Last House on the Left - Horrible Horror

Way back in the day when I was hardly into film at all, my friends were all watching a brand new exciting horror movie called Scream.  Scream took the world by storm, and I was informed by the film-reviewing world that Wes Craven had re-invented the horror genre.  What no-one stopped to tell me though, was that Craven had been here before, creating horror thrillers that inspired a generation of film makes over several decades.  With Craven's recent death, I am taking the time to watch some of his more famous back-catalogue.

Last House on the Left starts innocently enough, but by the end has degenerated into a bloody revenge fantasy in which a nicer-than-nice middle class family shows us how society is only a short step away from violent anarchy.  The plot is that middle class Mary of liberal upbringing and her more worldly-wise friend Phyllis go to see a concert, try to score some drugs, get kidnapped by a gang of sexually violent criminals - and then there's bloody horror.

With this - his first film - Craven set the template for a genre that has now become so ingrained in the minds of the movie-watching public, that it's hard to imagine a time before these tropes existed.  The movie is shot on grainy film stock, often with poor lighting, indifferent cuts and stunted chemistry between the actors - in other words trying not to look like a film, trying to look like real life.  Herein lies the true nastiness of it, rather than trying to tell a horror story or deliberately scare us, Craven is doing something much more animalistic than that.  He's trying to get under our skin by presenting us with youthfulness and innocence, and then ripping it to bloody pieces.

Of course the cleverness here is that even through this, the film is politically charged.  It plays into the fear of every liberal parent, that their liberalism contradicts that animal instinct to protects one's children above all, and that one's civilised exterior is only a front waiting to be washed away to reveal the darkness underneath.  When presented with something of unimaginable horror, such as the people who brutally killed your daughter, where will our civilisation go?  Who are the 'good guys' in the film - do we applaud the revenge of a murdered daughter, or do we shake our heads at the senselessness?

Looking back, it's a film that has been bettered by film-nasties since, but as a piece of film history it's clearly still relevant and seeing the opening shots of a genre that continues to draw huge audience appeal.