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The Hills Have Eyes (1977 film)
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The Hills Have Eyes
Hillshaveeyesposter.jpg
Theatrical release poster
Directed by Wes Craven
Produced by Peter Locke
Written by Wes Craven
Starring
Susan Lanier
Robert Houston
Martin Speer
Dee Wallace
Russ Grieve
John Steadman
Michael Berryman
Virginia Vincent
Music by Don Peake
Cinematography Eric Saarinen[1]
Edited by Wes Craven[1]
Production
company
Blood Relations Company[1]
Distributed by Vanguard[2]
Release date
July 22, 1977
Running time
89 minutes[1]
Country United States
Language English
Budget $350,000 - $700,000[1]
Box office $25 million[3]
The Hills Have Eyes is a 1977 American horror film written, directed, and edited by Wes Craven and starring Susan Lanier, Michael Berryman and Dee Wallace. The film follows the Carters, a suburban family that is targeted by a family of cannibal savages after becoming stranded in the Nevada desert. The cannibals kill the family's patriarch, Big Bob, rape his daughter, Brenda, and kidnap the family's youngest member, baby Katy, intending to eat her.
Following Craven's directorial debut, The Last House on the Left (1972), producer Peter Locke was interested in financing a similar project. Craven based the film's script on the legend of cannibal Sawney Bean, which Craven viewed as illustrating how supposedly civilized people could become savage. Other influences on the film include John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). The Hills Have Eyes was shot in the Mojave Desert. The film's crew were initially unenthusiastic about the project, but this changed as they came to believe that they were making a special movie.
The Hills Have Eyes earned $25 million at the box office. Hills and spawned a franchise; all subsequent films in the franchise were made with Craven's involvement. Hills was released on VHS in 1988 and has subsequently been released on DVD and Blu-ray, while Don Peake's score for the film has been released on CD and vinyl. Reviews for the film were mostly positive, with critics praising its tense narrative and humor. Some critics have interpreted the film as containing commentary on morality and American politics, and the film has become a cult classic.
Contents
1 Plot
2 Cast
3 Production
3.1 Development
3.2 Casting
3.3 Filming
3.4 Post production
4 Music
5 Release
5.1 Marketing
5.2 Box office
5.3 Critical reception
5.3.1 Contemporary reception
5.3.2 Retrospective reception
5.4 Accolades
5.5 Home media
6 Analysis
6.1 Genre
6.2 Moral themes
6.3 Political themes
7 Franchise
8 Cultural impact
8.1 Legacy
8.2 In popular culture
9 References
10 Bibliography
11 External links
Plot
The Carter family is traveling on vacation towing a travel trailer from Ohio to Los Angeles. Parents Bob (Russ Grieve) and Ethel (Virginia Vincent) are driving, accompanied by their teenage children Bobby (Robert Houston) Brenda (Susan Lanier), eldest daughter Lynne (Dee Wallace), Lynne's husband Doug (Martin Speer), Lynne and Doug's baby daughter Katy, and the family's dogs, Beauty and The Beast. They stop at Fred's Oasis for fuel, and Fred (John Steadman) urges them to stay on the main road as they leave. Fred's truck suddenly explodes. Ignoring Fred's warning and dismissing him as a crazy person, the Carters skid off a desert road and crash. Bob walks back to Fred's Oasis to get help. The dogs become very panicky and start barking at the hills. Beauty then runs off into the hills. Bobby chases after her and finds her mutilated body. Frightened, he runs, falls, and knocks himself unconscious.
As night falls, Bob reaches the gas station, where he finds Fred, who has tried to hang himself. Fred tells him about his son's family of deranged cannibals who live in the hills through which the Carters have traveled. They are commanded by Papa Jupiter (James Whitworth) whose mother, Fred's wife, died during childbirth. As a child, he killed the livestock on his father's farm and later murdered his sister. Fred attacked his son with a tire iron and left him in the hills to die. However, Jupiter survived and had children with a depraved, alcoholic prostitute known as Mama (Cordy Clark). Together, they had three sons - Mars (Lance Gordon), Pluto (Michael Berryman) and Mercury (Peter Locke) - and an abused daughter, Ruby (Janus Blythe). They survive by cannibalizing travelers and stealing supplies. Papa Jupiter suddenly crashes through a window, kills Fred with a tire iron and takes Bob prisoner and crucifies him.
Brenda finds Bobby, who is shaken up about Beauty and the two return. to the trailer. Bobby but doesn't mention Beauty's death, not wanting to frighten the rest of the family. Unbeknownst to Bobby, Pluto enters the trailer. He then locks Bobby out, so Bobby asks Doug for his keys. Before Bobby enters the trailer, Pluto tells Papa Jupiter via a walkie-talkie to set Bob on fire and an explosion is heard in the distance. Ethel, Lynne, Doug, and Bobby rush out to save Bob while Brenda stays in the trailer with the baby. As they extinguish the fire, Pluto and Mars ransack the camper and Mars rapes Brenda. The Carters eventually extinguish the fire, but Bob dies shortly afterwards. When Ethel and Lynne return to the trailer, Lynne is attacked by Mars, and Ethel hits him with a broom. After Mars shoots Ethel and Lynne, he attempts to shoot Brenda as well but has run out of bullets. Pluto abducts the baby and the brothers flee, intending for the family to eat the baby. Hearing their screams, Doug and Bobby rush in the camper only to find Lynne dead and Ethel mortally wounded.
Mars and Pluto return to their home, a cave, and The Beast pushes Mercury off a hilltop to his death. Ruby is then chained outside the cave with Mama tormenting her, and is forced to eat Beauty as punishment for sympathizing with the Carters. The next morning, shortly after Ethel dies, Doug sets out to find his baby while Papa Jupiter and Pluto set out to kill the remaining family members. Beast tears Pluto's throat out, and Papa Jupiter is killed by a trap set by Brenda and Bobby using their mother's corpse. Doug sees Ruby knock out Mama and escape into the hills with Katy.
Doug catches up with Ruby and the baby, but Mars follows them. Mars initially manages to tackle and knife-struggle with Doug, but Ruby interferes by putting a rattlesnake on Mars' neck, enabling Doug to overpower him. Doug then repeatedly stabs Mars to death while Ruby weeps over her brother's body and the screen fades to red.
Cast
Susan Lanier as Brenda Carter
Dee Wallace as Lynne Wood
John Steadman as Fred
Robert Houston as Bobby Carter
Martin Speer as Doug Wood
Russ Grieve as Big Bob Carter
James Whitworth as Papa Jupiter
Virginia Vincent as Ethel Carter
Michael Berryman as Pluto
Lance Gordon as Mars
Janus Blythe as Ruby
Cordy Clark as Mama
Peter Locke as Mercury (credited as Arthur King)
Brenda Marinoff as Baby Katy Wood
Production
Development
Drawing of Sawney Bean outside of his cave
The Hills Have Eyes is based on the legend of Sawney Bean.
Wes Craven desired to make a non-horror film, following his directorial debut, The Last House on the Left (1972), but he could not find producers interested in financing a project that did not feature bloody violence.[4] His friend, producer Peter Locke, was interested in financing a horror film, so Craven decided to write the project due to his monetary issues.[4] 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 Last House.[5] In writing the project for Locke, Craven decided he "wanted something more sophisticated than Last House on the Left." He added that he "didn't want to feel uncomfortable again about making a statement about human depravity."[6]
While going through the forensics department of the New York Public Library, Craven learned of the legend of Sawney Bean - the alleged head of a 48-person Scottish clan responsible for the murder and cannibalization of more than one thousand people. What interested Craven in the legend was how, after Bean's clan was arrested, they were tortured, quartered, burned and hung. Craven saw this treatment of the Bean clan by supposedly civilized people as paralleling the clan's own savagery. Craven decided to base the film on the legend.[7][4] Another major inspiration for the project was Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974),[4] one of Craven's favorite films.[8] 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".[4] Like Last House before it, Hills also drew influence from the work of European directors such as François Truffaut and Luis Buñuel.[9]
Other inspirations for The Hills Have Eyes were Craven's neighbors and family, whom the Carters where modeled on,[4] the director's nightmares,[10] and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939).[11] The original script was titled Blood Relations: The Sun Wars and was set in New Jersey during 1984, several years in the future.[12][1] 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.[13] 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."[14]
Casting
Michael Berryman, who has twenty-six different birth defects, won the role of Pluto.[13] The character of Ruby needed to be played by an actress who was a fast runner, so all of the actresses who auditioned for the part were required to race each other. Janus Blythe won the part partially because she outran all of the other auditioning actresses.[13] Locke wanted to make a cameo appearance in the film, and was given the role of Mercury, who appears briefly in the film. Locke was credited for the role under the name "Arthur King."[4] Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, was offered a part in the film and rejected it so that he could move to Maine and focus on his literary career.[15] He later came to regret not appearing in the film.[16]
Filming
Photograph of Victorville, California taken from afar
The film was shot in Victorville, California.
Principal photography for The Hills Have Eyes began in October 1976.[1] Hills was shot in Victorville, California[14] in the Mojave Desert[1] using 16 mm film on cameras that were borrowed from a Californian pornographic filmmaker.[4] The film cost between $350,000 and $700,00,[1] around thrice the budget of The Last House on the Left.[4] The film's actors were paid minimum wage, and the film's crew were non-union.[14]
The shoot was unpleasant for the actors, due to daytime temperatures of over 120 degrees which dropped to around 30 degrees during the night, as well as the fact that they played physically taxing roles twelve to fourteen hours a day, six days a week.[4] As Berryman lacks sweat glads, the heat was particularly hazardous to his health, and he had to be attended to after the filming of Hills's action scenes.[13] Many cast members did their own makeup due to budgetary constraints. Most of the film's crew were veterans of Roger Corman films, and were initially unenthusiastic about Hills. This changed weeks into production due to Craven's zeal for the project, and because the crew came to believe that the film was "something special."[4]
Robert Burns, the production designer of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, also served as the production designer for Hills. He re-used many of the props from Massacre to decorate the cannibal clan's lair, including animal hides and bones.[4] The sequence were Dee Wallace's character confronts a tarantula was not part of the film's script; it was added to the film after the filmmakers discovered the spider on a road. The tarantula was not harmed during the filming of the sequece.[13] During the sequence where the cannibals eat Big Bob, a leg of lamb stood in for human flesh. This was a relief for the hungry actors.[4] At one point, Craven considered having the character Papa Jupiter eat baby Katy, an idea which most of the cast disliked. Berryman refused to do the scene, and Craven allowed Katy to survive.[4] The carcass of the Carter's family dog, Beauty, was an actual dog carcass that the filmmakers purchased; Craven has refused to explain how exactly the filmmakers obtained the carcass.[13]
Post production
The film was initially given an X rating by the MPAA due to its graphic violence. Due to this, significant material was removed from Fred's death scene, the sequence were Mars and Pluto attack the trailer, and the last confrontation with Papa Jupiter.[13] Out of one hundred possible titles for the film, The Hills Have Eyes was chosen. It tested well with audiences, though Craven was dissatisfied with it.[4]
Music
The film's soundtrack was written and performed by Don Peake. The extensive score containing a total of 41 cues was released in 2009 on CD by Hitchcock Media Records. In 2014 it was re-released on vinyl and cassette by One Way Static Records. The vinyl edition contains extensive liner notes by Don Peake and the film's cast and crew.[17]
Release
Marketing
The film's advertising campaign, which cost twice or thrice the film's budget, claimed that a copy of the film had been had been added to the permanent collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art; in actuality, the copy of the film had been added to the museum's "study" collection rather than its more prestigious permanent collection. One of the museum's curators told the Los Angeles Times that he'd prefer that the film's advertisements not mention the museum.[1]
Box office
Hills premiered on July 22, 1977,[18] in Tucson, Arizona before gaining a wider release.[1] The Hills Have Eyes ultimately earned $25 million,[3] and was a greater box office success than Last House.[19] 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.[20]
Critical reception
Contemporary reception
The staff of Variety called The Hills Have Eyes "a satisfying piece of pulp," adding "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."[21] A positive appraisal of Hills came from Time Out, which said that the film's "exploitation themes are used to maximum effect, and despite occasional errors (the cannibal girl who protects the 'human' baby), the sense of pace never errs. A heady mix of ironic allegory and seat-edge tension."[22] 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.[23]
Retrospective reception
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 65% based on 23 reviews, with a weighted average rating of 6.1/10.[24] On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating to reviews, the film has a weighted average score of 64 out of 100, based on 4 critics, indicating "Generally favorable reviews".[18] 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".[25] Fangoria listed the film as one of the thirteen greatest horror films of the 1970s[19] while Film Journal International has cited The Hills Have Eyes as a classic grindhouse feature.[26] Marjorie Baumgarten of The Austin Chronicle wrote, "Inventive story ideas and humorous touches give this horror picture an enduring relevancy and stylistic flourish."[27] The film was nominated for AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills.[28] TV Guide gave it a three out of four stars rating, saying that while watching Hills it "becomes oddly and distressingly exhilarating to watch the nice family become increasingly savage in their efforts to survive. Not for the squeamish, this low-budget potboiler is one of the prime examples of the what was so fascinating about American horror films in the 1970s."[29]
Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman wrote "I still remember watching The Hills Have Eyes at a drive-in, and the low-budget grunginess of Wes Craven's 1977 shocker was integral to its effect; it told you that the film came from outside the system, that it was made with a lack of restriction — on violence, and on imagination, too — that big-studio horror didn't share."[30] Ambush Bug of Ain't It Cool News said "What more can be said about the original The Hills Have Eyes? It is simply a classic tale of terror".[31] For the San Francisco Chronicle, Walter Addiego said that Hills is the scariest movie he's 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."[32] Comparing Hills to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Zachary Paul of Bloody Disgusting said "Hooper's film is a genuine masterpiece of gut-wrenching, grounded terror, but I've always [been more fond of] The Hills Have Eyes. Maybe that's blasphemous to say, but no matter how many times I've seen it, I find the tension Craven builds to be overwhelming".[4] Author and film critic Leonard Maltin awarded the film 2.5 out of 4 stars, calling it "Above average of its type, with compact direction and plenty of amusing plot twists."[33]
Slant Magazine's Eric Henderson called the film "effective" and praised its cast, particularly Robert Houston, whose performance is "more complex than your average male lead in a horror film." However, Henderson also deemed the film inferior to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and criticized the sequence where the Carters create booby traps for feeling like Looney Tunes cartoons about Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.[34] Dread Central's Jon Condit opined "The Hills Have Eyes isn’t one of Craven’s most well-known films and [is] certainly not his best".[35] 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."[36] A critic for IndieWire dismissed The Hills Have Eyes as "mediocre".[37]
Accolades
At the 1977 Sitges Film Festival, The Hills Have Eyes won the Critic's Award.[38]
Home media
The Hills Have Eyes was released on VHS in July 1988.[39] 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 29th 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.[40]
Analysis
Genre
In Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Carol J. Clover characterizes The Hills Have Eyes as a rape and revenge film.[41] Steven Jay Schneider classifies Hills as a hybrid horror film, road movie, "siege film" and Western.[25] Christopher Sharrett of Film Quarterly sees the film as more akin to an Anti-Western.[11]
Moral themes
According to Steven Jay Schneider in Senses of Cinema, the sequence where Big Bob is crucified symbolizes "utter repudiation of" Judeo-Christian ethics. He further asserts that the "Carter family's phony values and repressed rage may eventually be exposed, but this does not make any less loathsome or unsympathetic the depiction of Jupiter's marauding cannibal clan. As in so much of Craven’s work, at the end of the day everyone is guilty, everyone is to blame."[42] Slant Magazine's Ed Gonzales characterized the film as "morally inconsequential" as "at the end of The Hills Have Eyes, a man kills a cannibal that's about to murder his delectable child. 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 the man’s situation. His instinct isn’t to kill for the joy of it, but to protect his own. It's a cut-and-dry case of life-or-death self-defense."[43] 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.[44]
Political themes
Craven has said that Hills expresses rage against American culture and the bourgeois.[45] John Kenneth Muir views the Carters as representing the United States,[44] while Schneider writes that the Carters are a bourgeois family while the film's cannibals can be understood as representing "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.[42] Muir believes that while The Hills Have Eyes has and can be interpreted as an allegory about the Vietnam War, this is complicated by the fact that the Carters defeat their enemies, unlike the American forces in Vietnam. Muir instead sees the film as being about the class divide in America, with the Carters symbolizing the wealthy and Papa Jupiter's family representing the poor. He supports this theory by noting that the Carters and the cannibals are both from America.[44]
Franchise
Craven directed a sequel to the film, The Hills Have Eyes Part II, in 1985.[46] He did this to turn The Hills Have Eyes into a franchise in the vein of the Halloween and Friday the 13th franchises.[47] The unrelated Craven project Mind Ripper (1995) has the alternate title The Hills Have Eyes III.[48] Alexandre Aja directed a remake of The Hills Have Eyes in 2006, which Craven produced.[49] In 2007, Craven and his son Jonathan wrote the sequel to the remake, The Hills Have Eyes 2.[50]
Cultural impact
Legacy
Photograph of actor Michael Berryman
Michael Berryman became a horror icon due to his role in the film.
Multiple critics have deemed The Hills Have Eyes a cult classic,[51][5][25] 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."[4] Both Berryman and his character Pluto have become horror icons due to the film.[4][13] Dee Wallace became known as a scream queen due to her roles in Hills, The Howling (1981) and Cujo (1983).[52] 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).[19]
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.'"[13] This inspired Raimi to include a ripped The Hills Have Eyes poster in his film The Evil Dead (1981), as a humorous way of telling Craven "No, this is the real horror, pal." Craven reacted to this by having Nancy Thompson fall asleep while watching The Evil Dead in his film A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Raimi responded to that by including Freddy Krueger's glove in a scene of Evil Dead II (1987). Later, Craven would have characters in his film Scream (1996) choose to watch a VHS of Halloween (1978) instead of the VHS of The Evil Dead (1981) that they had. Then, in a first season episode of Raimi's television show Ash vs Evil Dead, Krueger's glove can be glimpsed, while a poster for The Hills Have Eyes can be seen outside a movie theater in an episode of the show's second season.[53]
The title and lyrics of The Weeknd's song "The Hills" (2015) reference Craven's film.[54]
