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It's a grim thing to have to say, but based on the research I've been doing over the last few weeks – which I haven't yet finished with – I have come to a sad conclusion. That is that I am morally certain that Sandra Peabody was severely psychologically abused while making The Last House on the Left, most notably by David Hess whose psychological abuse of her was also strongly sexualised. His Vanity Fair quote was, for me, the final nail in the coffin. That's not a social media post or a one-man blog like mine, where a writer might be tempted to push a particular angle. It's a mainstream magazine with fact-checkers, legal review and the like. Barring a catastrophic failure of almost every 2008-era journalistic safeguard, Hess said what he did, and that alone constitutes severe abuse.

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271/365: Horsefair horse, Kidderminster
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272/365: Market Hall, Worcester
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The friends being me and nightlightsuk who I've known for more than twenty years now, and who was kind enough to join me in Worcester for a few hours. Most of which was spent eating, yattering, or both. This was a very agreeable way to spend a day, to say the least, so a big thank you and *hugs* for that! The lower photo today is of the top floor of the rather odd Market Hall in Worcester. No market, just a mixture of empty units and offbeat shops. Up here: comics and annuals shop on the left, vegan sushi café at the end, record shop far right, film (as in camera film) shop near right. It's all very strange.

I failed to upload yesterday's 365 picture on time – as it happens that wasn't a deliberate omission after my much more serious earlier post; it was just forgetfulness! So you're getting it now. That's the upper photo today: the life-size horse sculpture here is in the Horsefair, a formerly (and still to an extent) run-down area of Kidderminster. It's made of over 500 actual horseshoes, and was made by Tom Hill in 2011.

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270/365: Piccolos, Bewdley
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Another fairly unexciting day, which is naturally par for the course for me! The most interesting thing I can remember seeing is a hole in the road on Park Lane where National Grid were replacing something or other. Yes, this is the level of thrills we get in Bewdley life. Today's photo is even more amazing, as it's a coffee shop I almost never go into! Piccolos is fine as far as service goes, but it's really cramped inside and so it doesn't feel comfortable lingering. What's the point of a coffee shop where you can't linger, eh?

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And for anyone who's seen The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, as I now have, I want to be clear: my subject line is accurate. I don't mean her character, Sally Hardesty, though she was indeed a proto-Final Girl. I mean the actress herself, Marilyn Burns.

In my recent post, I detailed three particularly nasty examples of her mistreatment while making the film, but these were far from the only ones. Among other things she was semi-accidentally hit on the head with a sledgehammer whose steel shaft hadn't been made safe, was hurt doing a six/seven-foot jump involving sugar glass that had hardened in the humid conditions (her limp near the end is genuine), smashed up both knees to be bleeding pretty badly after 17 takes of the gas station sequence (Tobe Hooper: "It was terrible, but it played very well"), was chased through dark woods with a live chainsaw (chain off, but rubber belt on), and – for just a second – was in a room with a Gunnar Hansen who literally wanted to kill her because the set conditions had driven him deluded and for that moment he thought he was Leatherface.

So, Final Girl? Let's have a look at the scorecard:

1) Moral superiority. Her safety was treated as rather a low priority by Tobe Hooper and his obsession with bloody "raw authenticity", leading to injury after injury. She was upset by neither him nor anyone else on set praising her performances. Yet in later years, while she was honest about what she'd faced, she never sounded vindictive or twisted, and she was willing to remain on good terms with Hooper, Hansen (except for a while after his knife deception was revealed) and the others. She didn't treat anyone else the way Hooper treated her. Box ticked.

2) Resourcefulness. Despite not being an experienced actress, she was able to produce a performance that is still talked about while frequently acting under extreme duress – exhaustion and overheating at best, active abuse and assault at worst. She did most of her own stunts, some of which were significantly more dangerous than those of many other actresses of the era and genre – sometimes even more reminiscent of the silent era. Box ticked.

3) Resilience. Are you kidding me? Let me remind you that she somehow made it through a shoot where, in the space of five weeks, she had been beaten to the point of unconsciousness, dripped with her own blood, assaulted with a knife, run from working chainsaws and done about 900 takes of every angle regardless of fatigue because of Tobe sodding Hooper's cavalier attitude to her safety and obsessive artistic perfectionism. Box ticked.

4) Survival. On this set, that didn't just mean getting through a tedious, tiring shoot. It literally meant what it says: survival. She could have died in several ways out there: if Hansen's delusion had lasted a little longer, if the steel-cored "broom" had caught her an unlucky blow on the temple, if the sledgehammer had been wielded a bit too hard, if she'd succumbed to the extreme heat of the dinner scene, if a chainsaw accident in the dark had severed an artery... Box ticked.

5) Overcoming her monster. The "monster" here is probably a combination of things. Tobe Hooper (yes, again), the generally appallingly unsafe set, and the brutal Texas heat. In post-production, Hooper deliberately drove her to emotional collapse for the eye close-up scene, despite being under nothing like the pressure he had been on set. The set involved genius stunts like one actor putting gunpowder on his hand and lighting a match. All this should have broken her. It didn't. Box ticked.

6) Bearing witness. Burns didn't retreat into a quiet life once TCM had finished filming. She chose to lean into her experience and engage with fans and journalists, guest at conventions, do Q&A sessions and interviews, and more besides. She was straightforward about how hard her experience had been, but she almost never crossed into bitterness or anger. Once she knew the truth about Hansen's lie, she was able to talk about it fully. Box ticked.

So there we are. A perfect full house. The whole point of the Final Girl is that she's supposed to be fictional, something impossible to recreate in real life. Yet Burns did it – and she did it without the predestined protection of the script that her fictional counterparts have. She faced moments when it was genuinely uncertain whether she would leave that movie set alive. Her treatment was unconscionable, and she should never have had to earn this title. But since she did:

Marilyn Burns. The real Final Girl.
 

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267/365: Bug Hotel, Worcester
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Another trip to Worcester today to have a nice afternoon with My Little Pony fandom friends, including one who hadn't managed to make it for several months and persevered despite being inconvenienced pretty badly by CrossCountry Trains. (This is not exactly rare.) We had a nice few hours, as we nearly always do, in spite of the lighting in the basement we use gradually failing through the weeks to the point where our side of the big table we sit at now has one working bulb! Today's photo is of the Bug Hotel near Worcester Library – appropriately known as the Hive – which is there to attract insects. Not much going on today that I could see, but then it is almost the end of October. Clocks going back tonight, which definitely heralds the end of the outdoor season for me if the rain hadn't already done it.

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It turns out it was worse than I thought. Worse than I could ever have imagined. Regardless of the grace and humour Marilyn Burns herself showed in engaging with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, its personnel and its fans in later years, and regardless of the fact that she worked with director Tobe Hooper again on Eaten Alive, looked at objectively this particular movie's creation was an ethical catastrophe. Marilyn Burns suffered gross negligence, physical assault and psychological cruelty on that movie. And when you watch the film, the results of all three are right there on the screen. You are literally watching a young actress being abused on a film set. Let me give you the details – and these are nowhere near all the ethical failures that five-week shoot had, just three of the most severe. I'll first give a brief summary of each incident, following up with a longer paragraph including links and citations.

1. Gross negligence – Because a broomstick prop hadn't been checked for safety, Marilyn Burns was beaten so badly with it that she received multiple bruises and a black eye, and briefly fainted after cut was called.
2. Physical assault – When a tube containing prop blood failed, co-star Gunnar Hansen deliberately cut Burns' fingertip for real with a knife, then allowed another actor to suck the blooded finger without knowing the blood was real.
3. Psychological cruelty – In post-production, director Tobe Hooper called Burns to the editing suite under false pretences, then subjected her to hours of distress and discomfort to make her eyes look bad for a shot.

Now for the promised details of each incident:

1. Gross negligence
This one directly contributed to the worst injuries Burns received during production. As director Tobe Hooper notes in this 2015 interview with Flashback Files, for the scene where the Cook (Jim Siedow) attacks Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) with a broomstick, he'd asked for a safer prop "so as not to hurt Marilyn". So far, so good. But what he was given was a rubber stick with a steel rod inside – more dangerous than a real broom. As Siedow himself noted in 2000, the crew and even Burns herself, assuming the stick was a safe prop, encouraged him to hit her harder for realism, something he'd been reluctant to do. He "started having fun doing it and started really slugging her", they got through the takes... and then she "fainted dead away ... beaten up pretty badly". (She has a black eye at times in some of the following scenes. That black eye is not make-up.) So, an actress was beaten into – fortunately brief – unconsciousness because her director failed in his basic duties to a) know exactly what was going onto his set and b) keep his actors safe, and because a brave and committed actress was willing to endure pain beyond what she should ever have needed to.

2. Physical assault
When the kidnapped Sally is brought into the Sawyers' farmhouse, she's bound hand and foot on a chair and gagged with a rag secured by a rope. This being low-budget 1970s film-making, those restraints are real, not quick-release props: Burns noted in this Terror Trap interview that at one point she fell over and "I'm sitting there with my hands tied, my feet tied, the filthy gag in my mouth they just picked off the set (who knows where it had been)". Anyway, in this scene Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) cuts her finger with a knife so that Grandpa (John Dugan) can suck her blood. In his memoir Chain Saw Confidential, Hansen writes (pp122–23) that after the blood tube failed multiple times, he "decided to make sure it worked. I turned away from the others and quickly stripped the protective tape off the blade. [...] I would cut her for real. I wanted to be done with this shot, whatever the damage." He cut her fingertip, squeezed to get the blood to ooze, then pushed her finger into Dugan's mouth for him to suck. Dugan assumed it was stage blood, as did everyone but Hansen and Burns herself. Sally (and therefore Marilyn) was gagged and bound, so Burns could not effectively withdraw consent, and her screams – we all know that fingertip cuts hurt – were expected for the scene so were interpreted as acting. Hansen did not admit what he'd done to anyone for decades, so Burns repeatedly defended it as an accident – even some online sources continue to state this. So yes: if you watch that film and are impressed by how real the blood and screaming feel at that point... it's because they are real. You are, quite literally, watching a bound woman being injured with a knife, and having her blood drunk, without her consent or even prior knowledge.

3. Psychological cruelty
Again, the details of this incident come from Chain Saw Confidential (p128 this time), including contributions from Burns herself and from editor Larry Carroll. After principal photography had ended, Hooper asked Burns if she wanted to come to the editing office to "see what's going on", adding "I just want a few shots of your eyes". What actually happened was that she was kept there far longer – in her recollection, "it seemed like four or five hours", with the camera on them the whole time and her having to scream and cry repeatedly. She wasn't able to check her eyes as they got redder and debris built up, and nobody asked her if she was uncomfortable or suggested she "take a moment". Instead, she says, "They thought, 'This is getting better. Give her another couple hours and her eyes will really look crappy.'" When it was finally over, says Carroll, everybody left. Burns was left "devastated [...] there was nothing left." Carroll alone did stay with her, wanting to drive her home because of her condition. He ends by saying, "I think for Tobe, the performance that he wanted, about the only way that he knew how to get it out of her was basically torturing her, and he did. It was horrific." What came of all this were the extreme eye close-ups (not those of Burns' wider face) shown in the dinner party scene. Again, the result of what Hooper did is in the film you can watch today.

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264/365: Civil War mural, Worcester
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I had to be in Worcester today for boring reasons, but I did at least have a little time to myself to go for a walk, so I wandered up past Fort Royal Park (site of part of the Battle of Worcester in 1651) and went as far as the Mount Pleasant pub, since it has this rather nice mural on the back that I don't think has been there all that long. My photo isn't that great, but getting an angle without parked cars in the way was tricky! The text "It is for aught I know a crowning mercy" was written by Oliver Cromwell to William Lenthall (Speaker of the Commons) after his victory in the battle. Worcester was a Royalist city, so it's not often you see Cromwellian wording around here! Still, I seriously doubt the landlord sees this as anything other than a nice bit of historical artwork. :)

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263/365: Aldi, Kidderminster town centre
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...we have picture of Aldi. Yes, as in the supermarket. This is one of two branches of the store in Kidderminster, and I was in there briefly just today, though I didn't end up buying anything. As you can see from the damp road, it had been raining, although fortunately I avoided nearly all of that. This particular Aldi is unusual in that it doesn't have its own free car park – you have to use the pay and display council car park instead, but that doesn't seem to put people off. In any case, Morrisons is about three minutes' walk away (behind and to the left) and so plenty will park there and walk over to Aldi in the same visit.

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260/365: Pershore Panthers mural
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261/365: A rather wet lane surface...
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Not a great deal to say here, especially as the weather was dire virtually all day, as you can see in the second photo. A real pity that the worst rain hit on a Sunday, but there it is. The first photo is from inside the otherwise disappointing Coffee #1 café in Pershore: these wild big cats are something of a recurring rumour all over the country, and while most are simply dogs seen at awkward angles, there's just enough uncertainty that the stories keep on coming.