[unsettling music]
- A house can just be a labyrinth of death,
and you would never know from the outside.
- One movie...
[thunder booming]
That's really, really scary...
♪
I would say Rob Reiner's "Misery."
- God's sake. - It's for the best.
- Annie, please!
- [wailing]
- "Last House on the Left" is kind of just, like,
the world's most, you know,
[bleep]-up after-school special, you know?
♪
- Just a bunch of, like,
horrible hillbilly, evil people
doing their worst to you.
- Blow your brains out! - [crying]
[gunshot]
- I mean, "House of 1000 Corpses"
to me seems exactly like if you took
"Texas Chain Saw Massacre"
And "Rocky Horror Picture Show"
and threw it in a blender
and spit out another movie.
♪
- [screams]
[all gasp]
- "Cabin in the Woods" might be the most fun
that I've had watching a movie in the last ten years.
[ghastly snarl]
♪
- Most haunted house stories
are really glorified family dramas.
- [shouts]
- There is no safer place for you to be than your house.
- [shrieks] - [screams]
- When the place that you live in rebels against you,
that's terrifying.
♪
[eerie music]
♪
- [screams]
male narrator: Home is where the heart is,
unless you happen to live in a house of hell...
[gunshot]
A house where love sours into hate
and the echoes of the violent past
return to haunt the present.
♪
- Well, houses effectively are great locations for horror
because a house is anything you want it to be.
It can be a home,
or it can be a prison.
You never can tell what's going on on the inside,
and that's sort of that macabre curiosity
that I think we all have.
Whenever you hear about some serial killer, like,
"They--their house looked so normal from the outside."
narrator: When it comes to creating houses of hell,
Stephen King has few rivals.
- [screams]
- I know, like,you don't wanna play favorites,
but is there is one adaptationof yours
that you're like,"That's the one
that nailed exactlywhat was in my head"?
- Well, it depends on whether you're talking about
one of the balls-to-the-wall horror movies,
but if I had to say what's the one movie
that's really, really scary and just is unrelenting,
I would say probably Rob Reiner's "Misery."
narrator: Best-selling romance novelist Paul Sheldon
has a terrible car accident.
[dramatic music]
He's rescued by a seemingly kind and cheerful nurse
named Annie Wilkes.
- I'm your number one fan.
- Anybody who works in the arts
has experienced people that consider themselves
your number one fan,
and it just feels so real,
and Rob Reiner really got it right.
He really understood it.
- Look what I got.
narrator: Annie is obsessd with Misery Chastain,
the heroine of Paul's books.
- I slammed my money down.I got the first copy.
♪
You dirty bird.
How could you?
narrator: When she finds out
he's killing the character off,
she does not take the news well.
- You did it! You did it!
You murdered my Misery!
- Annie!
narrator: Annie turns Paul into a prisoner.
Her isolated country house becomes a cage
he can't escape.
- If someone is captive in a house in--in a movie,
that's part of the psychological torture
is that someone might be able to see freedom
or people walking by on the outside
but just be trapped on-- you know, on the inside.
In "Misery," it's like,
there were so many other claustrophobic elements.
There was a blizzard,
and she lives out in the middle of nowhere.
[dark music]
narrator: Disabled and trapped in his room,
Paul is forced to write a new book
that brings Misery back to life.
- Think of me as your inspiration.
- One of the things that made that film work
and made Rob Reiner the perfect person to do it
is because humor and horror
are really two sides of the same coin.
- Mm-hmm. - You know, I always say, uh,
"It stops being funny when it starts being you."
You know, so that a lot of times in a horror movie,
something really terrible will happen,
and the audience will go, "Aah!"
And then they'll laugh, you know,
because they're trying to play it off a little bit, so...
- Awesome.
- And "Misery" has a lot of funny things in it.
- Oh, this whole house is gona be filled with romance!
[gasps]
I'm gonna put on my Liberace records.
- That whole Liberace thing wasn't in the book.
- Really?
- How crazy she is about Liberace.
[jovial piano music]
♪
[typewriter dings] [thunder booming]
narrator: As Paul recovers,
he sneaks out of his room,
finds out some disturbing things about Annie,
and plots his escape,
but Annie is one step ahead of him.
[tense music]
- It all builds up to that scene--
- The penguin.
[suspenseful music]
- [sighs]
- When he puts the penguin the wrong way,
the whole audience went, "No!
She's gonna know!She's gonna know!"
[thunder booming]
- [grunts]
- In the book, Annie Wilks cuts his foot off with an ax.
[eerie music]
Rob just felt that that wasn't what was appropriate
for the character
and the movie.
So he said, "We're--we're gonna do this thing
called hobbling."
- Paul, do you know about
the early days at the Kimberly diamond mines?
Do you know what they did to the native workers
who stole diamonds?
[tense music]
- "And so what we're gonna do is,
"we're gonna put a block of wood,
and then we're gonna use a sledgehammer."
So the way that we designed that scene,
we made these fake legs out of gelatin
with a PVC pipe in them, with hinges in the ankle,
and we had cable on 'em so that we could pull the cable
when she swings the sledgehammer.
You know, if you watch the way that that scene
is edited together,
you see she hefts up the sledgehammer,
so you know it's a real sledgehammer.
We never used a rubber sledgehammer.
It was always real.
So you can see it took some effort.
And they cut back to the wide.
There's no insert close-up of the ankle breaking.
- It's for the best. - Annie, please!
[screams]
- Almost done. Just one more.
- You never even see the second ankle breaking.
- [screams]
- You only see--
there's literally one shot in the movie.
- [whimpers]
- God, I love you.
- Kathy Bates is somebody you'd never seen in a movie before.
She'd only been on Broadway before.
- [mockingly] "I can't write on this paper, Annie."
Well, I'll get your stupid paper...
- And you buy her as Annie Wilkes completely.
- Mr. Man!
- [yells]
[grunting]
- And James Caan had never done a horror film before,
and even though it wasn't supernatural,
this was very much a horror movie.
[both grunting]
[suspenseful music]
- [grunts]
♪
[grunts]
- A lot of my dad's stuff, a lot of Stephen King's stuff,
his worldview and philosophy
has always been kind of a more New Testament sort of thing.
Um, there is evil in the world,
and the darkness can be held back,
but the cost is usually human sacrifice.
We can only force the darkness back
at a great cost of blood and tears.
narrator: Secluded country houses
make ideal hideaways for psychopaths.
[ominous music]
But ordinary houses in the suburbs
have their secrets too,
particularly if your family problems
awaken something sinister.
narrator: In horror films, houses are characters
with personalities just as strong
as their occupants.
James Whale's classic "The Old Dark House"
was one of the first to make a crumbling Gothic mansion
reflect the insanity of the family living inside it.
- Wouldn't it be dramatic,
supposing the people inside were dead,
all stretched out
with the lights quietly burning about them?
narrator: And Gothic houses of hell
later featured prominently
in classics like Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho"...
[unsettling music]
Robert Wise's "The Haunting,"
and Lucio Fulci's "The Beyond,"
which conjures up a nightmarish vision
of a house built over a gateway to hell
and the evil that's unleashed
when the gateway opens.
♪
But sometimes
a house from hell doesnt look frightening at all,
like the suburban ranch house
in Scott Derrickson's terrifying film...
[suspenseful musical sting]
"Sinister."
- I think we really don't ge "Sinister" enough credit
for how incredibly friggin' scary that movie is.
[unsettling music]
It is so much more
hideously violent,
I think, than what you would expect
from most, like, studio-released horror movies.
♪
- I always say that the best horror movies feel dangerous,
and this felt dangerous.
♪
- And you have Ethan Hawke in the lead,
obviously a tremendous actor
giving a great performance,
and the dread that it manages to build...
- Last night,
I thought something was in the house.
[breathing heavily]
And I woke up on the couch holding a baseball bat.
[ominous music]
- "Sinister" is about, uh, a writer, Ellison Oswalt,
played by Ethan Hawke,
who had really come into his own
by writing a hit, best-selling book
called "Kentucky Blood," true crime book.
- Start by askingy do you spend so much time
investigating such grisly content?
- Fame and money. [laughter]
No, I'm...
- And, uh, he obtained fae and fortune, notoriety
and since then had written two follow-ups
that were not so good.
- And he was looking to recapture that,
and the way he thinks he can recapture that
is by moving into this house which was a murder house.
What he doesn't do is tell his family,
"Hey, I'm moving you guys into a murder house."
- [laughs] Oh. Oh, man.
Oh, that is a conversation
that I would not wanna be around for.
- No, me neither.
- And that's the biggest sin he could commit.
♪
- I wanted the house to feel
like its general appearance on the outside
isn't scary at all,
that wh--that when they're moving in,
there's just no sense of, like, "Oh, this is a haunted house."
Doesn't feel like that at all,
but it's--you turn all the lights out...
[suspenseful musical sting]
It's a long walk from the office to the bedroom.
♪
- As he's investigating what happened in the house,
he finds a box of--of film,
and each film is in these little cans,
these little home movies,
and they just say really ambiguous things
like "Lawn mower" or "Carpool."
[unsettling music]
And grabs a glass of whiskey
and strings up the projector
and settles in for a night to watch these home movies
after his family goes to bed,
and they are basically snuff movies.
[projector crackling]
♪
And once Ethan watches that first movie,
you're like, "Dude, get out of the house."
- Where was it you think we met?
[tense music]
- At your house. Don't you remember?
- "Lost Highway" was the movie
that made me figure out
how to make the Super 8 films scary.
I remember the effectiveness
of them putting those videotapes in
and watching the footage,
uh, that was moving deeper and deeper into their home.
♪
[horrific musical sting]
[distorted music]
In "Sinister," once it started,
you had--the audience has the experience
of their own as the character.
You never cut back to them
until you're-- till you're done watching.
♪
[dramatic musical sting]
- He's a good true crime investigator,
so he just kind of follows the bread crumbs
until he discovers that there's this entity
named Bughuul
which is using children to kill adults,
kill the parents.
[horrific musical sting]
[tense music]
- And he kind of pays
the ultimate sins for what he's done,
because he opens up the door,
this Pandora's box
of this supernatural horror,
this horrible entity that, um, you know,
leads to the downfall of his family.
♪
- But it's a horror film about a guy watching horror films.
Watching horror can be a dangerous business.
Anybody who watches real true crime
and anybody who watches horror cinema
knows of those moments in their life
when they overreached.
- [shrieks]
- [shouts]
- And they were really punished
for watching that particular film.
We've all had that experience.
- [screaming]
narrator: Some houses of hell
conceal their evil behind bland façades,
and some are exactly what they appear to be:
houses you can enter
but you'll never leave.
narrator: What kind of people would live in a house of hell?
[scary music]
♪
In "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,"
Tobe Hooper showed us
a house of hell is a home, sweet home
to a family from hell.
- [screams]
narrator: The image of that house
and that family
burned into the brains of many future filmmakers.
- [screaming]
narrator: It's influence looms large
in Rob Zombie's twisted,
violent, weirdly comic debut film,
"House of 1000 Corpses."
- Hope you like what you see!
[ominous music]
- "House of 1000 Corpses" to me
seems exactly like if you took
"Texas Chain Saw Massacre" and "Rocky Horror Picture Show"
and threw it in a blender and spit out another movie.
I was trying to make, you know,
this sort of gritty, back roads redneck movie,
which I always loved,
and just the so over-the-top "Rocky Horror" vibe.
- What do they call you, sweetie?
- I'm Qualsnargof the Crab Nebula.
- [laughs]
- Rob said, "I'm writing a character for, like,
a really obnoxious ass[bleep] that's perfect for you."
[laughing] It's literally what he said.
And so he asked me to be in it, and I was in it,
and I got to be in "House of 1000 Corpses."
♪
Four 20-somethings
are driving across country
taking note of, like, these kind of, you know, like,
roadside America,
all these, you know, weird attractions that you see
when you drive across the country
in a pre-internet era,
'cause this took place in the '70s,
and then, eh, you know,
[bleep] goes sideways,
maybe because of my character
when they stumble across
Captain Spaulding's Chicken Shack and Murder Museum.
There was actually a murder ride.
- A murder ride? - [laughs] Yeah.
- I don't wanna goon a murder ride.
- [baby talk] Yes, you do wanna go on a murder ride.
- No, I don't. - Hey.
How 'bout if we skipthe murder ride?
- [baby talk] Hey, how 'bout if we go?
[screaming]
That film is largely about claustrophobia
because from the second they leave the murder ride
and--when the film unfolds and you realize, like,
it's all been planned,
you know the trap is set,
and--and it's really just the trap
getting tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter
until it snaps. [claps]
[dark music]
♪
[all scream]
- [screaming]
narrator: The 20-somethings become prisoners
in the nightmarish home of the Firefly Clan...
Sadistic serial killers
with larger-than-life personalities.
- [screams]
- I like the villains. I always like the villains.
So even when I'm creating
horrible homicidal maniacs,
I'm--they're the people I like.
♪
As long as they're cool,
the audience will let them get away with--well,
you can let them get away with murder,
'cause when you're cool, you can get away with anything.
- Right. - [laughs]
- Well, I'd bet you'd stik your head in fire
if I told you you could see hell.
♪
- When, you know, I got together with Rob
and we started going over the character,
uh, it turns out that he wanted,
like, a--like, a badass.
You know, thumb in your, you know, belt buckle
kind of, you know, badass,
and I was thinking, "Man, I'm not that guy."
It's all true.
The bogeyman is real, and you found him.
And when we did the "run, rabbit, run" scene,
that's when I really deeply connected
to the spirit about us.
After that, I was off and running.
[rock music]
Run, rabbit, run.
Run, rabbit!
The best way to play a crazy guy
is to firmly believe
that you're the only sane one in the room,
and if you do that, then you're not playing crazy.
Run, rabbit!
- [yelps]
- There's no way to get around
how influenced that movie was from "Chain Saw Massacre"
and the house in that:
the wall with the skulls on it,
the chicken bones on the floor,
and the feathers.
But, you know, everything surrounding it,
the grounds, the--the cemetery with, like,
the hundreds of crosses, and the subterranean lair,
even thought that was kind of a wacky idea
that was never in the original script; I kind of, like,
came up with that after the fact.
♪
narrator: The hostages find out the hard way
that the Firefly house is just the tip of an acid iceberg.
[horrific musical sting]
Beneath the house,
the sinister Dr. Satan conducts ghoulish experiments
in his labyrinthine laboratory.
- No!
narrator: It's a basement portal to hell
that lets Zombie's flair for art direction run wild.
- It goes from being this very, like, homespun
DIY-looking kind of movie
to, like, you know,
this foyer of skulls
and this laboratory
and Dr. Satan, and I had all this makeup and stuff.
- There was a certain point where I thought, like,
"Oh, so I'm, like, turning the whole movie
into 'Alice in Wonderland.'"
They go underground, and then it just goes insane,
and you don't know, are they dead?
Are the crazy? Is any of this happening?
I don't even know if I know at this point.
[laughs]
[suspenseful music]
♪
- What do you mean, "It was all right"?
- I mean, it was cool, but it wasn't that great.
- You know, people didn't seem to love the movie
when it came out,
but then because of home video or whatever,
like, something happened,
and within a handful of years,
it was just, like, this cult classic, you know?
Like, people still, when they come to me,
they still, like, "Hey, can you do Dr. Satan?"
So I'm like, "Dr. Satan!"
Dr. Satan! Aah, Dr. Satan!
[dramatic musical sting]
narrator: The cult populariy of the Firefly Clan
led Zombie to bring them back
in the films "The Devil's Rejects"
and "3 From Hell."
- [grunts]
narrator: The dark fanty of Dr. Satan's lair
was traded out for nihilistic crime
in the sun-bleached desert.
- [screams]
narrator: Zombie may have left the Firefly house behind him,
but it's earned a place in the horror hall of fame.
A nice place to live,
if you're a psychotic killer.
[horrific musical sting]
But can a house itself be psychotic?
Can a house thirst for your blood?
[scary music]
♪
narrator: In horror films,
houses are twisted reflectis of their owners.
- The house tried to kill me.
It almost succeeded.
- [screams]
narrator: Every fear, anxie, and character flaw
is brought to the surface
in the pressure cooker of the family home.
- [yelps]
narrator: And those problems get a hundred times worse
when you make the mistake
of moving into a haunted house.
- [roars]
- You heard it.I know you heard it!
♪
narrator: This is the premise of the 1979 film
"The Amityville Horror"...
[chandelier chiming]
Based on the supposedly true story
of a family beset by a demonic house.
[thunderclap]
- I just wish that, uh,
all those people hadn't died here.
I mean, ugh, a guy kills his whole family?
Doesn't that bother you?
- Oh, yeah, sure, but...
houses don't have memories.
- "The Amityville Horror" begins, uh, actually,
uh, before the family even moves into the house.
[thunder booming]
In 1974,
a disturbed young man took a shotgun
and murdered his family.
He went to jail, and, uh,
a new family, the Lutzes, moved into the house
in Amityville, Long Island,
and over the course of 28 days, um,
the family supposedly experienced
a whole wealth of supernatural phenomena.
- [shrieks]
- Swarms of flies...
[flies buzzing]
- Mysterious ooze and slime,
loud noises.
[high-pitched bang]
You know, it ran the whole gamut, you know?
[ominous music]
- People say,"Amityville Horror, oh, I mean,
what was it like to film that?"
I...
It was like any other film I did.
♪
The prep that you do and what you do
to enter your character
and try to have something happen
and try to put a--a line you don't cross
where you're-- you're overdoing everything.
[Bleep] damn it, this is my house!
In the beginning of the movie,
George had a lot of hair
'cause I'd had a lot of hair from a previous movie,
and so I'm quite coiffed and everything.
- Hmm. Your hair's getting long.
- So when we got to that place,
it was really fun
to start taking, uh, goop and crap
and starting to make your hair look a little unkempt
and dirty and crazy.
- Honey.
- Oh, mother of God, I'm coming apart!
- George, you look terrible.
- So she keeps telling me.
The most fun for me was--
was the transformation.
Okay.
Being in that tux with everybody having a good time
and me in the bathroom, like,
turning into some kind of monster weirdo.
I'm gonna write you a check,
and either that's good enough for you,
or you're gonna eatyour own goddamn food.
[dramatic musical sting]
- It's their first house. It's a fixer-upper.
They're underwater quite quickly with--with the money,
with the cost of it,
and the house starts to exert an influence
on the husband, on the father.
- Just drop it, Jeff.
- You marry a dame with three kids,
you buy a big houe with mortgages up to your ass,
you change your religion, and you forget about business.
Great. Really great.
- Most horror stories,
most haunted house stories, when you--
when you boil them down,
are really glorified family dramas.
You know, they're about some kind of--
they're about alcohol abuse at some level
or--or parental abuse at some level or...
- Aah!
- In the case of the original "Amityville,"
they're about kind of economic distress.
- You're the one that wanted a house.
This is it, so just shut up.
- You bastard.
- [shouts]
- [shrieks]
- Stephen King in his book "Danse Macabre"
makes a good case
that the central horrific moment in that film
is the disappearance of some money.
- What money?
- The money for the caterer, $1,500.
I put it in-- I put it in this pocket.
- And it's hinted that the haunted house
has stolen the money because it knows
that that's a good way to get at them.
So, you know, the--the moment
of greatest suffering in the film
is when James Brolin finds an empty money clip.
[tragic music]
This is really what this film is about.
It's about this moment when a man is financially undercut
by forces beyond his control.
♪
- Where the hell is it?
[suspenseful music]
narrator: The film's strangest moments come at the end,
all drawn from the since discredited book
about the Amityville haunting.
- [screams] - [grunts]
I had a little trouble with,
you know, the pig in the window.
[rain pattering]
[thunder booming]
Um, I don't go there.
But I didn't have any problem
with the stuff leaking out of the walls
or even the possibility of George being bit in the leg
by a--a ceramic thing,
you know, that's shaped like a lion.
- Looks like teeth marks.
- Will you stop nagging at me?
[explosion]
♪
The process of a movie
is going from a lovely marriage
and two people in love
to the point of them having to leave in fear
in their car.
Good and delightful to bad and horrible, you know?
- George! No!
[thunder booming]
[unsettling music]
narrator: "The Amityville Horror"
gave us supernatural mayhem
in upscale Long Island,
but for full-on blood-soaked craziness,
take a vacation in a cabin in the woods.
narrator: 1981 introduced the world
to one of the most iconic houses in horror...
- Shut it off!
narrator: The haunted cabin from "The Evil Dead."
[chaotic music]
In 1987, director Sam Raimi returned to the cabin
for "Evil Dead 2,"
a horror comedy update of the original film.
[horrific musical sting]
- People go crazy for "Evil Dead 2."
Like, "Oh, my God, you worked on that movie?
I love that movie."
There's something about horror films
that have that aspect of being a bit outrageous
that takes them to a different place.
- Who's laughing now?
[screams]
narrator: Raimi's wildly inventive directing
inspired a generation of filmmakers.
I paid tribute to the "Evil Dead" cabin
in my first film, "Cabin Fever,"
and so did Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard
in their film "The Cabin in the Woods."
[eerie music]
- One spider, and I'm sleeping in the Rambler.
narrator: "The Cabin in the Woods"
begins with a familiar premise:
five college students go off for a weekend retreat.
None of them will survive.
[wood creaking]
But though it looks familiar,
this is not your ordinary haunted murder cabin.
[all gasp] - What the hell was that?
[ominous music]
- What do you think'sdown there?
- Not having an original take on the cabin
proves so much more valuable later on
when--when the whole big picture comes into play.
When you finally see what this whole movie's all about,
having this sort of cabin that's literally plucked from,
like, you know, an '80s classic or whatever is perfect.
Uh, guys?
I'm not sure it's awesome to be down here.
- "The Cabin in the Woods" says to the viewer,
"We get each other. We both know horror.
Sure, okay."
♪
So it does a great job of, at the very beginning,
hitting all the tropes that, uh, you wanna see...
♪
But--and then starts turning things on its head.
- "Then we will be restored,
and the Great Pain will return."
And then--then there's something in Latin.
- Okay, I'm drawing a line in the [bleep] sand here.
Do not read the Latin. - [whispering] Read it.
narrator: As you might expect,
in the basement,
the students unleash terrible supernatural forces.
- [speaking Latin]
[scary music]
♪
narrator: But you might nt suspect that the cabin
is just the front end of a supernatural
"Big Brother"-style reality show
made for an audience of ancient evil gods
run by a team of scientists working deep underground.
- We have a winner. [people groan]
It's the Buckners, ladies and gentlemen.
The Buckners pull the W.
All right,
that means that congratulatios go to maintenance.
[people cheering]
Who share the pot with Ronald the intern.
- Yeah!
- I love that it's outrageous.
You're setting up that--that all over the world,
there are these scientists
that are responsible for making sacrifices
in order to keep these unseen gods at check.
I mean, right there, the premise is so brilliant.
- Not here.
- Oh, baby, come on.
We're all alone.
♪
- These kids, they go to this cabin,
and they're under surveillance
by this kind of ridiculs military-industrial complex,
right?
And they're kind of watching them,
filming them being killed by these monsters,
and it's--it's--
they're--they're watchig a horror film.
- [screaming] - [screams]
- And the way that they all sort of consume this
as entertainment, almost,
in an almost sort of religious way
was sort of its own kind of commentary
on sort of the--I think maybe, like, a depraved sort of turn
that we've all taken, perhaps,
with sort of recent horror films.
Aah! Oh!
Aah!
narrator: To appease the evil gods,
this high-tech death trap
follows a strict set of rules
about who dies and in what order,
just like the tropes of slasher films.
- [grunts]
- But she's still alive.
How can the ritual be complete?
- The virgin's death is optional as long as it's last.
Main thing is that she, you know, suffers.
♪
Which one?
narrator: But the controlle' plans are disrupted
when two of the students escape
into the subterranean compound.
- It's an elevator.
- [roars] [both scream]
- They're going down the elevator,
and you see little cubicles
with all the different monsters.
[muffled screaming]
[dog barks] [baby cries]
[metal clanging] [ghostly moaning]
- And the seeing all the behind the scenes
of, okay, so this is, like, a big government-run
situation where you have all these different, uh, monsters
and then that going haywire
and them all getting loose from their own pods.
- Oh, [bleep].
[elevator bells ding]
[gunfire, screaming, and screeching]
[metallic whirring]
♪
- That's the depiction of...
how I think most people feel
about government incorporations now,
where we're like,
"Oh, they think they have everything together,"
and what they're actually doing
is delicately holding together chaos,
something that could destroy our entire society.
- [roars]
- They've decided that they know how to control it
and can keep it together
and we don't even know it's happening.
So we're just sitting here, victims of something
we are not even aware of.
narrator: As chaos reigns,
the students discover there's an even lower level
to this house of hell,
one that literally adjoins the underworld.
- At the end of the day,
it's all sort of really run
by some, like, weird primitive, you know,
giant--barbaric, giant, evil gods or whatever.
- What's beneath us?
- The ancient ones,
the gods that used to rule the Earth.
As long as they accept our sacrifice,
they remain below.
- And think there's something funny in that sense,
that sort of we--we--we like to think that we've, you know,
sort of created this nice civilized society
but perhaps, at the end of the day,
it's all really just cosmic indifference.
- You can die with them,
or you can die for them.
- Gosh, they're bothso enticing.
- By the time you end,
you're in a completely different place,
and you never saw it coming,
and you had a great time getting there.
That's a win-win for me.
[explosion booming]
[dramatic music]
[both laughing]
narrator: "The Cabin in the Woods"
was a fantastic darkly funny commentary
on horror and horror fans.
- I'm chilly.
[people moan]
- But there's few laughs and no fantasy
waiting at our last stop...
- [crying]
narrator: "The Last House on the Left."
- Yes, who is it?
narrator: In 1972,
one notorious film turned a quiet suburban home
into a metaphor for American society.
[horrific musical sting]
It has one of the most famous trailers in horror history.
♪
male announcer: "The Last House on the Left."
To avoid fainting keep repeating...
all: It's only a movie. Only a movie.
narrator: Two teenage girls looking to score drugs
before a concert in the city
wind up being raped and murdered by escaped criminals.
[scary music]
But retribution will come
in a suburban house-turned-abattoir.
♪
- "Last House on the Left" is kind of just, like,
the world's most, you know,
[bleep]-up after-school special, you know?
- Uh, you don't know where we could, uh, score on some,
uh, good grass, do you?
- Nah, I don't knowthat stuff.
- Aw. - Thanks.
- [laughing] It's--it's kind f just like, "Oh, my God,
"if I go into the big city and smoke weed,
"I'm gonna get, like,
"horribly, like, molested in the woods
and then shot in the head?"
That's a very rough movie.
- Aah!
[chaotic music]
♪
- I'm gonna kill that bitch.
[dramatic musical sting]
narrator: 1972 was a rough year
for the United States of America.
Cities were crumbling,
the war in Vietnam was a lost cause,
and the flowered hippie dream had collapsed
into the darkness of the drug culture.
First-time writer-director Wes Craven
and producer Sean Cunningham
decided to make a film
that reflected the ugliness around them.
- Wes' thought was that we could shape this movie
by showing a sort of a personalized violence
that the audience could react to.
- [crying]No. No.
[gasping]
[bird cawing]
- That, uh, it would become a much more visceral experience,
not unlike "The Virgin Spring."
♪
narrator: Ingmar Bergman's "The Virgin Spring"
is an unsparing study of rape, murder, and revenge.
"The Last House on the Left"
borrows "The Virgin Spring'" plot
but trades Bergman's art house perfection
for a raw style inspired by cinema verité documentaries
and the constant barrage of violent war footage
broadcast on television.
- Oh! [grunts]
- The impulse I had for "Last House" is,
I'll stage these various scenes,
and I'll--I'll do it like it's actually happening,
and I'll do it basically like a documentary.
It was only after we did a couple scenes like that
that I realized they were powerful,
and you could start to feel it.
- [wailing]
- I think that's part of the reasons why
that it engages you so,
because it doesn't-- doesn't look staged.
It looks sick. [laughs]
♪
- The assault itself is even almost so much more horrifying
because it, too, looks amateur.
It looks like a bunch of people who have no idea
what they're doing.
Just a bunch of, like,
horrible hillbilly, evil people
doing their worst to you.
[gunshot]
[dark music]
narrator: The last act of the film
takes place in the last house on the left.
- This place is in the middle of nowhere, you know that?
♪
narrator: Posing as traveling salesmen,
the killers are welcomed into a nice suburban home
by a doctor and his wife...
♪
Who offer to let them stay the night.
- Guess who lives here.
♪
narrator: They soon realize they're staying in the home
of their latest victim.
- [breathing heavily]
I'm all right. I'm all right.
- [gasps]
narrator: When the parents learn the truth,
they take brutal revenge.
- Don't move.
♪
narrator: The mask of civility drops.
The nice suburban house becomes a torture chamber.
[chain saw whirring]
- I think there is a morally questionable dynamic
going on in that movie
because I find revenge to be, um,
a distinctly American, uh, derangement.
There are revenge films, um,
elsewhere in the world and always have been,
but revenge is such a staple of American cinema,
and then you take it into the horror genre,
and you get really grapc and extreme with it.
I think you're tapping into the American id
in a way that is, uh,
revealing but not healthy.
[chain saw whirring]
- It's a very difficult film to watch.
- [screaming]
[chain saw whirring]
- When I went back to it ten years later,
I just found myself going, "Oh, Jesus."
Going, "Oh, God."
all: It's only a movie. Only a movie.
narrator: As often happens in horror,
a wave of imitators sought to cash in
on the success of "The Last House on the Left,"
and in 1984,
Wes Craven returned to housebound horror
with "A Nightmare on Elm Street"
starring Freddy Krueger,
whose name is a play on Krug,
"Last House's" lead psychopath.
[ominous music]
Houses of hell are sometimes realistic...
[gunshot]
Sometimes supernatural...
♪
But they all poke at our illusions
of comfort and safety.
They remind us that no matter where you live
or who you are, life is short...
Human relationships are fragile,
and you should never move into the murder house.
[scary music]
♪