The Hills Have Eyes (89 minutes)
We are not lost, we're right here somewhere on this little blue line.
If you’re an avid movie-watcher I'm sure you’ve all experienced that weird feeling of seeing a well-known movie for the first time. You know you’ve definitely never sat down to watch it in full before, but somehow you know all the beats already because you’ve read about it or seen enough clips over the years to piece it together. The Hills Have Eyes (1977, 89 minutes) is one of these movies for me. Scream is in my top three scary movies of all time (along with Halloween and The Thing) but just never made it around to Wes Craven’s earlier stuff (this one is going to be 46 years old this year!) Until now, of course.
Craven’s second film follows a suburban family, the Carters, as they get lost and ultimately stranded in the Nevada desert on their way to California. Unbeknownst to them, the Carters have been tracked and followed by a family of cannibals living in the caves of a former nuclear testing site and nearby active air force base. The cannibals are hungry and the Carters become the literal definition of sitting ducks.
Because of the success of the entire Scream franchise, I have always considered Craven to be a postmodern creator. Even with Nightmare on Elm Street, which takes a more surrealist turn, he is a filmmaker who does best when he is being referential. He will copy/paste a theme, a visual, or a thought repeatedly until the story becomes about the copy/paste itself and the actual element loses meaning. The straightforwardness of The Hills Have Eyes was unexpected for me. Though I went in with every intention of enjoying the film as its own product, I found myself waiting for the signature self-awareness of a standard Craven film.
Digging into the background of this movie I learned that it was made out of necessity. Which actually explained a lot to me. At the time Craven was looking for ways to make movies outside of the horror genre (after his first film The Last House on the Left) but was unable to find work to make this happen, so he accepted producer Peter Locke’s request for a horror movie set in the desert. I will say, even with the motivation of paycheck vs pure creativity, Craven did wind up making a solid exploitation-horror movie that, as you know, has become a classic over time.
The Carters are a large extended family driving across the country to get to California. The family is led by Big Bob Carter, a former city detective, and his sunny wife Ethel. With them are their three adult children, their son-in-law Doug Wood, the Wood’s baby, and two pet dogs, Beauty and Beast. They’re quite the sizable clan, so you can see how their arrival in the desert is thrilling for a starving family of cannibals. The backstory of the cannibalistic clan is vague at best and I found it to be the weakest point of the film.
When the Carters stop at a remote gas station they meet the owner Fred, who eventually tells Big Bob the story of his strange and dangerous son, Jupiter. Fred admits to trying to kill his son years ago, but Jupiter escapes, taking off for the hills. Somehow, and we don’t really know how, Jupiter finds a partner and has a bunch of kids out there. It’s been about thirty years but it just so happens that Fred is deciding to leave the area that very day, which sets off a chain reaction of sorts. I dislike how lazy that is. I would have actually enjoyed the movie more with less backstory. Jupiter’s family is so bizarre on their own, that trying to assign depth to them actually left me with more questions than answers. It doesn’t help that their costuming is Neolithic in nature and they look as though they’ve been teleported to 1977 from 10,000 BC. (I do love the costuming of the Carters, they’re bright and bold in the primary colors and scream white family on vacation.)
Outside of the backstory flaws, The Hills Have Eyes is genuinely terrifying because of the remote and grueling nature of the location and the stripped down motivation of the cannibals-- they are hungry. The Carters are in an impossible situation with limited resources. The desert is boiling hot in the day, freezing cold at night and miles from all civilization. Jupiter and his sons are driven by the very basic needs of food and sexual gratification.
I was most afraid when Brenda, the youngest of Big Bob’s children, is trapped in the family’s camper with Pluto and Mars. She’s woken up from a deep slumber and completely helpless. Craven restores her autonomy later, when she devises a very good plan with her brother Bobby to take down her attackers. She isn’t a “Final Girl” by definition (Bobby and her brother-in-law are still around at the end) but she is the outline of Craven’s final girls to come. Young women who must overcome impossible terrors to survive.
And she survive she must, by reducing herself to the same brutal means that Jupiter and his family have. By the end of the film, Brenda, Bobby, and Doug have become violent. Their terror and desire to live transforms them into wild people who will murder for their freedom. Some people argue Craven is a little heavy handed here with the themes, but I don’t mind it. The suburban family’s descent into madness is important note on similarities between them and the cannibals.
On that note, I would not watch this one if you’re even remotely squeamish. There were moments where I found myself actually gagging from the behavior of the cannibals living in the hills. I believe the worst one for me was one of the sons breaking the head off of the family’s pet canary and drinking its blood straight from its neck. I still shudder. Craven definitely doesn’t shy away from disturbing thoughts and gory images in this one.
While it was initially hard for me to reconcile The Hills Have Eyes with the later work of Wes Craven that we all know (and love), I’ve come around to it as a standalone horror classic and it serves as a great reminder that we don’t need to overcomplicate stories to terrify. Give us a family in the desert with some really determined cannibals and we’re good to go.
RESOURCES:
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/79676/11-terrifying-facts-about-hills-have-eyes
https://www.joblo.com/michael-berryman-memoir/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hills_Have_Eyes_(1977_film)
This was a really fun way to learn and relive that movie without having to watch it. Have you seen the remake?