Hills Have Eyes in 1970's American Horror

According to Robin Wood, "the 70's was a period in which the evolution of the horror genre produced films more gruesome, more violent, more disgusting and perhaps more confused than ever before in its history."[1] This was an age that saw the horror movie take on many forms and issues whilst maintaining the shock factor that resonates from the earliest "splatter and gore films"[2] (such as those made by Hershell Gordon Lewis of the previous decade(. Among the many films that populated the exponential growth of the genre in the 1970's, Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977) is seen as a defining film in the maturing of American horror film- largely due to the issues its deals within the social realm as well as the aesthetic horror it presents on screen. To understand the film's place in cinematic history, we must take into account the socio- political environment the film was born out of as well as previous filmic influences.
According to the critic Gregory A. Waller, the "modern era of the horror movie began in 1968,"[3] and the cinematic evidence supports this statement. Films such as George A Romero's Night of the Living Dead (dir G.A. Romero, 1968) and Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (dir R. Polanski,1968) had both been made in this year, and both touched on aspects that did not only have shock value like the Hershel Gordon Lewis 'intensive gore'[4] film, but also a deeper, more sociological undertone which amplified their impact on the viewer - In other words, "the genre had become more aware of itself in terms that it knows that is a scary movie, not only of American life but generic memory."[5] Whilst many saw it as a low budget zombie Sci-Fi horror, Night of The Living Dead can be viewed as a take on the invasion of the family unit and American social values, rather than the veiled communist threat that was typical of the invasion movie.

In the pre-hayes code productions of the 1930's and 1940's, Hollywood endeavored to test the boundaries of the horror film, as Thomas Doherty highlights in Pre-Hayes Code Hollywood. [6] Exploitation and gruesome imagery was used to push the envelope in films such as Tarzan(dir WV Van Dyke, 1932), Freaks(dir Tom Browning, 1932) , and King Kong (dir M.C.Cooper, 1933). Tarzan could be seen as a radical, racial adventure move,[7] Freaks; a body shock-horror,[8] King Kong; human sexuality at its most brutal, manifested in a violent oversized gorilla.[9] Naturally, these movies exerted a strong influence on the horror genre. Robin Wood also discusses these elements in films such as Frankenstein, taking the riotous actions of the village people against the monster to symbolize the reaction of the proletariat against the upper classes. This provides a further link to the science fiction cycle of the invasion from another world,[11] symbolic of the incursion of a different system of ideals - in this case, Communism. "The Threat in the 1930's horror was always foreign i.e. horror exists but it is un-American."[12]- Essentially the essence of any horror movie lies in this "other"[13] presence or threat which takes many forms and shapes throughout the history of the genre. The medium of the cinema is classic escapism into dreams, whilst the horror movies do the exact opposite- they are the escape into terror. The late1960's saw a shift in the genre from a more public and sociological arena (like science fiction) to a much more personal, psychological terror, an important feature in its development. The social fears addressed were no longer collective, but internal and personal - this can be seen in the attack on the home. The internal manifestation played on the fact that the once impenetrable fortress of the family unit can be invaded, violated, and effectively destroyed. Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes exemplifies this, showing the American family under threat in the realm of the horror movie.[14]

Boasting a career that spans four decades, as a director of such seminal horror films as The Last House on the Left (dir Wes Craven, 1972) in the early 70's, the Nightmare on Elm Street in the 1980's and the post modern Scream Trilogy in the 1990's, Wes Craven is, to say the least, a venerable figure whose name is synonymous with the American Horror film. In his 1977 feature, The Hills Have Eyes, Craven explores the more primal instincts of man when his private safehaven - his family home- is attacked. For Craven, "the family is the best microcosm to work with. If you go beyond that you're getting away from a lot of the roots of your own primeval feelings."[15] Robin Wood sees the family as being the unifying master figure in relation to such issues as violence, rape, cannibalism and revenge motifs within this genre, which I will discuss individually during the course of this essay. Wood considers the evolution of the horror film in the familial sense. The family comedy of the 1930's turned sour and petered out in the 50's, evolved into the family horror film with such early examples as Psycho(dir A Hitchcock 1960) .[16] Night of the Living Dead also features a family fighting for their lives when under threat by a zombie hoard only for them to be consumed from within by their own mutated daughter. Wood sees this as a recurring motif which can also be seen in Meet Me in St Louis (dir V Minelli 1944) where Margret O Brien symbolically kills and eats her parents.[17]


The premise of Craven's The Hills Have Eyes centers around two families, one, the standard "white bread" American family as Craven describes them, who are stranded in the desert far from civilization; the other a rather mutilated half breed of human who eek out their living in the wasteland in a rather violent and primeval way. In essence this Darwinian film is about two families pitted against each other for survival and power over one other (although there is no clear cut reason for this clash). However, as D.N. Rodowick highlights, by the end of the film it is not clear who is more monstrous; the Carters or the mutated family who double them throughout the film.[18] Rodowick again notes that the end of the film depicts equally bloody revenge for each act of violence perpetrated against the Carter family. Even the family dog, Beast, gets revenge for the death of its partner, Beauty, by ripping the jugular of Pluto the rapist out of his neck. The two teenagers, left alone in the car, attempt to kill off the opposing patriarch by blowing up their trailer and immolating him much in the same way as their father Red was killed- hung and burned to a tree. The final battle boils down to Doug and Mars exemplifying what Rodowick sees as "the ultimate struggle for parental authority."[19] The films haunting final image is that of Doug's face after he has viciously, repeatedly stabbed his attacker. There is no trace of a happy ending that would befit a comedy; no tearful, joyful reunion with his surviving family. Instead, we fade bleakly out to red, symbolic of the bloodshed we have just witnessed. Such features as the attack on the American family, cannibalism and a bleak nihilistic ending betray the influence of earlier films such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre(dir Hopper, 1973) and Night of The Living Dead; reaching their pinnacle in Craven's work.
The Hills Have Eyes shows a blending of various subgenres on thematic levels that drive towards the modern horror film, as we know it. Throughout the film the viewer is left in suspense, constantly questioning who will survive and what will be left of them. This was a common trait in many horror films from the 1960's onwards, notably The Texas Chainsaw Massacre where our young protagonists are chased by an axe wielding mad man only to escape and fall back into the clutches of the demented family again. The Night of the Living Dead is equally as tense as one by one each of the survivors are plucked from the security of the house and succumbed to the violent forces of the encroaching zombies. The Hills Have Eyes is no exception from the dispatching of violence. Each killing within the film has a certain formulaic quality to it as Rodowick notes in his essay 'The Enemy Within.'[20] Here the violence explores the theme of revenge. Here, each killing and act of violence is seen as a struggle between two families dealing with each other on a mirrored basis. "The family," Wood remarks, "is besieged by its dark mirror image, the terrible shadow family from the hills."[21]
The 1970's saw an escalation of violence on the silver screens of American cinema. This was a direct influence not only of the previous mentioned "gore and splatter" films but also from uncensored, violent European exports, like the Italian horror classics by directors Fulchi and Argento. This period was renowned for the increase of violence on all levels, in all genres from crime/detective movies (The French Connection(dir W Friedkin 1971) , Dirty Harry(dir Don Seigal 1971) , Shaft(dirG Parks 1971 ) to Westerns (Man Called Horse(E Silverstin 1970) ) and War films (Patton dir W Schaffner 1971 , Murphy's Wardir Peter Yeats 1971 ).[22] The final scene from the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde(dir A Penn, 1967) also testifies this; here the two protagonists are cut down by a hail of bullets in slow motion. A never-before-seen level of violence invaded the American theatres.[23] Westerns had also taken to the taste of the apocalyptic with such films as Once Upon A Time in the West(dir S Leone 1968) , where we a see the figuratively heroic Henry Fonda turn bad guy and The Wild Bunch(dir Peckinpah, 1969) , where gun violence and death reach gruesome heights. These blood soaked factors could even be attributed to increase of violence on American soil - the Kennedy assassination of 1963, the killings of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King to name but a few, all of which had lasting effects on the psyche of American film going audiences. These elements slowly but surely crept into the mainstream horror movie, making violence a mainstay of the modern stem of the horror genre.
Craven had always argued in his depiction of violence in films like Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes to be a realistic portrayal of actual violence. It is a comment on how the violence in Vietnam became the television "junk," effectively inuring the American public. "I tried not to make the violence romantic but to make it real," Craven maintained, "so that people would be affected and speak out against it."[24] The end of the 1960's marked the end of "The Summer of Love." 1968 was a year marred by violence, riots and assassinations along with the heightening of the conflict in Vietnam. The cinema of the time, of course, reacted accordingly, solidifying "the age of Saturn where violence and death reign."[25] The peaceful hippie commune of 1969's Easy Rider(dir D Hopper, 1969) provided a contemporary cinematic influence on The Hills Have Eyes. This portrayal, however, was a strong juxtaposition to the real life commune dubbed "The Family," led by the infamous activist Charles Manson. At the time, they were involved in the brutal murder of Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski's wife. Again, even the title "the Family" leads us to question the moral order these films conveyed to a potentially gullible public. Robin Wood has argued that the American Horror movie is in fact...
inherently familial - an alternative definition of those 'good old values' that the Regan administration and the 1980's Hollywood cinema are trying to convince us are still capable of reaffirmation.[26]


The threat in the Hills Have Eyes is not an external one- it is one that is indigenous to America , as Rodowick says,"the threat is a product of white society[27]"- one that threatens the Carters way of life internally. The threat in the film is...
...omnipresent in the textual landscape [...] harsh and primeval, the desert is literally a testing range which incorporates and entraps the self enclosed, self sustaining space of bourgeois domesticity represented by the Carters' trailer.[28] The sour taste this leaves in the American audience member's mouth is that
the idea that the home, as it appears in Straw Dogs(dir S Peckenpah, 1971) and Night of the Living Dead, is no longer a place of refuge.[29]
Rape, fear of rape and its depiction was another taboo topic that reared its ugly head post 1968 cinema. Rosemary's Baby portrays fear of rape by the devil, Deliverance shows scenes where a member of a doomed white water rafting expedition is lost and subject to rape and torture from a local mountain man. I Spit On Your Grave(dir Zarchi 1978) (another controversial rape revenge thriller) goes hand in hand with Craven's The Last House on the Left, which deals with a parent's revenge for the rape of his child. The violence in The Hills Have Eyes is centered around that of women; that is to say "all violence (within the film) is predominantly against women."[30] Rodowick points out that
if the violence in the film seems gratuitous, excessive and meaningless in any commercial cinema, then this is due in part to the passive roles delegated to them in most narrative structures. Violence is meaningful for men because it is the struggle over women.[31]
Rape here, therefore, largely represents a branch of violence that was oppressive of women during this period (with the exception of the film Deliverance dir J Boorman 1972 ). Rape as a cinematic theme, is a form of sexual violence which relates directly to the escalation of violence and aggression present in American society at the time.
Cannabalism is another recurring theme in Amercian cinema of the time that appears in The Hills Have Eyes. Cannibalism also appeared in Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which I have mentioned above for their extreme use of violence. Wood observes that throughout the horror genre cannibalism functions as a means aggression or survival- within the context of The Hills Have Eyes, it is a means for the family to sustain itself. The younger generation, in this case the baby in the Carter family, are being devoured by the old. Cannibalism, according to Wood, "represents the ultimate in possessiveness, hence the logical end of human relations under capitalism."[32] The idea of cannibalism is one that is frightening and repulsive in the eyes of civilized western society. It represents a full breakdown of moral and social order, hence its shock value. The biggest shock factor within this motion picture is that the events in this film occur at home, within the American heartland, portraying an American white-bread family resorting to (now alien) primitive instincts such as using their dead mother as bait - ultimately, Darwin's theory in action. The Christian ethic of respect for the dead must be removed in order for the 'civilized' family to survive. This can be trying for an American audience, where there is such a strong emphasis placed on social order and Christian values. The Hills Have Eyes represents a confluence of many strains of cinematic development in the American Horror genre of the 1970's, but also, and possibly more importantly, bridging the gap between modern day horror film and earlier examples. The direct influence of this era of horror movies is still felt today and it is just as disturbing as ever. In this era of horror film, The Hills Have Eyes has explored issues in cinema such as cannibalism, the family, issues of violence, rape, women, revenge, morality and much more. While every film has its flaws, The Hills Have Eyes represents a coming of age of the American horror film in an extremely volatile decade. The Hills Have Eyes represents not only a turbulent time for American society, but an important stepping stone for the American horror film.


Bibliography
Wood Robin Hollywood; From Vietnam to Regan (New York, Columbia University Press 1986 Rodowick David N The Enemy Within: The Economy of Violence in The Hills Have pp 321 - 330 Eyes in the Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film ed Barry Keith Grant (London Scarecrow Press, 1984) Wells Paul, The Horror Genre: From Beelzebub to Blair Witch (London, Wallflower Press, 2000) Doherty Thomas Pre Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930 - 1934 (New York, Columbia University Press, 2003) Schneider Steven Jay Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud's worst nightmare ( Cambridge University Press 2004)
Biskind Peter, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. (Bloomsbury Publishing Plc London 1998) Kaminsky, Stuart M American Film Genres (Nelson-Hall Inc Publishers Chicago, 1985)
Waller Gregory A , American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.