Alexandre Aja’s ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ turns 20 this year. Its legacy endures as one of the century’s best horror remakes.
It’s no secret I started watching horror movies at a time many would consider too young (whatever that means). My mom, a huge horror buff, was always watching the latest and greatest, and I was all too keen to sit alongside her, even when what we watched was scaring me silly (see: Child’s Play and the enduring childhood belief that Chucky lived in my basement). It was in 2006, right as I started middle school, that Alexandre Aja’s remake of Wes Craven’s gnarly, gritty classic The Hills Have Eyes hit theaters. Naturally, I saw it. I was scarred.
Aja’s remake, like the original, was an unflinching reflection of our dominant culture’s othering of those on the fringes of society. Reject and torment them long enough, and they’ll strike back. The remake was also, parallel with Craven’s vision, grotesque and gruesome. The Hills Have Eyes was given a rare NC-17 rating, which was trimmed to an R before its theatrical release, though the unrated home video cut restores the brutality of the original. Even in its censored state, The Hills Have Eyes remains one of the most extreme mainstream horror releases of not just the century, but of all time. Yes, more so than the likes of Hostel, Saw, or even the Terrifier series. It’s a necessary, urgent, and enduring horror text that remains as important today as it was 20 years ago.
In one of my earliest editorials for Dread Central, I shared a list of the movies that shaped me into the horror fan I am today. The Hills Have Eyes made the list. “This might be controversial, but I think Alexandre Aja’s remake, by most every account, is a better movie than Craven’s original,” I wrote. “It’s an incredibly sadistic film… mean, brutal, and unforgiving, both upsetting and cathartic when it matters most.” It was my first foray into extreme horror (whatever that really means), introducing me to an entirely new subgenre of French Extremity and transgressive cinema. My Netflix queue was loaded with titles like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Angst immediately after.
Horror With a Point
All horror is political, even if the politics are merely indifference toward challenging dominant ideals. Extreme horror—defined here as horror movies framed around extreme physical or sexual violence—is, unfortunately, often the latter, at least to me. For every Martyrs, there’s a Hostel, Incident in a Ghostland, or The Seasoning House. While my perspective may vary, I don’t buy those movies’ thematic aspirations. They’re nasty simply to be nasty. Subversive and boundary-pushing, yes, but without a meaningful pulse to contextualize all the savagery on-screen (or, in the case of Incident in a Ghostland, the savagery behind-the-scenes).
Now, to be fair, I’ve also defended A Serbian Film, even if it’s not something I enjoyed or would even recommend. I’m more than just an aging putz who can’t handle horror that challenges me. It’s often the opposite. I welcome the challenge. I adore the opportunity to feel uncomfortable and grapple with my own ideals and cultural boundaries, and horror movies are more effective than any other genre at accomplishing that. Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes is a premier example of cinema as an interrogation of the self.
Courtesy of 20th Century Fox
Even in its theatrical cut, The Hills Have Eyes closely replicates the original’s most infamous scene—a nighttime, RV siege. Two desert-dwelling mutants, Pluto (Michael Bailey Smith) and Lizard (Robert Joy), infiltrate the family’s trailer while the patriarchal figureheads are distracted by a Ted Levine pyre. Brenda (Emilie de Ravin) is left alone and attacked by the two assailants. She is raped and beaten. Lynn (Vinessa Shaw) and Ethel (Kathleen Quinlan) enter, and they’re subsequently brutalized and killed. Brenda is left alive as Pluto and Lizard flee with infant Catherine.
My filmic boundaries around sexual assault are firm. I hate seeing it. I’m often left viscerally and physically upset, sick to my stomach, and almost entirely removed from the immersion of whatever it is I’m watching. It’s too real. Aja’s depiction is protracted and punctuated by Emilie de Ravin’s gut-wrenching, auditory pleas for help. It’s a soundscape of suffering, even as the camera pans away from the worst of her assault.
Yet, as horrifying as that particular scene is, it’s never perfunctory or simply there to shock. Wes Craven is the greatest humanist horror filmmaker of all time. He adroitly understood that violence should never be fun. Instead, it’s ugly, confrontational, and intentionally savage. It’s a shock to the system, and for as upsetting as the trailer assault is, it’s the only way to adequately convey the larger, societal subjugation and violation of The Hills Have Eyes’ many mutant antagonists. They’re not incidentally monsters, but monsters we ourselves created. Aja understood that.
Desert-Dwelling Outsiders
Courtesy of 20th Century Fox
As a queer man, I’m all too familiar with monstrous identification. Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Freddy Krueger, for instance—the trifecta of slasher villains—are all queer-coded, whether intentionally or not. Before we buried our gays, we rendered them monstrous; masked killers whose troubled childhoods and mommy issues rendered them homicidal. They were different and dangerously so.
The Hills Have Eyes populates its New Mexico desert with sundry deformed mutants. After the United States government tested its nuclear arsenal in a rural mining town, survivors were left to mutate and morph, abandoned by their government and discarded as dregs by the remainder of “civil” society. The origins dovetail from Craven’s original. They’re still monstrous, though decidedly more human. Craven’s cannibalistic clan was inspired by the legend of Sawney Bean, the leader of a 16th-century Scottish clan rumored to have murdered and cannibalized thousands of people. Craven’s interest had less to do with the alleged savagery of the clan and more to do with their subsequent treatment after they were apprehended.
As the legend goes, Sawney Bean and his motley crew were tortured, burned, starved, and quartered, onward and onward, in acts of violence that paralleled the crimes with which they were suspected. Wes Craven has always been woke, and The Hills Have Eyes is one of his most profound works. While the monsters are monstrous, they nonetheless invite sympathy as outsiders whose reputation was preordained. Much like Thomas More’s enduring passage in Utopia, our society first created monsters and then punished them for being so.
Courtesy of 20th Century Fox
In a much-debated, though regularly misrepresented, video on the matter, horror creative and essayist Zane Whitener breaks down the anatomy of the franchise (original, remake, and a sequel to each). Whitener is more endeared toward Craven’s original, remarking on the remake, “It is mean in its explicit purpose of trying to be as nasty and cruel as possible.” Whitener’s key contention is that the remake uses real-life deformities to outwardly trigger revulsion and disgust toward its antagonists, ultimately amounting to an apathetic and nihilistic remake with little to say beyond “the world is terrible and will eat you alive.”
While my perspective differs, Whitener’s interrogation spotlights just how rich Aja’s remake is, largely because it can be meaningfully interpreted in many different ways. The intended revulsion is a means to an end, namely the aforementioned othering of those different, an abject and confrontational push toward viewing them as monsters before they’ve behaved as such. The audience willfully interprets disability and deformity as frightening, an unconscious (often conscious) bias that underscores the broader, sobering point– our own prejudice toward and sequestration of marginalized persons created this problem in the first place. We’ve been doing it for 30 years, and should we continue to do it, the cycle of violence is never going to stop.
An Enduring Remake
Courtesy of 20th Century Fox
For some, the gore quotient is enough. On a purely technical level, Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes is stunning. It’s provocative, propulsive, and breathlessly intense. That cruelty, as Whitner described it, is precisely the point for some. The movie is garish, ugly, and scary, and that can be enough. For me, The Hills Have Eyes endures as extreme horror with a point. A complicated one, sure, and one reasonably debated, though it’s a movie that I read as a tragic ode to society’s fringe. Poor, tired, abused, and ready to fight back.
