David Hess 1936-2011

He was something of a renaissance man, whose career began in music, and though it never totally left that arena, also took him to some very different places. In the end, David Hess, who passed away suddenly of a heart attack last month at the age of 75, will be remembered by millions of movie fans worldwide as an icon of exploitation cinema. An odd fate for a guy who used to write songs for Elvis...

Hess was born to a Jewish family in New York City during the depths of the Depression. From a very early age, he had already found his first calling. Songwriting came naturally to him, and he also enjoyed performing, as well. At age 19, using the Anglicized name "David Hill", he actually took a stab at recording a brand-new song called "All Shook Up", which wound up a #1 hit the following year for Elvis Presley.

Unbowed, Hess took his songwriting talents to Shalimar Music, where he would be a successful composer through the rest of the 1950s and into the 1960s. Ironically, he would compose a number of songs for Presley himself during this period, as well as the likes of Sal Mineo, Andy Williams, Pat Boone and others. Most notable was the novelty hit "Speedy Gonzalez," which Boone took to #6 in the U.S. and #2 in the U.K., selling six million copies worldwide. By the end of the 1960s, Hess had recorded two hit folk albums and found himself the head A&R man at Mercury Records.

Few could have predicted that during his tenure at Mercury, this successful songwriter, producer and recording artist would suddenly branch off into a very different area of show business. In 1972, he was asked to star in the debut film of a young director by the name of Wes Craven. That film was The Last House on the Left, which would become one of the most notorious pieces of exploitation cinema ever made.

It started out as a musical collaboration, as Hess was called upon to pen the soundtrack for the film. This he did, and songs like "The Road Leads to Nowhere" can be heard throughout the film, with Hess himself on vocals. But it would be as the brutal, sadistic, yet disturbingly charismatic Krug Stillo that Hess would make his greatest contribution to the movie, and become forever known to connoisseurs of the darker side of horror.

The leader of a band of vicious outlaws, Krug is one of the most terrifying psychopaths of '70s cinema, and that's really saying a lot. Hess is a natural in his first screen appearance, seeming to exude the perfect pitch of unadulterated sleaze and lowbrow humor that makes the character unforgettable. One wonders why it took so long for Hess to step in front of a camera. Last House is a flawed film, yet Hess' performance remains one of the best things about it.

Hess would continue to write music of all kinds for years to come, but his career was now set on a different path. The role of Krug opened the door to other lead parts in films like Pasquale Festa Campanile's Hitchhike and Ruggero Deodato's The House on the Edge of the Park. These were unrelentingly dark, grim pictures, in which Hess played unrelentingly dark, grim roles very reminiscent of Krug. Not to besmirch the man in death, but he seemed to have a knack for playing the consummate dirtbag, and it served him well in picture after picture.

He continued to act through the '80s, appearing in Craven's Swamp Thing as well as a slew of Italian exploitation flicks, and even tried his hand at directing. Both his acting and musical careers slowed down a bit in the 1990s, but in more recent years Hess had once again become very active. He recorded a few more albums and started popping up again in horror films like Zombie Nation and Smash Cut. Reminiscent of what he did on Last House on the Left, he even worked on some music tracks for a horror film, namely Eli Roth's 2003 breakout, Cabin Fever.

The iconic roles of his earlier years had gained Hess a whole legion of new, younger fans, many of whom he began connecting with at the conventions at which he started to become a fixture. His career was experiencing a bit of a revival, and ironically he had recently signed on to appear in the sequel to The House on the Edge of the Park, when he died on October 8.

A musician, an actor, a director, a producer--David Hess was all these things, but horror fans will remember him for playing some of the screen's most infamous lowlifes, particularly the implacable Krug Stillo. It's always the villains who get all the glory in horror, and Hess was one of the best.

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A Quarter-Century of Krueger: How a Porn Producer Changed the Face of Horror

From the very beginning, the man who would bring Freddy Krueger to Elm Street had a hard time fitting in with the middle-American, conformist dream. Born into a Baptist family in Cleveland, Ohio, Wesley Earl Craven suffered through an unhappy childhood before leaving as soon as he could to pursue a degree at Wheaton College in Illinois.

After studying English literature, writing and psychology, it seemed that Wes Craven was destined to be your garden-variety humanities college teacher--but that was a far cry from where his path was headed. By the end of the 1960s, his first marriage was over, as was his teaching career.

Craven went to New York and tried to earn money any way he could, first as a cab driver, and later finding work as a sound editor for a movie post-production company. This would be Wes' first taste of the motion picture industry. However, because that industry was so very different from what it is today, Craven's path to horror superstardom would take a decidedly unexpected turn first.

Joining forces with fellow future horror groundbreaker Sean Cunningham, Craven threw his hat into the "adult documentary" biz that was beginning to blossom at the time. Specifically, the two men, with the help of "investors", produced the softcore sex film Together, featuring the future star of Behind the Green Door, the late Marilyn Chambers. As with many such flicks of the day, it posed as an informational film, while really showcasing titillating scenes of frank sensuality.

It must be remembered by modern film-goers that this was a very different time, when respectable middle-class couples lined up around the block to see The Devil in Miss Jones, and the likes of Frank Sinatra and Spiro Agnew sat in the audience for Deep Throat. If you think porn is mainstream today, then you'd really be surprised by the early 1970s, when the genre came as close as it has ever been to the mainstream industry.

And so, a movie like Together seemed like a perfectly natural way for two aspiring filmmakers like Craven and Cunningham to cut their teeth and put together some capital. But next up, the investors behind the operation, in their infinite wisdom, decided that it might be a good idea to shift gears from sex to violence, and asked the boys to put together a horror movie.

That movie would be the still-controversial exploitation film The Last House on the Left, produced by Cunningham, and directed by Craven from a script he based off Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring (1958). Featuring graphic depictions of rape, disembowelment and sexual mutilation, Craven's directorial debut pushed the envelope like no film ever had before. Some were genuinely repulsed by it, while others recognized it as a daring piece of filmmaking. It also must be understood that in the cultural climate of the day, many probably viewed it in the same light as a film like Together--exploitation, after all, is exploitation. There were also the shady associations attached to the film, the funding for which had come largely from the porn industry.

But as much of a career-maker as Last House was, Wes wasn't done with the world of skin flicks just yet. As a matter of fact, his next project after his horror picture would be a film he edited called It Happened in Hollywood, the one and only hardcore porn flick that Craven would be associated with, written and directed by benefactor Peter Locke.

After that, it was horror all the way for Wes Craven. The genre had become big business in the 1970s, and was a way for Craven to make a name for himself in a fashion that was a bit closer (though not much) to the mainstream. With Locke still providing funding, Craven struck out without Cunningham and wrote/directed his next horror picture, The Hills Have Eyes.

This one was an even bigger hit. Ironically, considering the intense subject matter of the film about genetic mutants terrorizing a family of tourists, the film was a bit more accessible to the masses than the brutal Last House, and helped make Wes Craven a name in the horror business.

With enough success under his belt to completely escape the shadow of the porn biz and Locke's money in particular, Craven came under the auspices of big-time production company PolyGram and distributor United Artists for the admittedly mediocre supernatural thriller Deadly Blessing. Next up was Swamp Thing, a campy, quirky and inventive comic book movie that had the terrible misfortune of coming out in the summer of 1982 (E.T., Wrath of Khan, Conan the Barbarian, Poltergeist... get the picture?) That would be followed by a TV movie, Invitation to Hell.

It seemed for a fleeting moment like Last House and Hills Have Eyes were aberrations, and that Craven, free of the grindhouse milieu, was destined for horror oblivion. But thanks to a script he had written right around the time he was making Deadly Blessing, that would not be so. It had bounced around from studio to studio, largely getting turned down for being too ambitious from a special effects point of view. Based roughly on some bits of Germanic folklore and crossed with the then-burgeoning slasher subgenre, that script would be A Nightmare on Elm Street.

No one wanted to take a chance on it, largely because films of that nature were usually considered pretty small-time, and couldn't command the necessary budget. But dying distribution house New Line Cinema, which had taken chances in the past with the likes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Evil Dead, opted to take it on. This would be the first film actually produced by the company that had previously only been in the distribution biz.

And the rest is horror history. Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street made him literally a household name, along with his greatest creation, Freddy Krueger. It also saved New Line Cinema from bankruptcy and positioned it as such a viable property that it would eventually be bought up by Ted Turner. Despite being shut down recently, it was, till the end, known as "The House that Freddy Built" (but should've been "The House that Wes Built").

Craven had come along way from the New York grindhouse porn scene to the new, mainstream pop culture world of '80s horror. His landmark film would become arguably the most identifiable and popular horror film of the entire decade, and established Craven as a true visionary of the macabre. The films that followed, including the likes of Deadly Friend, The Serpent and the Rainbow, Shocker, The People Under the Stairs, Red Eye, and of course the Scream series, would only further solidify that well-deserved reputation.

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Hmm. I Still Think the Last House Remake Will Be Good, Despite this New Commercial

Kids, if you want a lesson in how to strike exactly the wrong tone for the movie you're trying to promote, check this out:



I'm going to write this silliness off as a minor hiccup. You may continue to color me optimistic about this film. Even after the baseball sound effect. How's that for the power of positive thinking?

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There Will Be Blood Libel

By fellow League of Tana Tea-Drinkers member, Arbogast:

My first reaction upon seeing photos of the cast of the 2008 remake of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT was "Funny, they don't look Jewish."

I consider Wes Craven's LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972) to be one of the great unintentional blood libels of the latter half of the 20th Century. I don't think for a minute that Craven is anti-Semitic but rather that he, like all of us, carries with him learned associations that exist apart from his conscious mind. Just as David Lynch has in the past identified a sense of evil in effeminacy (BLUE VELVET) and ethnicity (WILD AT HEART), Wes Craven particularizes in LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT his perception of pure evil with a distinctly Hebraic flavor. Though none of the characters identify themselves explicitly as being Jewish, David Hess' Krug is depicted as an obnoxious cigar-smoking "Jew Yorker" whose perpetual stubble, curly hair, olive-colored skin and outer borough accent code him as an obvious Heeb. Add to that, Krug has been convicted for the killing of a Catholic priest and two nuns.

Cast in the role of Krug's accomplice, Weasel Podowski, Fred J. Lincoln wears the slate-colored hair and slack suit of a Lower East Side alter cocker while both Jeramie Rain (as Sadie, a common Jewish name that also brings to mind Manson killer Susan Atkins, aka Sadie Mae Glutz) and Marc Sheffler (as Krug's schlemiel of a son, Junior) have "difficult" ethnic hair. Weasel's rap sheet identifies him as a child molester, which fits the historical blood libel that slandered Jews as sacrificers of children. The quartet is shown to be "animal-like," to inhabit a dirty tenement (a dwelling associated with foreigners) and, while transporting their kidnap victims from the city to the country, Krug and Sadie engage in rear-entry sex (coitus more ferarum, or "sex by way of the beasts"), a form of copulation frequently associated (however unfairly) with non-Christians.

The transition of the kidnappers/killers from the city to the country is a key element of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, illustrating an old white Anglo-Saxon fear of the contamination of suburbia's assumed purity by ethnic types (as Fairfield County, the film's location and setting, became a destination for upwardly mobile urban Jews post-World War II). The waspy surname of one of the victims and her parents, Collingwood, is eerily similar to Sadie's imaged alias (Agatha Greenwood), suggesting that Krug & Company aspire in some part to assimilate even while they shred the very fabric of Christian society.

In the film's most disturbing sequence, Krug, Weasel and Sadie kill their captives after stripping them and humiliating them sexually. When Phyllis tries to escape, she is run to ground, stabbed and then butchered in a scene that can't help but evoke shechita, or Jewish ritual slaughter. Phyllis' intestines are pulled out of her oozing abdominal cavity and examined, as a shochet would do to determine if a slaughtered animal were fit to be declared kosher. Obviously, Phyllis' disemboweling is not genuinely kosher but does suggest that Krug & Co. are operating on auto
pilot, as if by collective cultural memory, in the same way that their earlier torment of Phyllis and Mari echoed the treatment of Jews bound for concentration camps. The kidnappers seem to be maltreating their captives as a form of confused racial self-hatred, channeling ritualistic acts that both glorify and slander their ancestors.

Having killed Phylllis, Krug rapes Mari... but not before he uses a switchblade to carve his name into her sternum. This gesture reminded me of Rabbi Lowe scratching the word "EMET" into the forehead of The Golem. (With his helmet hair, Krug even resembles Paul Wegener's iconic
1920 interpretation of THE GOLEM.) As EMET is the Hebrew word for "truth," Krug's mutilation of Mari might be said to be his way of sending a wake-up call to WASP society, announcing both his arrival and his intention to destroy their four-square, missionary position world. (In this regard, Krug also bears a resemblance to the character of Berger from the musical HAIR, who comes to his position of iconoclastic hippie king from a distinctly urban Jewish environment.) And can it be mere coincidence that Krug comes to his decision to shoot Mari after having overheard her reciting the Lord's Prayer, as she wades into a woodland pond in a cleansing act of self baptism?

At this point it's worth remembering that LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT is a remake of sorts of Ingmar Bergman's THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960), a Medieval morality tale set at a time when Christianity was waging war against Paganism for world and spiritual dominance. LAST HOUSE hews closely to the VIRGIN SPRING template by having its spree killers (who pose as salesmen, and in so doing aligning themselves with Jews via the merchant class) taken in by Mari's parents, who feed them in a scene that mimics da Vinci's The Last Supper (while leaving an empty chair in the foreground - for Elijah?). Over the course of the evening, the truth comes out and Mari's parents turn on her killers. While the ensuing slaughter is strong stuff, the third act's oddest/most brutal bit of business is Mrs. Collingwood's oral castration of Weasel in a scene that seems to mock the Jewish rite of circumcision (thus explaining the chair left empty for Elijah). It should also be noted that she performs this act after first using Weasel's leather belt to bind his hands in what could be construed as an allusion to the philactery, the calfskin box containing Hebraic scripture that some Jews wear strapped to their heads and wrapped around their left arms during weekday prayers.

Again, I hasten to add that I don't believe ex-Baptist Wes Craven set out to slander the Jews with LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT but the Jewishness of the killers he created cannot be ignored. My feeling is that Craven was writing/casting/directing instinctively from a series of societal and cultural presets and prejudices. Certainly, living and working (first as a taxi driver and then as a young filmmaker) in New York, Craven would have had plenty of negative experiences with people of all ethnic persuasions. I half suspect Krug was modeled on a particularly noxious distributor who blew fetid cigar smoke in Craven's face while cheating him out of profits. However it all came together, these textures (real or imagined) give the original LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT intriguing layers of meaning. You won't find this kind of subtext in a New Millennium remake claiming to pay homage to 70s cinema while pissing all over a glorious, difficult and demanding decade that was never afraid to get blood on its hands.

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