The Last House on the Left (1972)

Wes Craven is one of the fathers of the current horror genre thanks in large part to Nightmare on Elm Street, which remains one of my favorite movies of all time. I've seen most of his catalog but one film had evidently escaped my radar: his first. Curious to see how he got started in the business, I decided to settle in and watch The Last House on the Left. I was quickly unsettled.

This isn't a horror flick in the traditional sense. There are no demon creatures, no ghosts, no masked serial killer stalkers. Instead Craven instills terror by staying closer to reality, telling a story based on true events about two teenage girls who are kidnapped by a gang of criminals.

We get to know Mari and Phyllis by way of some rather tranquil opening scenes. Frolicking by the river, talking about boys… just girls being girls. It's in these opening shots that Craven tries to capture the easy-going nature of the flower power generation, which serves as a twisted juxtaposition to scenes of the criminals, just escaped from prison, drinking and roughhousing in a hotel room. You sense what's coming, but it doesn't prepare you.

The two groups come together rather ironically when the girls meet one of the criminals on the street and ask him for marijuana. Here, then, is the perfectly morbid counterpoint to the spirit of that generation. That two innocent kids who just want to smoke a little grass, happy to be alive and having new experiences, end up as prisoners of insane escaped convicts.

The scenes that follow are hard to watch, especially if you have kids. This is Craven making a statement about a period of time, about the futility of random situations, about the reality of life. It's not a whisper or even a shout… he throws it in your face over and over again. The gang beats and tortures the girls, rapes them, forces them to have sex with each other. After the opening scenes, there are no happy or triumphant moments to be found.

The movie is visceral although far from perfect. The subject matter generally transcends the quality of the writing and directing, but this is obviously an amateur film by a first-time film maker. It shows the beginnings of his strengths — action, pacing, and atmosphere — but also his weaknesses — poor character development and sometimes sloppy writing.

It's hard to say if I would recommend The Last House on the Left to anyone. If you're a big Wes Craven fan and have never seen it, definitely. But to anyone else it's a jagged pill to swallow.