‘THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977)’ is hicksploitation done right
#31DaysOfHorror: October 3rd, 2016
This October, as I have for the last three years, I’ll be watching 31 horror movies in 31 days and reviewing them all! You can see the ongoing list of what I’ve watched and reviewed here.
THE PLOT
The Carter Family is your average American family — a father, a mother, two daughters, a son and a son-in-law, a granddaughter, and two dogs. They’re traveling across the desert in a camper headed for Los Angeles, bickering as families do.
There’s another family in this terrible tale, too… a family with distinctly mythological names… Papa Jupiter and his brood: Mercury, Pluto, Mars… (And, uh, Ruby.) Only this is not your average family. This family lives in the hills. And they eat people…
MY REVIEW
Wes Craven’s classic radioactive cannibal film The Hills Have Eyes is easily the “scariest” horror film I’ve watched so far this month. Whereas They Look Like People aimed to be unsettling and eerie more than “scary,” and Event Horizon’s gory shock tactics fell flat for me, The Hills Have Eyes combines the best of both worlds into a film that’s at turns thrilling and creepy, dreadful and grotesque.
I’m reading a book right now called Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. I haven’t made it all that far, but in the introduction, Carol Clover gives an overview of a number of critical approaches to horror film. Personally, I like looking for how films deviate from formulas, but Clover (with support from James Twitchell, author of Dreadful Pleasures) argues that formula is the attraction in many cases. Horror films perform similar functions as fairy tales and folklore; there are endless retellings with similar elements, and while details differ depending on the teller, the pleasure comes from the repetition, the repeated beats and familiar plot points, and how they are used to tell a tale with particular significance to the audience. Clover writes that, in horror as in folktale, “there is in some sense no original, no real or right text, but only variants.” As such, Twitchell recommends an “ethnological approach” to horror criticism, suggesting that critics and academics analyze horror films “as if no one individual telling really mattered,” focusing instead on tracing the migrations of horror images to audiences and then discussing why they were important enough to pass along.
This #31DaysOfHorror project is, in a sense, an ethnological approach to horror criticism. In various reviews (over the last two years, anyway, and presumably in the future this year as well) I have taken up questions of audience and circulation as well as genre and form, classifying and situating films within various subgenres as well as hypothesizing about the relevance of these subgeneric classifications to various socio-cultural movements and themes. So, while on an individual level I do think it’s interesting and worthwhile to point out what any one particular film does well, or did first, or provides exemplary subversions of, I’m also intrigued by Clover and Twitchell’s assertion that horror is best served by looking at how well each film “delivers the cliché” rather than what each film does differently.
Because The Hills Have Eyes is nothing if not exemplary of its subgenre, what I like to call “hicksploitation.” The Hills Have Eyes may not have originated some or any of the tropes common to hicksploitation films (which derive their horror from exploiting middle-class fears about lower-class white people in the American heartland). But, it uses those tropes phenomenally well.
Before I get too deep into how I interpret the film, I’ll give a quick rundown of some of the familiar elements in The Hills Have Eyes, and some of the different folklores it seems to be retelling. While it was certainly an early example of hicksploitation horror, it was by no means the first — The Texas Chain Saw Massacre came out three years earlier. And, if we’re reading the movie along Clover and Twitchell’s lines, “first” doesn’t mean much anyway; it just indicates that the film is representing something primal, something that carries resonance in American culture. More on that in a minute.
The Hills Have Eyes opens at a gas station, a familiar locale to many hicksploitation horrors. The grizzled old local who tries to warn off the travelers from impending doom is a well-worn trope at this point; Texas Chain Saw Massacre itself features an obvious example, but so does Deliverance, which, while not precisely a “horror movie,” certainly does trade in horrific goings-on perpetrated by lower-class white people out in the sticks. Since the 70s, ominous convenience-store owners or customers have featured in such films as Friday the 13th and Cabin Fever, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil and Cabin in the Woods.
Road movies have a long history in American culture as well, and The Hills Have Eyes is a road trip gone wrong. I’m a big fan of road horror such as Joy Ride and Wrong Turn (another film about wayward travelers encountering mutant cannibals in the mountains). Americans romanticize the open road, and The Hills Have Eyes preys on what could go wrong out in the hill country should your trusty American automobile do you wrong.
Intriguingly, The Hills Have Eyes also trades in what feels like 1950s or 60s postwar fears of government-sponsored scientific horror. We learn that the shortcut the Carters have taken has brought them through an area of the desert marked off-limits by the United States military, and the movie strongly implies that the hill-dwelling hillbillies have been driven mad by radioactive mutations. Like the monster movies of the 50s and 60s that were a reaction to a deep sense of horror about the consequences of the atomic bomb, The Hills Have Eyes exploits fears of what our experiments with nuclear bombs have done to this country. In The Hills Have Eyes, the very American desire for violence sponsored by the government and the military has rotted and mutated the heart of the country. I don’t think it’s an accident that The Hills Have Eyes was made just after the end of the Viet Nam war, either; this was a time when Americans were confronted more than ever before with images displaying the deeply horrific damage war can wreak on humanity, and on a very visceral level, The Hills Have Eyes wants us to see what war can do to the body.
There is something mythic about this film, something that asks you to think about its symbolic resonances as you’re watching. On a surface level, Craven has given the hillbilles names of Roman gods, which certainly clues the viewer in to thinking about myth. The “Carter” family may also be significantly-named; Jimmy Carter was, after all, President when the movie came out. Moreover, the choice to set the action in the desert rather than the backwoods swamps traversed in Deliverance (another movie with mythic resonances) calls to mind that most mythic of American genres, the Western, and it forces us to think about what this film means for American society. This is very self-consciously the story of an All-American nuclear family pitted against the “savages” who live in the wilds of the West; the mutant cannibals could easily be read as an allegory for the worst stereotypes about Native Americans. Check out the headdresses and jewelry the cannibals wear, and think about the way the camper could be a stand-in for a pioneer’s covered Stagecoach wagon featured in many a Western.
Director William Friedkin argued that the audience’s emotional engagement with a horror film begins while they are waiting in line to purchase tickets to the movie. Clover argues that audiences mull over a basic plot outline that they expect the horror film to follow, developing a schema of tropes they hope the film hits in order to be considered a success. I would go back a step; I think, especially with horror, audiences already imagine they know a movie from its advertising, and so they engage with what they imagine the plot and themes to be before they get in line to buy the ticket. The advertising for The Hills Have Eyes is especially indicative of the mindset audiences should be in so they can be most receptive to the film’s themes; posters like the one at the top of the page feature the tagline “A nice American family. They didn’t want to kill. But they didn’t want to die.” This primes audiences to expect a story dealing with what the American family means, and what the American family will do to protect itself.
The sick irony here, of course, is that the major figure on the poster is Pluto, the breakout iconic mutant from the film. This suggests that the “American family” in the tagline could equally apply to the mutants who live in the hills. After all, if they don’t kill (to eat), they too will die.
And herein lies the genius of The Hills Have Eyes. In telling this mythic tale of a family meant to represent “a nice American family” and therefore, America itself, and the horrific lengths Americans who hide their savagery under a thin veneer of respectability will go to survive, the film becomes an allegory for the terrible, savage things Americans did to previous inhabitants of those hills. If we understand the mutants as Native Americans, and the Carters as the embodiment of Westernism and manifest destiny — the Carters are, after all, traveling through the desert to claim a silver mine they inherited — then The Hills Have Eyes works primarily by revealing that there isn’t that much difference between a “nice American family” and a savage one. After all, as the poster explains, it’s simply the will to survive that leads the family to kill.
What’s more “American” than protecting your family?
