (1998) Screams & Nightmares: The Films of Wes Craven. London: Titan Books. 24.
[13] Williams. 138.
[14] Craven quoted in Robb 1998. 25.
[15] Middleton, J. (2010) “The Subject of Torture: Regarding the Pain of Americans in Hostel”, Cinema Journal, 49 (4). 1.
[16] Thrower. 70.
[17] Lowenstein, A. (2005) “Only a Movie: Specters of Vietnam in Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left”, In: Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film. Columbia University Press; New York. 138.
[18] Muir. 49.
[19] Bergman quoted in Laity. 183.
[20] Laity. 189
[21] Thrower, S. (2009) “The Last House on the Left [review]”, Sight & Sound, 19 (7),70.
[22] Wood. 110.
[23] Muir. 299.
[24] Williams. 130.
[25] Middleton. 1.
[26] Williams. 137.
[27] Williams. 140.
[28] Lowenstein, “Spectacle Horror and Hostel”. 43-44.