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The Hills Have Eyes
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 The Hills Have Eyes Production NotesTagline: The lucky ones die first.
A hapless family makes a detour to a desolated desert to visit a silver mine they've inherited where they are preyed upon by a disturbing clan.
A new take on Wes Craven's 1977 film of the same name, "The Hills Have Eyes" is the story of a family road trip that goes terrifyingly awry when the travelers become stranded in a government atomic zone. Miles from nowhere, the Carters soon realize the seemingly uninhabited wasteland is actually the breeding ground of a blood-thirsty mutant family...and they are the prey.
In the annals of modern fear, few films have had as deep an impact as Wes Craven’s 1977 cult classic The Hills Have Eyes. With its gritty, ferocious and relentlessly suspenseful tale of a vacationing family who suddenly face a desperate battle for survival, the low-low-budget but no-holds-barred film was resonant with both intriguing themes and outrageous shocks to the nervous system.
Now, inspired by the wild imagination of suspense-master Craven-- who serves as producer along with Marianne Maddalena and Peter Locke -- comes a contemporary reinterpretation of The Hills Have Eyes from the cutting-edge young filmmakers, Alexandre Aja and Gregory Levasseur, whose recent hit High Tension won acclaim and controversy for raising the bar on horror films again with its graphic, white-knuckle take on psychological terror.
Aja and Levasseur bring this chilling horror story of ever-intensifying dread hurtling into the 21st century, refashioning it with a raw, gut-wrenching realism and hard-driving visual style to terrify a whole new generation of filmgoers.
It all begins with a typically dysfunctional cross-country family road trip. It’s the wedding anniversary of rugged Cleveland police detective “Big Bob” Carter (Ted Levine) and his chatty wife Ethel (Academy Award nominee Kathleen Quinlan) and to celebrate, Bob’s asked his extended family to cruise to California with them, hoping the joys of the open road might help fuse their frayed connections. No one is particularly happy about it.
Eldest daughter, Lynn, (Vinessa Shaw) worries about her new baby’s safety and comfort while her husband, mild-mannered tech geek, Doug (Aaron Stanford), worries about close encounters with his father-in-law. Meanwhile teen daughter, Brenda, (Emilie De Ravin) detests the idea of leaving her friends for a family bonding trip, while young prankster Bobby, (Dan Byrd) is anxious to entertain the family’s two German Shepherds, Beauty and Beast. Nevertheless, the entire clan piles into a weathered Suburban pulling Bob’s beloved ’88 Airstream trailer and heads west.
Then, Big Bob takes a detour. Suddenly, the Carter family finds themselves in a desolate stretch of desert, with nothing seemingly alive for miles. When they run into a little unexpected vehicle trouble, they realize they are in dire straits, far from help, with a relentlessly sweltering desert sun overhead. But even as they fight to survive the deadly desert, a far greater threat emerges. Now the Carters become aware that they are not quite as alone as they first thought.
There is another group of survivors in the hills surrounding the desert: a genetically mutated, insatiably hungry, blood-thirsty clan -- the terrifying offspring of miners left behind in the days when atomic tests spread radioactive fallout across the desert -- who will stop at nothing to prey on the Carters one by one. Facing the very depths of savagery, the Carter family must pull together if they are to find any hope of returning to civilized life again...alive.
The Hills Have Eyes: Then and Now
In a career spanning more than three decades, Wes Craven has become a worldwide cultural phenomenon in film, television, and literature. He reinvented the youth horror genre in 1984 with the classic A Nightmare On Elm Street, which he wrote and directed, and in the next decade, he deconstructed the genre again with the mega-successful Scream trilogy. These two franchises alone have earned nearly a billion dollars and serve as a demonstration of Craven’s profound understanding of the oftenunconscious desires and fears roiling in the human psyche.
“He’s a terrific storyteller, a compelling writer and a wonderful director,” says Hills producer Peter Locke, who produced, financed and distributed the original film in 1977. “He’s the master of the horror genre because he had early success in it and he’s figured it out probably better than anyone around.”
Craven’s success in probing the nature of fear began in 1972 with his first film, The Last House on the Left, and was taken to a whole new level of mastery with his second film, The Hills Have Eyes which quickly became part of the cultural zeitgeist with its unflinching tale of a mutant family preying on travelers in a government atomic zone.
Craven wrote the script after being inspired by the infamous true tale of Scotland’s 17th Century Sawny Beane family, who ambushed travelers on lonely village roads, killed them in unspeakable ways and then, shockingly, cannibalized their victims, living off their remains. The story recounts that through inbreeding the Sawny Beane family numbered as many as 48 members and murdered countless travelers.
King James I of Scotland ultimately sent in some 400 soldiers and bloodhounds to hunt down the family’s hiding place: a blood-soaked cave of horrors. After they were captured, the King had the entire family executed in the same manner as they had killed their victims.
For Craven, this powerful ancient story seemed to tap right into our most resonant modern fears – fears about the clash between our yearning for civilization and our human propensity for unthinkable brutality and mad behavior. Moving the story into 20th century America, Craven also saw an opportunity to explore what he terms “the shadow side” of the American family – as his suburban clan faces off against the far more primal members of the mutant family.
These were the days before big-budget horror movies, and the original version of The Hills Have Eyes was made with a skeleton crew of just 15 members for a paltry $325,000 in the desert community of Victorville, CA. Things were so tight that producer Peter Locke drove the cast to locations in a beat-up Winnebago and the crew wore garbage bags for rainslickers when the weather turned stormy. Props were scavenged from Tobe Hooper’s horror classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and an abandoned gas station was found to create the film’s key set. The film was shot with a handheld 16mm camera, lending it a gritty look that only heightened the terror.
Despite its humble production, The Hills Have Eyes broke box-office records when it was released in the summer of 1977. Audiences were literally stunned by what they saw and critics were shocked and baffled. Unlike conventional horror films of the time, with their predictable monsters and comprehensible killers, this film boldly pushed the farthest edges of cinematic horror past long-held taboos and opened the way for today’s unflinching cinematic investigations of fear. It became a classic, influencing numerous future horror films and jarring viewers with its emotional fever pitch well into the DVD age.
Flash forward 30 years . . . now, intrigued by the astonishing success of such horror remakes as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Amityville Horror, Craven and his producing partners began pondering the possibility of revisiting The Hills Have Eyes – but with the heightened storytelling power of today’s far more advanced cinematic tools. Craven explains: “Because the original had been produced on such a minuscule budget, there were many aspects of the story I simply couldn’t afford to explore. Fortunately, the new version has a much bigger budget so we were able to greatly expand the production’s scope and take more time and care in shooting.”
In order to re-introduce this horror classic to contemporary audiences, Craven knew it would take upto- the-minute verve and style, so he and his production team began to look for a rising young director to bring fresh perspective to the project. The position was going to be extremely tough to fill. It would require an authentic visual innovator -- someone with not only a dark and distinctive imagination but a unique talent capable of revisiting the dynamic action, gallows humor and edge-of-your-seat terror of the landmark film, while fusing them into an entirely new experience.
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Emilie De Ravin in The Hills Have Eyes.
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