The Hills Have Eyes (1977 film)

Cast

Martin Speer as Doug Wood
Susan Lanier as Brenda Carter
Robert Houston as Bobby Carter
Brenda Marinoff as Baby Katy Wood
Virginia Vincent as Ethel Carter
Dee Wallace as Lynne Wood
Russ Grieve as Big Bob Carter
Cordy Clark as Mama
Janus Blythe as Ruby
Michael Berryman as Pluto
James Whitworth as Papa Jupiter
Lance Gordon as Mars
Peter Locke as Mercury (credited as Arthur King)
John Steadman as Fred

Production

Development

Wes Craven desired to make a nonhorror film, following his directorial debut, The Last House on the Left (1972), because he saw the horror genre as constraining. He could not find producers, though, interested in financing a project that did not feature bloody violence. Craven considered collaborating with Sean S. Cunningham on a horror children's film based on "Hansel and Gretel", but Locke wanted the film to be more in the vein of The Last House on the Left. According to Steve Palopoli of Metro Silicon Valley, the finished film still features elements of "Hansel and Gretel", specifically its portrayal of people getting lost in the wilderness and setting a trap for their tormentors. Palopoli also noted the witch from "Hansel and Gretel" and the villains from Hills both try to cannibalize children. Bloody Disgusting's Zachary Paul says that both films center on a group of vacationers, who are "stranded in the wide-open nowhere and must protect themselves against a tightly knit family of cannibals" and feature an archetypal "gas station of doom". As Locke's girlfriend, Liz Torres, often performed in Las Vegas during this period, Locke saw a lot of desert landscapes as the film was being written, and suggested that Craven set the film in the desert. Due to budgetary constraints, the film was written to have few roles and be set in few locations. Originally, the film was to end with the surviving members of the family reuniting at the trailer site, signifying that they could move on with their lives. Craven ultimately opted for an ending where Doug stabs Mars as a disgusted Ruby watches, as he liked the role reversal that this ending created. Craven also wanted the two families in the story to be the "mirror images of each other," believing that this would allow him to "explore different sides of the human personality."

Casting

Michael Berryman, who has 26 different birth defects, won the role of Pluto. He later came to regret not appearing in the film.

Filming

Principal photography for The Hills Have Eyes began in October 1976. It was released for the first time on DVD by Lionsgate Home Entertainment on September 23, 2003, as a two-disc special edition. On September 29 that same year, it was released by Anchor Bay Entertainment. Anchor Bay would release the film again in 2006. The film made its Blu-ray debut on September 6, 2011, by Image Entertainment, who also released the film on DVD that same day. In 2013, Anchor Bay released the film on Blu-ray as a "Double feature" with Re-Animator (1985) and on DVD as part of a four disc set which also includes Re-Animator, Sleepwalkers (1992), and Darkness Falls (2003). The film had its Canadian release on both DVD and Blu-ray by E1 Entertainment on January 10, 2013. The film was later released on Blu-ray by Arrow Video on October 11, 2016, and again on January 30, 2018.

Reception

Box office

The film premiered on July 22, 1977, and was a greater box office success than The Last House on the Left. Craven noted that the film managed to break box office records at some of the individual theaters in which it opened. The film's gross was impeded by the financial success of the Burt Reynolds film Smokey and the Bandit (1977). Locke characterized the film as neither a huge hit nor a box-office bomb, and was pleased with the amount of money it generated.

Critical response

Contemporaneous

The staff of Variety called The Hills Have Eyes "a satisfying piece of pulp," adding that "Gratifying aspects [of the film] are Craven's businesslike plotting and pacy cutting, and a script which takes more trouble over the stock characters than it needs. There are plenty of laughs, in the dialog and in the story's disarming twists." In his review of Craven's later film Swamp Thing (1982), Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times criticized the film for being too "decadent" for his taste. Tim Pulleine of The Monthly Film Bulletin stated that the film's story "had promise" but was "never fused into an effective narrative pattern, let alone an allegorical one." Tim Whitehead of The Spectator deemed the film's "predictable" plot an excuse for "scenes of ghastly carnage in the horror vein of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," opining that Craven "maintains the tension throughout and occasionally manages to relieve the horror with elements of the ridiculous." Whitehead stated that he "simply found [himself] looking away from the endless stabbings, gougings and burnings."

Retrospective

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, The Hills Have Eyes holds a 69% approval rating based on , with an average rating of 6.2/10. The consensus reads: "When it's not bludgeoning the viewer with its more off-putting, cruder elements, The Hills Have Eyes wields some clever storytelling and a sly sense of dark humor."

On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating to reviews, the film has a weighted average score of 64 out of 100, based on 8 critics, indicating "Generally favorable reviews".

The film was included in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, where Steven Jay Schneider said it "warrants consideration as one of the richest and most perfectly realized films of Craven's career". The film was nominated for AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills. TV Guide gave it a three out of four stars rating, saying that it is "exhilarating" to watch the Carters become more savage.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman wrote that the film is more imaginative than horror films made by major studios. For the San Francisco Chronicle, Walter Addiego said that The Hills Have Eyes is the scariest movie he has ever seen, describing it and The Last House on the Left (1972) as "a turning point in horror ... Suddenly, earlier horror—like the Universal classics (Frankenstein, etc.) and Roger Corman's Poe films—seemed like weak tea." Comparing The Hills Have Eyes to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Zachary Paul of Bloody Disgusting found the former superior and praised its "overwhelming" tension. Dread Central's Jon Condit opined that The Hills Have Eyes is not one of Craven's best films. In Empire, Kim Newman gave the film a three out of five star rating, saying, "Decades on The Hills Have Eyes no longer seems quite as breathlessly swift as it did." A critic for IndieWire dismissed the film as middling.

Accolades

At the 1977 Sitges Film Festival, The Hills Have Eyes won the Critic's Award.

Analysis

Genre

In Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol J. Clover characterizes The Hills Have Eyes as a rape and revenge film. Steven Jay Schneider classifies the film as a hybrid horror film, road movie, "siege film" and Western. Slant Magazine Ed Gonzales characterized the film as "morally inconsequential," commenting that with the film's ending "Craven seemingly believes he's saying something about our instinctual need to kill for pleasure, but this philosophy doesn't hold water considering the context of [Doug's] situation ... It's a cut-and-dry [sic] case of life-or-death self-defense." In Wes Craven: The Art of Horror, John Kenneth Muir writes that the film is not saying that the Carter family are worse than their enemies, as the cannibal clan commits violent acts more horrific than anything the Carters do, but that the Carters must stoop to the level of barbarians to defeat barbarians. Muir also believes while the actions of Jupiter's family are inexcusable, they are understandable, as they are trying to survive.

Political themes

Craven has said that the film expresses rage against American culture and the bourgeois. Steven Jay Schneider, a film critic from Senses of Cinema, views the Carters as a bourgeois family, while the film's cannibals, according to him, may represent "any number of oppressed, embattled and downtrodden minority/social/ethnic groups," including the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, African Americans, hillbillies and the Viet Cong. Craven made the film to turn The Hills Have Eyes into a series, in the vein of the Halloween and Friday the 13th series. In the late 1980s, Craven considered making a film in the series set in outer space, but it never came to fruition. The unrelated Craven project Mind Ripper (1995) was originally going to be a third The Hills Have Eyes movie, but it was re-written so that it never directly refers to The Hills Have Eyes or Part II. Mind Ripper still has the alternative title The Hills Have Eyes III.

Remake series

Alexandre Aja directed a remake of The Hills Have Eyes in 2006, which Craven produced. In 2007, Craven and his son Jonathan wrote the sequel to the remake, The Hills Have Eyes 2.

Cultural impact

Legacy

Multiple critics have deemed The Hills Have Eyes a cult classic, with Zachary Paul of Bloody Disgusting saying "In the 40 years since the film was released, The Hills Have Eyes has amassed quite the large following. It's hard to throw a rock at any decent horror convention without clocking someone involved with the film's production in the head." John Kenneth Muir writes that The Hills Have Eyes "was seen as a turning point in the horror genre" and inspired humorous, visceral horror films that were accomplished on a technical level, including Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), and Prom Night (1980).

In popular culture

While watching The Hills Have Eyes, director Sam Raimi noticed a ripped poster for Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) in a scene of the film. He "took it to mean that Wes Craven ... was saying Jaws was just pop horror. What I have here is real horror.'"

"Home," a 1996 episode of The X-Files, is an homage to both The Hills Have Eyes and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

The title and lyrics of the Weeknd's song "The Hills" (2015) reference Craven's film.