Following his debut with Last House on the Left (1972), director Wes Craven briefly dallied with hardcore pornography (he’d been editing adult films before directing Last House) with The Fireworks Woman (1975) and tried to stay away from horror films by writing non-genre scripts with Sean S. Cunningham (later of Friday the 13th (1980) fame) who had produced his debut. None of this work proved fruitful and in 1977 his friend producer Peter Locke persuaded him that horror was the way forward and Craven started work on a script inspired by the legend of Sawney Bean, a 16th century Scottish patriarch whose clan allegedly ambushed and ate over a thousand people. The result was The Hills Have Eyes, a still raw but more polished film than Last House on the Left that lacks that films ferocious sexual violence but has enough moments of savagery of its own.
The extended suburban Carter family – Bob (Russ Grieve), his wife Ethel (Virginia Vincent), their grown-up children Bobby (Robert Houston), Brenda (Susan Lanier) and Lynne (Dee Wallace), the latter’s husband Doug (Martin Speer), their baby Katy (Brenda Marinoff) and two German Shepherds, Beauty and The Beast – are driving through the Nevada desert en route for California when their RV is damaged in an accident. Stranded in a former air force testing range, they find themselves at the mercy of another family, a monstrous clan of cannibals who live in the caves of the nearby hills and who prey on passer-by. Led by Papa Jupiter (James Whitworth), the inbred family – Mars (Lance Gordon), Pluto (Michael Berryman), Mercury (producer Peter Locke, credire as Arthur King) and the abused Ruby (Janus Blythe) who later tries to help the Carters – attack the RV, abduct baby Katie and murder several members of the family who find themselves fighting back with a savagery that matches – and even surpasses – that of their opponents.
Several of Craven’s films have concerned themselves with the clash between supposedly “normal” families and their savage counterparts (Last House, Deadly Friend (1986), The People Under the Stairs (1991)). In Hills, the extended middle-class Carters find themselves well outside their suburban comfort zone and, like the Collingwoods in Last House, discover a brutality lurking not that far beneath the surface that they never knew existed. Pushed to the limit it doesn’t take them very long before they’re committing acts of murder (Doug’s climactic killing of Mars is particularly excessive) and using their own dead matriarch as bait to lure deranged cannibal killers to their doom.
Hills is a more disciplined film than Last House which gets by on its rawness, boasting a grimy, almost documentary feel that Hills lacks. Craven makes it a more suspenseful and action-packed – though no less disturbing – film. Perhaps its biggest flaw is that the villains are more outlandish, almost cartoonish and although they’re memorable lot they’re less obviously frightening than the very real Krug and his “family” in Last House. From the split faced Papa Jupiter (who berates Bob’s charred body, yelling at him “you come out here and stick your life in my face”, setting out the film’s thematic stall) to the disquieting Pluto, they’re a visually interesting clan (they dress in a manner not dissimilar to Native Americans in old westerns – and they circle the broken down “wagon train”/RV) but they’re more broadly drawn than the killers of Craven’s debut.
Michael Berryman was born with the condition hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia which gave him distinctive facial features that he was able to use to his advantage, carving out a decent career as a cult figure in many a horror films since – he’d already appeared in Miloš Forman’s non-genre One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (1975) but Pluto remains his signature role, his appearance so striking that he was placed front and centre on the film’s poster. The other notable name in the cast is Dee Wallace who had appeared in The Stepford Wives two years earlier and would go on to Joe Dante’s The Howling (1981) and her highest profile role playing Elliott’s mum in Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). She’s been a regular in genre films ever since.
While The Hills Have Eyes turns its back on the unblinking ferocity of Last House, it doesn’t skimp on its horror moments – the burning alive of Bob, the much publicised image of Mars forcing a gun into Brenda’s mouth and her rape by Pluto, a skinned and gutted dog (using a real dog’s corpse, the origin of which Craven refused to talk about later in life) and the baby being carried away and threatened with being consumed by the hungry clan all gave the film endless censorship problems around the world. Craven’s original cut was given an ‘X’ rating by the MPAA forcing him to tone down some of the film’s more gruesome excesses. And it could have been much worse – initially it was written that the cannibals would have been seen eating baby Katie but the cast and crew baulked at the notion, Berryman in particular refusing to take part in the scene which was quickly re-written.
The shadow of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) lies over The Hills Have Eyes as it does over just about every 70s horror film about innocents getting into trouble in the American wildernesses. It was a favourite film of Craven’s and the plots of the two films are remarkably similar – a group of suburbanites wander off the beaten track and find themselves being tormented by a family of inbred cannibals. Both films together gave rise to a whole strain of American horror films, set in out-of-the-way places and populated by savage characters tearing up cosy middle-class America.
The Hills Have Eyes was a well-deserved success for Craven though it helped to cement his reputation as a horror director that he was going to find impossible to shake. It may not be as disturbing as Last House (some will count that as a blessing) but it’s still a film with plenty of clout and one that has proved to be far more influential. An inferior sequel, The Hills Have Eyes Part II followed in 1985 and the Craven-produced Mind Ripper (1995), directed by Joe Gayton, was originally meant to have been the third film in the series but was rewritten to remove any references to the earlier films. In 2006 Alexandre Aja directed a surprisingly effective remake which in turn was followed by The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007). The influence of Craven’s enduring unpolished gem can be felt in everything from the X Files episode Home (1996) to the Wrong Turn franchise.
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