There’s been a recent surge in a peculiar little niche of the horror genre, a subset you might call “torture horror.” Movies like Captivity, Hostel and even the popular Saw series have made torture the new fad in fright films. When distilled to their very essence, what movies like these are trying to do is convince you you’re watching a snuff film. All of them are trying to equal the granddaddy of all pretend snuff films, Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left, but none of them has.

There’s one key difference between that original classic and the current new batch of unpleasant, endurance-test movies. The modern pictures are trying to entertain you; The Last House on the Left, on the other hand, seems to adopt the position that nobody could be entertained by this. It’s job is not to amuse, but to upset. Instead of giving the audience what it wants, it points finger at the audience as they squirm more and more uncomfortably in their seats, and it fairly shouts at you: “You came here to be delighted by people being raped and tortured and brutalized and murdered? What in the fuck is wrong with you?” And that’s why it succeeds where others have failed.

As a title, The Last House on the Left is completely meaningless. There aren’t any houses on the left, first or last. What the picture’s actually about is two innocent young girls who are kidnapped by a gang of thugs. They’re sexually assaulted, painfully tortured and ultimately murdered in cold blood. The violence is gritty and in your face, the brutal sexuality is on screen and never tastefully done and the whole thing is basically an attack on your senses and your sensibilities. Everything that transpires in these sequences is absolutely horrible, and it’s all juxtaposed with slapsticky scenes of comedy and oddly cheery folk music. That’s how life is, isn’t it? One minute it’s laughter and gaiety, the next terrible tragedy.

Although he’s since become one of horror’s top names, this was writer/director Wes Craven’s very first picture. A low budget and a crop of amatuers means there isn’t the flash and pizazz of a Hollywood movie, increasing your belief that what you’re seeing on screen is really happening. The grainy 16mm film further adds to the notion that this is a documentary rather than a simple movie (in spite of the now famous tagline “Keep repeating: It’s only a movie.”). And of course there’s the title card at the beginning that says the movie is based on a true story, which is a complete and utter lie. But hey, it keeps you guessing.

It’s hard to come up with anything more to say about this picture, because it’s really just an affront to all things decent. But it’s a good movie. It endures because it makes a statement, and that statement is: “Why would you sickos wanna look at this stuff? You should be ashamed of yourself, getting all excited over violence.” It’s that message that has caused it to rise above its imitators.

In his intro to the DVD, Wes Craven has this to say: “What you’re about to see is the most complete version of Last House on the Left that has been released to this date since the original theatrical release that was done previous to any cuts. And all materials that were removed for reasons of community standards or protests of censors and everything else has been restored, so you should be aware of that. Remove any small children or innocent animals from the room and take some sort of a tranquilizer yourself if you’re at all unstable in your psychological makeup.”

I think that about says it all.

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• Saw Series in a Nutshell
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