With Wes Craven now passed on, we’re left with the situation of a modern American horror director with an extremely successful body of work for analysis. Both an educator and a sometime adult filmmaker, Craven struck a fruitful compromise with commercial necessity. Will his lasting legacy be his Freddy and Scream franchises, or his less palatable slaughter-horrors?
Craven worked his way up from the exploitation depths, through the intense but ragged Last House on the Left and the later, slick The Serpent and the Rainbow. He developed into a fine director, shepherding his two major horror franchises. He eventually proved his versatility by directing a mainstream success, a Meryl Streep movie about a dedicated music teacher.
The Hills Have Eyes is Craven’s second outing from the middle seventies. His cast and crew ran themselves ragged in the Mojave Desert for a few weeks to tell a horror tale that combines the savage carnage of Last House with more original elements. The defending-the-family revenge saga of Straw Dogs plays a hand, as does the struggle with inbred sub-humans in Deliverance. Ex- college teacher Craven based his tale of terror on a true incident from Scottish history, and adds a few mythical touches of his own. Nowhere near as bleak or ugly as Last House, Hills finds transgressive themes of its own to exploit for its effective, raw shock scenes.
We’re essentially back in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre territory once again. The American frontier is closed, opportunities have dried up, and some desert dwellers have taken to savagery to get by. Not helping is the hint that their strange mutations may be the result of radiation from atom tests, although no large ants are in evidence. The family of feral deplorables is no longer part of society, and has instead become another danger of the savage wilderness.
Horror movie rule #1 … stay off the back roads. The Carter family’s trailer is disabled en route to California, and they fall prey to a clan of inbred cannibals that slaughter and rob passersby to survive. This feral ‘alternate family’ is ruled by Jupiter (James Whitworth), a crazed savage. Using one victim to trick the rest, the desert dwellers seem intent on wiping out the family as horribly as possible. They rape the daughter (Susan Lanier) and steal the other daughter’s baby. How long can the surviving Carters remain alive?
Savant remembers a very scary afternoon in an East L.A. theater watching this notable shocker, a far-fetched story that succeeds by being reasonably intelligent and logical. When savages are slaughtering your family, there’s no time to contemplate Why or How, or to debate fine points of philosophy. Craven’s script quickly puts the Carters into a believable jam, their only sin being to wander ‘off the beaten path’ where maniacs have awaited victims since horror movies were invented. ‘Big Bob’ Dad (Russ Grieve) is a police detective from a rough town. He’s not one to be intimidated by the incoherent warnings of old Fred (John Steadman), a gas station guy and estranged father to the monster family in the hills. Through no fault of their own, the Carters are put through a gauntlet of blood and horror.
The Carters are anything but ready for trouble. Big Bob’s complacent wife Ethel (Virginia Vincent, coincidentally of The Return of Dracula, made twenty years before) is way out of her depth, and reacts to the brutality leveled at her family with an uncomprehending denial. The rest of the Carters fall prey to bad communication and mistakes in judgment. The clan’s first attack occurs when Dad and son-in-law Doug Wood (Martin Speer) go for help, leaving the trailer protected only by son Bobby (Robert Houston). Two Carters are soon killed horribly and another mortally wounded. Daughter Susan (Lanier) collapses into one of those useless catatonic states favored by horror movies after the groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead of a decade earlier.
Those still functioning must formulate a plan of survival. They only have one wild card in their favor — their German shepherd dog named Beast. Just as all seems hopeless, Beast leads a counterattack and the audience jumps to its feet rooting for the underdog defenders. The Grand Guignol horrorshow is unhindered by the intellectual and literary baggage of the Sam Peckinpah and John Boorman siege movies. Craven generously allows the Carters a fighting chance.
As proven in hundreds of inept straight-to-video productions made after Hills, anybody can make this kind of movie. Craven and producer Locke didn’t have that many models to imitate. Their story relies on some desperate booby traps, including one likely inspired by the improvised killing of the shark in Jaws. But the characters always seem to function, even when they’re not well acted. Craven puts us in shock by eliminating some of the most interesting folk early on, in traumatic ways. It’s yet another story of a family forced to re-form after the loss of its normal leader, the father figure. The kids and son-in-law that must continue the fight don’t communicate worth beans. But the brother and sister muster the ruthlessness needed to prevail, and the son-in-law has good luck and some unexpected help on his side.
The concept of a feral family of cannibals has long since been eclipsed in subsequent gross ‘n’ nasty horror thrillers – I haven’t seen the remake that was produced by Wes Craven. But the Jupiter clan circa 1977 still sets us back a step or two. Papa Jupiter’s face has been horribly scarred since his childhood. He’s stolen a family for himself by kidnapping prostitutes and raising three strong sons, named after planets. Pluto is portrayed by horror icon Michael Berryman, a good actor using his congenital deformation to play a monster. Berryman’s domed skull and protruding brow became the movie’s iconic image.
On a true-crime level, Jupiter’s crimes resonate with Charlie Manson’s functionally similar ranch cult out in Death Valley. Craven’s storytelling also alludes to fairytale forms. The twin dogs Beauty and Beast figure boldly in the Carters’ defense. Not only does Beast attack with Lassie-like intelligence, he takes on a spectral function: the superstitious Pluto becomes spooked when he imagines that the second dog is the ghost of the former. It’s perhaps this story twist that redeems Hills from the usual dull-edged nihilism of modern horror: man’s best friend helps to even the odds.
The kidnapping of the Carters’ baby grandchild strays beyond the bounds of mainstream good taste. It also touches on more fairy tale references. Its attempted rescued makes use of a pig as a momentary substitute. This alludes both to Alice in Wonderland and earlier terror-fairytales about gypsies or trolls stealing infants and replacing them with suckling pigs. Wes Craven shows his English Lit background here just as he did in his cribbing of the myth behind Bergman’s The Virgin Spring for Last House. Always looking for high-toned reasons to champion otherwise un-credentialed horror films, film critics eat up on literary references: a crude gut-ripper can become a ‘Dark Statement of Our Times.’
