BACKGROUND
If it weren't for producer Peter Locke, Wes Craven's filmmaking career might have gone quite differently. Perhaps he would have even faded into obscurity, known only as the guy who made that 1972 rape/revenge shocker The Last House on the Left. Craven wanted to make more movies after Last House, but because of the controversy that had surrounded his directorial debut and the way the subject matter had caused people to question his morals and his sanity, he had no interest in making another horror movie. There was a five year gap between Last House and The Hills Have Eyes because Craven spent those years trying to get non-horror projects off the ground, to no avail. It was Locke who convinced Craven, who was now broke, to give horror another try. Locke also suggested the setting: his wife (actress/singer Liz Torres) was working in Las Vegas at the time, so he and Craven could go off and make an independent movie somewhere out in the desert. Oddly, they chose a spot that’s almost 200 miles outside of Vegas, in Victorville, California, but that’s what got the project rolling.
Craven found inspiration in the 16th century story of Sawney Bean, a man who was said to have lived in a coastal cave in Scotland with his wife and multiple children and grandchildren. The Bean family survived by ambushing people, killing them and eating them, keeping their belongings. When they were finally caught by members of "civilized society," their executions were brutal and torturous. There is debate over whether or not the Beans actually existed, but their story was a perfect one to base a horror movie on.
In the initial script Craven wrote for The Hills Have Eyes, under the title Blood Relations: The Sun Wars, it's clear that he was still upset by how he was viewed after the release of The Last House on the Left. It starts with a crawl of text: "In 1973, following the release of Last House on the Left, the writer/director of that film was committed for psychiatric observation. He was treated extensively with drugs, group therapies, electroshock programs and a final lobotomy. Despite these efforts at reform, Craven killed his nurse, Maura Heaphy, and escaped to the Mohave Desert. At the end of 1000 days of meditation he was taken up by a jet-black saucer and trained in Secondary Media Infiltration and parametaphysical survival on the Planet Jupiter. Upon his graduation he was returned to the planet Earth at Exeter. This Film is his first since his return, and is respectfully dedicated to the memory of Maura Heaphy." This, wisely, did not make it into the final film.
Locke and budget constraints also caused Craven to drop an unnecessary element of the story being set in a dystopian, futuristic (the year: 1984) United States that has crumbled so much that passports are required to travel from state to state. They ended up keeping it simple and modern.
The resulting film is not one I really consider to be a slasher movie, but (like Children of the Corn) it’s one that gets labelled as a slasher online. I’ve never seen it as a slasher because, while some characters do get slashed with bladed weapons, those are not the chosen weapons of the villains, who would probably rather shoot people. That said, the sequel that was made in the 1980s definitely is a slasher movie and I intend to cover it in a Dissecting Slashers article someday, so I figured I would cover this one to pave the way for that one.
SETTING
When it comes to locations, The Hills Have Eyes is one of the most economical movies ever made. It takes place in the middle of nowhere. All Craven really needed to bring his story to the screen was a patch of desert, some hills (which are said to have eyes because the villains live in those hills and are keeping watch on the area from them), a cave, and a station wagon with a camper trailer to park on the side of a dirt road.
The only buildings in the entire movie are on the property of Fred's Oasis, a rundown gas station out in the middle of the Nevada desert, the last chance for travellers to get gasoline before they enter two hundred miles of nothingness.
The locations are sparse, but they were well dressed by art director Robert A. Burns, who also worked on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – a film that Craven was almost certainly drawing inspiration from when he was putting this story together.
Locke was right; the desert was an excellent setting for a horror movie. It comes across in the film that the characters are trapped in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but desert sand. No one is coming to help them, and to find help they would have to walk miles and miles. It’s desolate, giving a sense of utter helplessness.
The nearest sign of life is an Air Force base, as part of this area is used for a gunnery range, leading some characters to fear that they’ve wandered onto the Nellis Air Force Base nuclear testing site. The remake that came along in 2006 leaned heavily into the “nuke test site” idea, but in this film there’s only a quick reference to it.
KILLERS
The cave-dwelling killers in this film are not radiation mutants. The proprietor of Fred’s Oasis, Fred himself (played by John Steadman), tries to warn people who pass through the area not to fool around in the desert, but he doesn’t tell them about the cannibalistic maniacs lurking in the desert unless he absolutely has to. Of course, he has to as the film goes on – and he reveals that he played a major role in their back story.
Fred's Oasis opened in 1929, at which time Fred and his wife had a beautiful baby daughter and another child on the way. Things fell apart when that second child was born; a twenty pound boy that was hairy as a monkey. The kid started killing animals as he grew up, and in August of 1939 he even set fire to their house. Fred's beloved daughter was killed in the blaze. In retaliation, Fred split his devil son's face open with a tire iron and left him for dead... But he didn't die. He took up residence in the desert hills and eventually started a family with a former prostitute. Fred is the father of the man known as Papa Jupiter, played by James Whitworth.
With Mama (Cordy Clark), Papa Jupiter has brought a pack of wild kids, now all adults, into the world. They are Mercury, a simple-minded fellow played by Peter Locke, who dresses similar to a Native American, headdress and all; Janus Blythe as Ruby, who doesn’t agree with her family’s methods and desperately wants to find a way to escape from them and leave the desert; the messy-haired Mars (Lance Gordon), and the perverted Pluto (Michael Berryman), who ended up being prominently featured on the film’s poster due to Berryman’s unique appearance, a result of multiple birth defects.
Most of these people are homicidal maniacs, but Craven doesn’t just present them as bloodthirsty monsters. He shows us exactly how these family unit works and interacts with each other, Papa Jupiter being the intense, ruthless leader of the pack, Mars and Pluto being his dangerous enforcers, Mercury keeping watch and making goofy comments about eating baby toes, Mama hanging back at the cave they call home, and Ruby being appalled by her family’s actions.
FINAL GIRL
The Hills Have Eyes has more survivors than you might expect to see in a movie of this sort, so there are a few different options for characters who could be referred to as the final girl.
There’s teenager Brenda (Susan Lanier), who survives a horrific “camper invasion” assault carried out by Mars and Pluto and goes on to help her brother Bobby (Robert Houston) set up a trap for Papa Jupiter. Even though she shrieks in fear throughout the action – and if you see this movie in a theatre, those shrieks might even cause your eardrums to burst – she’s still determined enough to survive that she’ll grab a weapon and stand up to the raging wild man who raised a pack of cannibals.
There’s pack member Ruby, who turns against her own family and helps a desperate father rescue his baby from them, even going so far as to participate in the murder of her brother Mars.
And, since the baby is a female, you could even say that infant Katy (Brenda Marinoff) is one of the final girls in this movie.
VICTIMS
The outsiders who wander into dangerous territory are a family from Ohio: Big Bob Carter (Russ Grieve), who was recently forced to retire from his job as a detective on the Cleveland police force due to heart problems; his religious wife Ethel (Virginia Vincent); their teenage children Bobby and Brenda; their twenty-something daughter Lynne (Dee Wallace); Lynne's husband Doug Wood (Martin Speer); and Lynne and Doug's infant daughter Katy. A couple caged birds and German shepherds Beauty and Beast are also along for the ride – and yes, the animals do get involved in the horrific action in a major way.
The Carters are on a road trip to California, celebrating Big Bob and Ethel’s 25,th wedding anniversary, and they’ve taken a side trip to Nevada to check out an old silver mine that was gifted to them by Ethel’s Aunt Mildred. Despite Fred's best efforts to warn the family away from searching for the mine, telling them it's been empty for 40 years and that the Air Force uses the area for a gunnery range, they still leave the main road, taking a dirt road off through the vast desert countryside. And the nightmare begins.
Ohio native Craven partially based these characters on his own family: their poor communication with each other, the religion aspect, even where they're from. While most of the family resides in Cleveland, where Craven was born and raised, Lynne has gone off to be with Doug in New York City, where Craven was living when this film was made.
The Carters are a flawed bunch. Big Bob is a temperamental jerk – and he’s responsible for what happens to his family because he acts like a total idiot, speeding down a dirt road with his whole family in the car, pulling a trailer, a baby in the backseat held in its mother's arms. His actions cause the car to crash and become immobilized, making the Carter family easy pickings for the cannibals living in the nearby hills.
Bobby is aware very early on that there’s danger in the area, because he sees that Beauty has been killed and mutilated. But he keeps the secret because he's too embarrassed by how scared he is and he doesn’t want to worry the women, especially after they've already demonstrated that they are very worried already. So he takes the burden of worry upon himself, which is a terrible decision.
Ethel’s not a particularly bright woman, and she’s completely out of her element. Brenda is an annoying teen. Lynne and Doug are the least irritating, least questionable characters of the group. They’re more worldly than most of the people around them, but that won’t necessarily do them any good out here where the hills have eyes.
DEATHS
There are several survivors, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of deaths along the way. The heroes and the villains both lose members as the story plays out, with one character being beaten to death with a tire iron. Another is burned alive. As mentioned earlier, a couple of characters get shot. There’s some hatchet hacking, a bite from a venomous snake, and an ending moment that involves someone getting stabbed multiple times.
A couple of kills are even carried out by the heroic, vengeful dog Beast, who manages to knock one of the villains off the cliff and tears out the throat of another.
CLICHÉS
People are always complaining about characters in horror movies making bad decisions, and that cliché is represented here in full force. Big Bob being a bad driver, Brenda opening the camper door to let a dog run loose in the desert, Bobby keeping his knowledge of the danger in the area to himself... the Carters really bring a lot of misfortune on themselves. There’s the doomsayer cliché in this movie, in the form of Fred trying to warn the family not to wander around in the desert – and, of course, the family makes the cliché decision not to listen to the doomsayer, who will later tell us all about the troubling history of the villains.
Unexpectedly, there is some sex in the movie, a cliché for the slasher subgenre. Lynne and Doug make the surprising decision to have sex in the station wagon while Big Bob is missing (having gone on a walk back to Fred’s Oasis) and the rest of the family is in the camper trailer with their baby. This isn’t a case of premarital sex, as is usually the case in slasher movies, as Lynne and Doug are married parents – which makes it even more surprising that they would decide to have sex in the middle of this situation. They have the hormones of your average teenage slasher victims.
You also have the isolated setting, the fact that the characters decide to split up while seeking help (Big Bob heads back to the gas station, Doug goes off in a different direction, the rest stay at the camper), the set-up of a road trip gone wrong, and the inability to contact the outside world, even though the characters have a CB radio (the signal can’t get past the hills because they’re full of iron).
POSTMORTEM
Wes Craven would go on to make even more popular movies than this – he is, after all, the man who created Freddy Krueger – but The Hills Have Eyes is my favorite of his movies. I find it to be the most fascinating, and endlessly rewatchable. It tells a simple, well paced story. The crash happens 11 minutes into its 89 minutes, and from then on it's just a harrowing, brutal struggle for survival. The concept of the desert-dwelling cannibals, the music by Don Peake, the fact that Craven shows us exactly how both the cannibal and civilized families function and interact with each other, it all works for me exceptionally well. Even when characters are making choices or displaying behavior I don’t agree with.
There is some questionable dialogue, Craven wasn't always the best at that, and there are some shaky acting moments here and there, but I find that the good, make that the great, far outweighs its flaws.
The intensity and brutality of some of the attack sequences can be jaw-dropping, and the performances of the actors as they deal with these terrible moments are really striking to me. It's effective and involving, and I get totally drawn in by the family's ordeal. Craven beats them into the ground until they're forced to rise up. He was inspired by the idea that what society had done to the Beans was just as awful as what the Beans had done to their victims, but I have to say, I don't feel sympathy for the pack. Every time the family strikes back, I'm rooting for them. Pluto, Mars, and Jupiter deserve everything that Beast, Doug, Bobby, and Brenda do to them.
Craven had to struggle with the ratings board and cut down moments of violence to secure an R rating, but once he had, the film made its way out into the world in 1977 – and it did very well. Made on a budget somewhere in the range of $350,000 to $700,000, it made $25 million at the box office. It even broke box office records at some of the individual theatres it played in, although its national numbers were hindered by the fact that it was up against the comedy masterpiece Smokey and the Bandit, which was a box office juggernaut. Of course, Craven and Locke were both pleased by how well it did.
The Hills Have Eyes quickly became known as a horror classic, and Michael Berryman became a genre icon due to his performance and appearance as Pluto. Sadly, it seems the movie has been overshadowed by its remake it recent years – but for me, the enhanced action and special effects of the remake can’t surpass the effectiveness of the original film or the terrifying performances delivered by Berryman, Lance Gordon, and James Whitworth. I may not consider this to be a slasher movie, but I do consider it to be one of the all-time great horror movies, and it’s one of my top favorites.
No comments:
Post a Comment