The Hills Have Eyes (Craven, 1977)
This review contains spoilers.
Wes Craven’s first film,
The Last House on the Left, explores what happens when decent people come face to face with real evil, and sets up a campy, innocent surface only to shatter it with unspeakable violence. I’m not a fan (its ambitions are undermined by its technical sloppiness), but there’s no denying that its strongest sequences have a palpable gut level impact. Craven’s stated intention was to reflect the way the violence of the Vietnam War and contemporaneous societal unrest had entered the living rooms of the average American family, and as clumsy as his movie may be in its overall construction, I think it achieves this aim.
A few years later,
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre again brought average, almost aggressively banal characters face to face with a kind of savagery heretofore unseen on screen. This time the villains have a more clearly defined family structure (in contrast to the loose association of no-goodniks in
Last House), one which suggests parody, but the comedic dimensions of their characterizations might be hard to see thanks to how assaultive the surrounding film is. I think Tobe Hooper’s film is quite a bit better than Craven’s, but both are very much part of the same strain of horror (which arguably started or at least went back to George Romero’s
Night of the Living Dead), one which does away with any sense of safety or heroics that might offer comfort to the viewer, and in which society itself seems to be under attack.
The Hills Have Eyes was Craven’s return to the horror genre after a few years of unsuccessfully trying to get non-horror projects off the ground and directing a porno (
The Fireworks Woman) under the pseudonym Abe Snake. In many ways it’s a continuation of the themes of those earlier movies and, I would argue, it pushes them further. The heroes here once again find themselves face to face with a kind of horror they’ve never experienced before, one which doesn’t play by their rules. This time the action is set not in the backwoods but in the middle of the desert, the harshness of the environment captured effectively by the rough, dust-caked visuals, individual frames looking like they’ve been left out in the sun far too long. Yet how Craven expands this premise is kind of daring. He mirrors the heroes and villains. And he sets up the heroes to be more than a little unlikable.
Both the heroes and the villains are defined as families, each ruled by their respective patriarchs. The father of the villains was an overgrown, feral child cast off into the wilderness by an abusive father who kidnapped a local prostitute and started a family in the middle of a desert. They’re mean and capable of great cruelty, but at the same time survival is clearly their motivation. Craven invites us to see them how mainstream, polite society viewed the counterculture or how Americans viewed the Viet Cong in the decade prior, which calls our vantage point into question. The father of the heroes is a retired cop who seemingly holds nothing but contempt for the people he was supposed to be policing, using racial slurs and other insults to speak of the life he’s left behind. The rest of his family doesn’t come across much better. The kindly mother makes appeals to their Christianity yet bemusedly remembers the time a neighbour’s dog was killed by one of their own. And frankly, the rest of the characters are pretty annoying. How much should we really be rooting for them?
Of course, once the cannibal family begins their attack, our sympathies line up pretty quickly with the aggrieved party, but even then Craven avoids settling matters too cleanly. The villains are shown to be sadistic, but also intelligent, using psychological warfare in burning alive the father and strategic-minded in using that as a ploy to break into the RV. The film alternates between the perspectives of the heroes and villains, as if to confront us with who we identify with and why (most pointedly in one scene where Papa Jupiter, the cannibal patriarch, speaks directly to the camera). The heroes make stupid mistakes early on, but eventually learn that they can only triumph by matching the savagery of their opponents. Presaging
Scream, the characters show some awareness of tropes, particularly Bobby, the clean-cut aviators-donning son who pretends to be tough early on but soon has to step into the alpha male role he was previously play-acting. (That character is played by Robert Houston, the man responsible for combining the first two
Lone Wolf and Cub movies and releasing them in the US as
Shogun Assassin.) The patriarch of the cannibals is defeated with the symbolically loaded act of the son and daughter using their mother’s corpse as bait and turning their RV into a boobytrap, while another character brutally kills the cannibal who had kidnapped his infant daughter. The closing shot has this character staring at the audience, blinded with rage, the background turning red in a freeze frame. It’s an unpolished image, but one that hits straight in the gut. Yes, our heroes have triumphed, but at what cost?
Alexandre Aja would remake this film a few decades later, drastically upping the gore quotient. As far as remakes go, it’s one of the better ones around as it has an actual sense of texture (greatly enhanced by shooting on location in the Moroccan desert) and a pretty good lead performance, but in aligning our perspective too closely to the protagonist, it loses the original’s most fascinating quality. Aja views the material too neatly a story of good versus bad, while Craven has us questioning which is which and uneasily blends the two. Craven would also revisit the material in
The Hills Have Eyes Part II, which he would later disown as a purely mercenary gig, but in my humble opinion, I don’t think it’s all that bad. It lacks the original’s sense of transgression and settles more easily into a slasher movie template, including some of the dumber associated elements (there’s a shower scene in the middle of the desert). But does have a handful of interesting elements (carried over trauma from the original, possible psychic powers) and shares the same dirty, sunburnt visual style. I was never convinced that dirtbikes were nearly as cool as the film insisted (there’s a lot more dirtbike footage than necessary), but by the standards of the average slasher, I found it reasonably enjoyable.
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