The Hills Have Eyes (

1977

) ½

I mentioned in my review of The Last House on the Left (1972), that none of Wes Craven's later films have the same disturbing, unpleasant quality to them as his debut work. None of them anyways aside from today's film, which if anything is even viler and unnerving thanks in no small part to Craven's maturation as an artist and the fact that his budget now allowed him to hire actors whose previous experience was not limited solely to pornography. I just don't get it, how can someone make a film as bleak and disturbing as The Hills Have Eyes, and then effortlessly pull away from the abyss and spend the rest of career-making films like A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Scream (1996). Sure those films are violent, but they are a kind of fun and entertaining violence, the sort that makes you jump and gasp not the sort that makes you question humanity and all the fucked up things we're capable of. Maybe Craven just had something really sick and twisted growing inside of him, a disgust with the whole of mankind and his place within in. Some grotesque cancer that he just absolutely had to get out before it drove him crazy. Thank god he got it out on the screen where it could become a masterpiece, I worry about what such an urge would have looked like if released into the real world.

While en route to a new life in California, the Carter family decides to make a detour to the Mojave desert, to check out an abandoned silver mine that a distant relative gifted them. That is to say that the family's patriarch, Big Bob Carter has decided that they are going to check it out, and what Big Bob says goes. The rest of the family, his wife Ethel, three kids Bobby, Brenda, and Lynn, son-in-law Doug, baby granddaughter Katy, and two dogs (Beauty and Beast), would probably rather push on to California. Big Bob isn't phased in the slightest when he's told in no uncertain terms to get back on the main road by the gas station attendant Fred. Fred gives him plenty of good reasons to turn back, the mine is almost certainly exhausted and the air force uses this area as a live munitions testing ground. Fred leaves out what is perhaps the most compelling reason though, the fact that deep in the desert wastelands there lives a family of vicious cannibal murderers patterned off the legend of Sawney Bean. Fred knows about them because they are his own kin, sprung from the loins of his monstrous son Jupiter. He doesn't tell The Carters any of this because he's been quietly profiting off of the cannibals for years, giving them supplies in exchange for the money and valuables they steal from their victims. With the army and the law starting to ask questions, Fred is looking to make his exit. However, it is unlikely that the cannibals will let him go, as evidenced by the fact that shortly after the Carters depart for their silver mine, a bomb goes off, destroying Fred's truck leaving him stranded in the wilderness.

The Carters soon have problems of their own. After a close run-in with an air force fighter plane out for a test run, their car swerves off the road. With the axle snapped, there's no way that Big Bob or his family can hope to repair the car. The only option is for the kids and women to hunker down in the RV while Big Bob and Doug head out in opposite directions in search of help. The family only has two handguns, so Big Bob takes one and leaves the other with Bobby to safeguard the womenfolk. The family is being watched, with the three sons of Jupiter (Mars, Pluto, and Mercury) prowling in the nearby hills spying on the family with binoculars and communicating with each other via radios. It isn't long before Beauty, the dog, bolts and runs off into the mountains. Bobby, gung-ho about his newly appointed role as protector promptly rushes off after her. He finds her far up in the mountains, dead, eviscerated and partially eaten by Pluto. Suddenly Bobby is not quite so eager anymore. The cannibals meanwhile are ready to launch an attack on the crashed RV, all they need now is the cover of darkness.

The attack by the cannibals on the Carter family is among the most grueling and uncomfortable set-pieces in horror movie history. First, Jupiter captures Big Bob and strings him up on a tree before setting him on fire with an incendiary bomb. Ethel, Lynne, Doug, and Bobby rush out to help Big Bob, leaving Brenda alone in the trailer. At that point, Pluto skulks in and pounces on Brenda, he's stopped from raping her by Mars, not for any moral reasons mind you but because Mars is the older brother and consequently gets dibs on any women they find. Mercifully, we are not subjected to another explicit rape scene al la The Last House on the Left (1972), as much of this scene was removed to avoid an X rating. The worst is left to our imaginations, which from my experience is less grotesque than the images Craven can conjure up. When Lynne and Ethel return, Lynne is killed outright and Ethel is mortally wounded. The two brothers then slip off into the night with baby Katy in tow, a tasty “Thanksgiving Turkey.”

It's a sequence that pulls absolutely zero punches as we watch one sympathetic character after another die at the hands of pointless savagery. Any sane viewer will be horrified by all the events of this scene, and maybe a little pissed off too. Pissed off at Bobby for not warning the others sooner, and instead only confiding in Doug about what he saw in the hills. Pissed off at Big Bob for dragging his family into this hell. Maybe even a bit pissed off at Craven himself for making this film. But most of all pissed off at the monsters that did this, and ready to seek vengeance. This does a great job of setting up the film's final act because it gives every one of the surviving Carters a motivation to get even. Doug is avenging his wife and saving his daughter, Brenda is getting even with her rapist, and Bobby is out to reclaim his honor and masculinity after failing to protect his family. Even Beast the dog has a comprehensible motivation, in the form of his murdered mate. However, since the film has been so completely and utterly callous so far we have no reason to believe that any of these characters will be successful in their aims. After what we've seen so far, is it really that hard to believe that the cannibals won't simply kill the men, rape the women and eat the baby?

Craven does a masterful job of exploiting our righteous anger and then, quietly shaming us for having it. We are desperate to see justice done, and these monsters punished that we hardly even stop to debate the morality of our own blood-lust. That's where the genius of the ending comes into play, in the tradition of Straw Dogs (1971) we are denied the happy ending and the payoff for all the violence and cruelty. The film simply ends, freezing on a shot of Doug stabbing Mars, a look of animalistic ferocity on his face. It's a short that poses a simple question: Is this really what a hero looks like or is this just primal instinct gone amok. However much we may sympathize with Doug's anger, can we really condone what he is doing? It's a question more often posed in Greek Tragedy than in horror cinema. It's exactly the sort of ambiguous ending that we couldn't have in the Manichean world of $_CURRENT_YEAR, lest the filmmaker be accused of sympathizing with rapists.

The allegory to Vietnam should be obvious, even to those who don't spend a great deal of their spare time analyzing old horror movies in their historical context. We have the all-American family isolated in the wilderness and being preyed upon by a foe that coordinates their attacks and ambushes with army surplus binoculars and radios. Sure, the Carters were not led into this conflict by a callous government that cares more about looking tough than they did about the lives of its own citizens but the film still works on a broader level. Not every 1970s allegorical horror film has to be The Crazies (1973) you know. I'm sure there were plenty of men in the first run audience who could empathize with the plight of Doug, Bobby, and Brenda because not long ago they'd found themselves in nearly the same situation: Isolated in an alien wasteland and hunted by an invisible and implacable foe. In particular, I imagine it's easy to empathize with the character of Bobby initially seeing the experience as an adventure before realizing it was really a nightmare all along. I respect the fact that The Hills Have Eyes does not feel the need to hammer the audience over the head with its underlying themes, it's a lesson that the 2006 remake could stand to learn.

Then there are the religious undertones. These are no run-of-the-mill cannibal psychos stalking the Carter family, with names like Cletus or Otis. Instead, they have the names of Pagan Gods, the patriarch of the family is named Jupiter the Roman name for Zeus, and his sons are called Mars, Pluto and Mercury respectively (Ares, Hades, and Hermes respectively). Just like their names, the cannibals themselves are products of an older, more savage world where violence was commonplace and morality could be summed up with the utterance “The strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.” They are utterly foreign beings to a modern, Christian world which is why they come as such a shock to both the Carters and the audience. Tellingly, it's not until Ethel Carter, the spiritual center of the family who insists that all the others pray and behave like good Christians, dies that the Carters completely abandon their humanity and fight the cannibals on their own terms. Much is made of Craven's rebellion against his own devoutly Baptist upbringing, but the religious implications of this film suggest that this rebellion was by no means complete. No atheist makes a film that suggests that Christianity is all that is holding mankind back from neolithic savagery. Perhaps it was this faith that pulled Craven himself back from the brink of nihilism. Though I don't want to overstate my case, The Hills Have Eyes was also a considerable commercial success (grossing $25 million), and while it was mostly denounced by critics at the time, those with a taste for horror films mostly recognized its obvious greatness. Acclaim and fortune are nearly as effective as religion at introducing a bit of sunshine into a man's disposition.