Resources used: The Letterboxd post I mention is my review of Last House on the Left (1972). The Letterboxd list I mention is Edgelord Horror. Logan is the person who left the useful comments: Logan's Letterboxd Logan's Reddit post about the DVD commentary Logan's blog; he says: "The basic, text-heavy design is deliberate. For those with the stamina, it's probably best to start at the intro post and read chronologically, as later posts often have multiple hyperlinks back to earlier ones. The blog is unashamedly on Sandra Peabody's side, and it covers parts of her career away from Last House as well. Although the last post was in May, it's not finished: I'm just waiting until I have something new to post. The 88 Films release later this month might be a trigger for that, for example." Articles Garret Dillahunt's post 'More from the Last House press junket' Videos Celluloid crime of the century David Hess on 'The Last House on the Left' David Hess was scary and he knew it (2009 commentary track) Remembering 'Last House on the Left' (1972) Part One About That Final Girl Life: You can keep up with the podcast on Patreon, or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the pod on Instagram @thatfinalgirllife, or email thatfinalgirllife@gmail.com if you want to say hello. Transcript: Haters and gentlefriends, welcome to That Final Girl Life. It's your favourite final girl here, taking you through the horrors and out the other side to find out what life is really like after the movie ends. In this episode we'll be discussing the 2009 remake of the previously banned 1972 film The Last House on the Left. Please be aware that there will be spoilers for both the original movie and the remake throughout the episode, starting… now. We have to discuss the remake because in the original, Mari isn't a final girl; she only survives in the 2009 version. We will, however, be talking about some of the history behind the movie, where it's relevant to the plot. In this episode, I'll be talking about rape, violence, rape culture, and being chased and shot. I'll also be discussing the abusive behaviour of the actors in the original movie, towards Sandra Peabody, who played Mari in that one, and of course, as always, we'll be discussing symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Ready? Fire up a doobie and boogie on down to the lakeside, where we'll hang out and chat about… The Last House on the Left. We open with two cops driving a prisoner between locations. They're chatting about women on the way in a manner which shows us they're not exactly respectful. Suddenly, a van crashes into the side of the car, and the prisoner they're carrying escapes with the help of his friends, who it turns out staged the crash. And so we begin to meet our cast of characters: Krug, a violent criminal on the run, the one who escaped from the police car; Francis, his brother; Sadie, his girlfriend; and Justin, his son. That's the criminal contingent. Then we have the good guys: parents John and Emma and their daughter Mari, who have come to their lake house for a short holiday. They're grieving the loss of Mari's brother Ben, who died a year earlier. But they're at the stage that, whilst it still hurts, they're able to have some fun, and we kind of get the sense that this trip is partly meant to help with pulling their lives back together. Mari's friend Paige lives nearby, and Mari leaves her parents to an evening on their own while she takes the car and goes to hang out with her buddy. We've already seen that Mari is a competitive swimmer, and that both her parents are workaholics. Paige, on the other hand, is a pretty chill girl. She just wants to work her normal day job in a local store and smoke some weed and hang out with her friends in the evenings. Fair enough. Paige and Mari score off a guy called Justin, who takes them back to his motel room. They start smoking and messing around together, but then the door opens and in walk Krug, Francis, and Sadie, and thus the horror begins. Krug has learned that his picture is all over the papers, and this means that he can't let Paige and Mari go, so he kidnaps them. But Mari tries to escape from the car, and the entire group ends up in some woods near the lake. Paige tries to run away, but gets dragged back and stabbed to death in front of Mari, who is then raped and shot as she tries to run away. She gets to the lake, dives into the water, and begins swimming. But one of the bullets finds its target in her shoulder, and she stops. The group, triumphant, believe they've killed her, and they plan to leave, but a wild storm prevents them from driving away. They approach the nearest house, which happens to belong to Mari's parents, and take shelter inside. Mari's dad, John, offers to let them stay the night in their guest house. They accept. Whilst locking up the house once they've gone to the guest house, John hears a banging noise coming from outside, and opening the door, he finds Mari badly injured, lying on the porch. Usefully, he's a doctor, so he's able to help her, but the lack of a car combined with the phone lines being down means that he's limited as to what he can actually do. But he manages to dig out the bullet, and he cauterises the wound. And at that point, he realises that she's also been raped. Meanwhile, Emma, Mari's mum, learns that it was the group in the guest house who did it. The parents seek revenge, and as a result of several very satisfying fight scenes, they get it. We end with Mari and her parents speeding across the lake in a boat, presumably on their way to the nearest hospital. I'm going to try something a little bit different with this episode. With all of the others, I have written a full script beforehand, and then I've read the script off the page. So I kind of wanted to try one where I'm doing a bit more of a casual vibe. So I have made notes, but I haven't written a full script. So I'm just going to kind of riff off the notes that I've been making all week, and then let's see if you like it. If you hate it, please tell me. Don't be shy. I… presumably I'll get better at not saying um all the time eventually! I realised that when I'm listening to podcasts, what I really like is the kind of casual vibe and the feeling of of sort of getting to know the the host as well a little bit, and I do share quite a bit of my own life as well, as I'm sure you've already learned on the podcast. So I, yeah, I thought let's give this a go. Like I said, if you hate it, please tell me. If you love it, please tell me. I'll see if I hate it or love it, and we'll see what we'll see what I decide to do next week. So first of all, let's talk about the setup of the movie, how we come to understand who Mari even is, and kind of what gets established while we're watching. So first of all, we have the scene where the majority of our main characters meet for the first time. We've already met Mari's parents, and we've discovered all sorts of things, like they're middle class, they're hardworking, their son has died. They have Mari. They're… they're like nice parents, you know. There's like a real sense of like this is a family that actually gets on. And then a bit later, we meet Paige and then the criminal gang. So in this scene where they all meet at the motel, we… we establish a few things. We establish that Mari is a good girl, which we kind of already knew. We get the sense that Paige is sort of naughty, but still likeable. Like, she's not a bad girl as such, but she's like from the wrong side of the tracks. So we're allowed to sympathise with her, but we can't care about her too much, is kind of the vibe I got. We learn that Justin has a soft side, and we also learn that the criminals are definitely the baddies in this film. There's no kind of ambiguity on that front, and we also learn that they're not middle class. I kind of wanted to initially pick up on this class thing though because it was one of the first things I noticed. I think being from a really really low class background, like so low that I'm basically underclass in the UK… like, people say, it's upper, middle and working [class]. It is, but there's also like a benefits underclass that people don't really talk about, except in the Daily Mail, which is, you know, people who grew up on benefits, people whose parents weren't working for whatever reason. That's the kind of background from which I am watching the film, and so one of the first things that struck me was this massive… like massively obvious class difference between Mari and Paige and Justin, and mostly as a result of that, one of the first films that this one reminded me of was Eden Lake, which I really love. I think it's fantastic. I love a bleak movie, and what I love about Eden Lake, I think, is that I don't like… it started, and… I found it really hard to empathise with the main characters because I felt like they were kind of dicks. I don't know. They… they had this this vibe, this like air of entitlement to them, where they were like, "Well, we're entitled to our nice quiet holiday. How dare you plebs be here making noise?” And admittedly, the consequences that they suffer for that are disproportionate, to say the least. However, I really liked it as a kind of demonstration of class differences and of, like, just how clueless people can be when they come from a background that allows them to think “it'll never happen to me.” So I thought of Eden Lake, but I feel like in Last House on the Left, Mari and her family are much more sympathetic than the Eden Lake characters, whose names I can't remember at this point. It's been ages since I watched it. We kind of see this family together, and they seem happy, and they seem to actually love each other, and they're like warm and kind, and like joking around a little bit with each other. And we also learn, obviously, that they've lost their son, which adds a layer
