Photo by Lorenzo Hodges

Hi FEARnet.  Hi America.  Hi Mom.  So, The Last House on the Left was filmed on location in Cape Town, South Africa, which is one of the most beautiful, and obviously, historically complex, cities I've ever been to.  I flew to Cape Town with our uber-producer Marianne Maddalena (who's worked with Wes Craven on everything from Scream to Music of the Heart to The Hills Have Eyes).  It took us a mere 34 hours (including an 8-hour UTI-infection-inducing layover in London), but we flew on Virgin "Upper Class", which is rich people speak for "You get your own sleeping pod, with a down comforter and all the yellow chicken curry with basmati rice you can eat," so the time flew by (pun intentional).  Marianne and I got into our sleep suits (rich people speak for "free pajamas") and had girl talk until our totally legal in the US sleeping pills kicked in.

Marianne and I landed at the airport and were greeted by Sean Cunningham (producer of the first LHOTL and director of a tiny, flash-in-pan, un-influential movie called Friday the 13th) and Vincent, my "chaperone" (which is rich people speak for "driver slash guy who brings you red bull and granola bars"), who was waiting there for me, UTI prescription in hand.  That night, Sean, Marianne and I went out for drinks and Sean told us stories about the original LHOTL, including how they raised money by asking well-to-do dentists for donations, and how the main bad guy, Krug, was the namesake for Freddy Kruger.

Over the next three days, the cast (sans Tony "The bad guy in Ghost" Goldwyn and Monica "The person who was not Morgan Freeman in Along Came a Spider" Potter, who arrived a month later), trickled in.  We began a week or so of intense rehearsals, fittings, hair and makeup tests, get-to-know-you drink-a-thons, and red bull and granola bar hand-offs from our chaperones.  This was the first movie I'd worked on that allowed for such a lengthy rehearsal process, and I think that proved invaluable to the film.  We were actually given time to find our characters, try things out, and get to know our director and each other artistically (if not biblically… okay, not biblically, but that could've been fun, too).  Because of the nature of the material we were rehearsing, and the fact that everyone was at once very prepared and very generous, the cast became close really quickly.

Garrett, Aaron and I (because we were the "bad guys") got to have hours of gun training, and darkened hair and plaster casts made of our heads.  There's nothing quite like a team of dudes covering your head in sticky plaster while you breathe out of two "nose straws".  These creepy-looking plaster head casts (I still have mine and use it as a vase, by the way) were for the special effects and makeup teams to help accurately design the injuries our characters were about to sustain.  Meanwhile, Sara Paxton had the inauspicious task of waking up at 6 AM for swim lessons in a freezing cold pool.  Like any good actor, she exaggerated her swimming prowess during her audition and therefore had to make up for lost pool time with a professional swim coach.  Unfortunately for her, this was at the crack of dawn in ice-cold water.  But I think the swimming looked great in the film, so it was all worth it, right Paxton?

The first month we were there, the six of us (me, Sara, Martha, Spencer, Aaron and Garrett) would shoot all day, get "chaperoned" to some adorable mom-and-pop hotel, have a long dinner, try to sleep (unless, like Aaron Paul, our rooms were haunted by demonic crickets) and do it all over again.  So of course, all that time together made for an atmosphere of camaraderie and inside jokes, including all the girls naming one of our crew members "Captain George", meaning Captain Gorgeous (naturally), because he was so beautiful and fully ignored us.  On our days off, we would sleep, eat foreign junk food (like Beef Flavored Fritos or Tomato Ruffles) and watch movies that came out in the US two years ago or even go on mini-safari.  So, as you can imagine, we all had it pretty rough.

Last House has one of those casts where people know who they are, they just don't know they know who they are.  I had a lot of conversations like, "Garrett Dillahunt, you know, he was in Deadwood, No Country for Old Men--"  "Who was he in Deadwood?"  "He played two characters, actually…"   So if you don't know Garrett "Terminator" Dillahunt, Martha "Becca from Superbad" MacIasaac, Sara "The Mermaid from Aquamarine" Paxton, Aaron "Breaking Bad" Paul, Spencer "The kid from Gladiator" Treat Clark, Tony "Ghost" Goldwyn or Monica "hot piece of blonde ass" Potter now, hopefully you will after this movie comes out.  Or maybe they'll all become First Name "that person from LHOTL" Last Name.  That'd be pretty cool.