Top 25 Greatest Halloween Films: #11 – 'The Hills Have Eyes' (1977)

#11: The Hills Have Eyes (1977)

There are many qualities that make for a classic horror film, but nothing enhances the emotional power of the overall experience like a director who can successfully plant a sense of pure dread deep in your gut and hold it there. With “The Hills Have Eyes” writer/director/horror master Wes Craven (“Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Scream”) not only accomplishes this within the first few minutes, he does something even nastier. About halfway through, in a harrowing attack sequence, the filmmaker tells us in no uncertain terms and in the harshest way possible that all bets are off, there are no rules, and that you better hold tight because anything can happen.

With a budget of only $230,000 (over the years, the film would eventually gross an incredible $25 million), this visceral piece of unashamed exploitation tells the story of an extended Ohio family on their way to California who stupidly (and fatally) decide to bypass the interstate in order to check out an old silver mine that, even if it exists, does so uncomfortably close to a nuclear testing site deep within the desert of the American Southwest.

The crusty old owner of a ramshackle gas station (John Steadman) tries to warn our typical American family off, but Dad’s a retired cop afraid of nothing and the warning only seems to encourage him. And so with his chirpy wife, teenage children Bobby and Brenda, grown daughter Lynne (Dee Wallace), her husband and an infant (who will play a crucial role), Dad rolls into the heart of no man’s land pulling a mobile home all under the watchful eyes of a family of starved mutant cannibals who don’t appear to be completely opposed to incest.

Craven does an excellent job of making the low budget work to his advantage. The home movie feel of the cinematography adds to the heightened sense of reality, as do the amateurish performances (though Wallace obviously stands apart). Other than an explosion and gory make up, the lack of elaborate trappings, the starkness of it all, only increases the special sauce of foreboding and queasiness that grabs hold as soon as the old filling station owner watches the family drive away past the point of no return and deep into the wastelands.

Though there are a few moments meant to remind you that you are indeed watching a horror film, for the most part, the master director allows the story to slowly coil like a spring for the first 45 minutes until the tension is so unbearable you almost welcome the release that comes when the cannibals finally unleash an intensely brutal and coordinated attack against the family. No one and nothing is safe from their monstrous depravities. Not the women, not the pets, and not even the infant. When the sun finally rises, though, the worm turns. Their ranks might be thinned, but what’s left of this family isn’t going down without a fight, no matter how nasty that fight might have to get.

I seem to remember reading or hearing somewhere (and the film’s abrupt ending backs this up) that what Craven was aiming for was to make some sort of statement about how we’re all savages. On the back of my DVD case part of the description reads, and who will become the most shocking savages of all? Ooh, how lofty. And silly. If that was the director’s intent, he fails even before he gets started. There’s a wide berth of morality between savages who target the innocent and decent people forced to protect themselves by targeting those who target the innocent. Thankfully, Craven’s approach never spoils the film with speechifying and the narrative plays out as it should: like a very satisfying revenger.

Funnily enough, in the worthy 2006 remake, it’s been reported that director Alexandre Aja was also attempting to make some sort of left-wing political statement, this time about guns and the war in Iraq. But once again, innocent people minding their own business and forced to do what’s necessary to survive (including fire off various forms of firearms and stab a mutant in the head with the American flag) can never credibly be presented in a way that will ever satisfy the left’s argument that violence is violence is violence. No matter how hard one might try to craft a moral equivalence, reasonable people instinctively understand that when a marauder who looks like the great Michael Berryman comes after you, there’s nothing as comforting as a semi-automatic in one hand and Old Glory on a sharp stick in the other.