The Last House on the Left

Craven's first film, made for around 90,000 dollars with a crew that included Sean Cunningham, and it is a remake of Bergman's The Virgin Spring.

That is not a joke. Bergman's film won the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1961 and is the same story: a girl is assaulted and murdered in the woods, the killers unknowingly shelter with her parents, the parents work it out and take revenge. Craven kept the structure and removed every piece of distance Bergman had built in.

The result is hard to sit through and was intended to be. Craven has said the film came out of Vietnam footage on the evening news and a conviction that screen violence had been made too clean.

The tonal problem is real: there is a bumbling-sheriff subplot with comedy music that sits inside an unbearable film, and nobody has ever successfully defended it.

The marketing line was "to avoid fainting, keep repeating: it is only a movie". Refused a UK cinema certificate in 1974, it reached British shops on uncertificated video before the Video Recordings Act, and the BBFC did not pass it until 2002, with cuts.