Mari Collingwood

Uncommon card · No. 199705

Mari Collingwood is a fictional character in The Last House on the Left films. She first appears in The Last House on the Left (1972) as a hippie girl abducted on her seventeenth birthday by a fugitive family. Conceptualized by Wes Craven, she was portrayed by a twenty-three-year-old Sandra Peabody in one of her early film appearances. Director Dennis Iliadis brings the character back in the 2009 reimagining, this time portrayed by Sara Paxton. Craven conceptualized Mari with the basis of her being the 1970s version of the virginal Karin (Birgitta Pettersson) from Ingmar Bergman's medieval Sweden set The Virgin Spring (1960)—symbolizing innocence during an era of apprehension caused by the Vietnam War. Iliadis' vision of Mari was to make her proactive and set forth to humanize her through her depiction as a competitive swimmer and the subplot of her late brother. Due to this characterization, critics have called Iliadis' version of the character as following aspects of the "final girl"...

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