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Once more, with feeling...: It had been a while since I last saw The Last House on The Left, so I thought I might take a look at the new DVD of the film. This isn't anything like a definitive version of the film and Director Wes Craven even admits that no such thing actually exists. Thirty years after the fact, he's not sure what was supposed to stay in and what was supposed to stay out. One wonders if he knew even when the film was new. I've struggled with this film for a long time. Many people whose opinions I respect love this film, but I've never warmed to it. Every once in a while, I'll try to put myself in a mindset to understand the film's appeal. I continue to fail in this pursuit. I just don't get it.

In discourse that treats horror films from a sociological viewpoint, The Last House on the Left and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are often grouped together like conjoined twins at the freakshow. Both of them are vivid and angry movies. Both of them, it so happens, are first features by first-time directors. Craven describes Last House as “a young man’s movie,” and wonders at the rage that gave it life. Both films inhabit the “rural massacre movie,” as pioneered by Herschell Gordon Lewis in the 1960s. Both comment on the zeitgeist of the times with images borrowed from television news. But from there, they part company. Where The Texas Chainsaw Massacre puts down deep roots into the hindbrain and occupies terrifying archtypal landscapes, Last House struggles with its ambitions. A lot of this has to do with the approach of its director.

The Last House on the Left is an easy film to intellectualize, since the spends a fair amount of time reflexively intellectualizing itself. We also have the long career of its director to provide signposts. In Kim Newman’s superb overview of the horror genre, Nightmare Movies, he notes of Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes: “The Hills Have Eyes is to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as Rio Bravo is to High Noon.” This is a statement describing the the central themes of Craven’s early films, in which would-be victims commit attrocities in the name of survival that are as violent and as inhuman as the actions of the degenerate forces arrayed against them. This is a central theme in The Last House on the Left. In The Hills Have Eyes and, later, in The People Under the Stairs, there is a strong theme of class warfare. This is ALSO a central theme of The Last House on the Left. But Craven is an inconsistent auteur when it comes to these textual and subtextual elements, because he drops one, the other, or both in many of his films, and hasn’t really explored these themes in nearly a decade. The element of his films that HAS endured even to his latest projects, though, is the idea of the horror film as meta-cinema. The Last House on the Left is a reflexive film that comments upon itself (mainly in the guise of pretending to be a remake of The Virgin Spring). Commenting in The American Nightmare, a recent documentary about 70s era horror films, John Landis notes that this film is genuinely transgressive (he uses the phrase “genuinely perverted,” in point of fact), and further notes of its modus operandi: “In a Hitchcock movie, we are reassured because we are in the hands of a master filmmaker; in Last House on the Left, we’re in the hands of a maniac.” The way in which Last House on the Left transgresses the boundaries of good taste and civilized behavior is instructive, because it is ALSO a reflexive commentary on the conventions of the subgenre. Additionally, the film is very conscious of its portrait of the young and the old devouring each other as a reflection of the times during which it was made.

In other words, the film is over-intellectualizing itself, long before critics and apologists get a crack at it.

Where Last House on the Left fails is precisely where The Texas Chainsaw Massacre succeeds so spectacularly: it fails to match image with archetype. In fact, I would suggest that The Last House on the Left rarely occupies an archetype in any meaningful way and that the archetypes it trades in are too obscure to function in the way horror movie archetypes should function. There are hints of Saturn devouring his children in the movie, and The Virgin Spring elements resemble the story of Theseus and Protrusces, in which a madman murders those to whom he has extended his hospitality. But none of the archetypal figures--if we can call them that--referenced by the film really resonates deep in the reptilian hindbrain where primal experiences dwell, because the film never provides an image to match them. To an extent, this is a function of the slipshod filmmaking on display here. The film is grotty and unpleasant to look at and features none of the visual and epistemological flourishes that characterize Craven’s later films. Purely in terms of the visual image, the film is MUCH closer to the sensibilities of Last House’s OTHER creative force, Sean Cunningham, who would later father The Friday the 13th movies. As a measure of the laziness behind the camera, it should be noted that almost every structure of any significance is on the right of the characters as they approach them. The end result is a film that subverts its own cleverness with its sneering bad taste. As John Waters once noted, there is “good” bad taste and “bad” bad taste. I would place Last House on the Left in the latter category.