From his origins Wes Craven (1939-2015) seemed the most unlikely of men to become one of the most famous directors and influencers in the horror film world - and yet the more you delve into his background, the more it makes sense. Craven had been raised in a strict Baptist church setting in Cleveland, Ohio to lower-middle class parents who divorced when he was very young. The repression and denial of darker impulses as well as images of Satan as the purveyor of punishment for sin haunted him from a very early age. Later in life, in a 1990 interview with Michael Banka for
Cineaste magazine, he expressed regret that he had earlier described the church's impact on his formative years, claiming that "...religion is a normal part of a lot of Americans' lives and I've never felt the need to deal specifically with it in my movies". And yet his upbringing informed preoccupations and imagery in his work that deal very much with social anxieties and how delicate social fabric is, how easily the tension within groups can be tested to breaking point. The family under siege in
The Hills Have Eyes (1977), the forbidding Hittite community in
Deadly Blessing (1981) and even the vigilantes who gather to kill the paedophile Freddy Kreuger as the inciting incident in A
Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) all attempt to maintain a veneer of civilisation while forces conspire to bring our their primitive uncontrolled urges to defend what they believe in.
An event that also had a profound effect on the eleven year-old Craven's psyche was when he awakened from a doze in his family's second-floor apartment to look down at the street where a strange man in a hat and overcoat looked up at him. The man appeared to make a move to enter their building, at which the terrified Craven woke his brother and they burst out of the apartment armed with a baseball bat to find he had vanished. Though dismissing him as a harmless drunken bum, the future creator of Freddy Krueger never forgot the potential that an adult could have to amuse himself terrorising vulnerable children.
Craven's first career as a university professor of Humanities suited his demeanour of the very quiet, academic gentleman - an air that he seems never to have lost according to the actors interviewed from
The Hills Have Eyes. However, when his department chairman at Clarkson College insisted he should apply himself to a PhD or face being fired, he took the advice of his peers and decided that arduous road was not for him.
Working in film was what really appealed to Craven; he had gained a new zealot's love for the medium only in adulthood because until then his religion forbade all but the most innocent of cinema-going. Till he went to college the only movies he was permitted to see were made by Disney. Suddenly in his undergraduate days he was exposed to the intoxication of the French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) amongst other works in the heady counter-cultural period of the late 1960s. Hooking up as an editor with producer Sean S. Cunningham who needed help with profitable soft-core porn films, they realised that horror was a genre that could be equally lucrative. This led to Craven's directorial debut in 1972 with
Last House on the Left (already covered in this blog). Although to my mind its exploitation of women, crudity of execution and dreadful performances disastrously mar its underlying themes, it is an important step in his development as an artist. Admirably, Craven was not afraid to graphically show violence without sanitising it, and he demonstrated from then on a willingness to deal with unsavoury real world issues even when buried as subtext under overt horror movie styling. This thoughtful, multi-layered approach could only have come from a creative soul who was familiar with the rigours of examining what is beneath the surface in the mind sciences and arts.
Producer Peter Locke urged Craven to consider making a second horror picture. The director was extremely reluctant due to the enormous disapproval his first film garnered wherever he went - even at dinner parties. No-one could separate the man from the material. It was only financial desperation that forced him to accept the offer. Craven's debut was produced for a budget of around $90,000 which is a remarkable physical achievement. I'll concede. This sophomore project would eventually be completed at a cost of around $350,000 which was very close to that of John Carpenter's
Halloween (1978). However, Carpenter's masterpiece was lensed nestled in the creature comforts of suburbia. Craven's crew was heading for the grim hardship of weeks in the unforgiving Mojave Desert. What better location he reasoned for a return to the theme of primitive nature eventually revealing primitive mankind when pushed to the forefront by extreme pressure?
The Hills Have Eyes shares a very similar plot to
Last House on the Left but is a much better film, made by more experienced talents in every department and a director who was growing in skill at putting a vision on screen that wasn't obscured by just pandering to the lowest level of prurient exploitation. Here, the action is centred around a white bread, close-knit middle class family whose motor home breaks down deep in the wind-whipped desert. They then find themselves stranded and preyed upon by what is essentially their flip-side: a gruesome feral family of homicidal modern-day cannibals so depraved that they prize the civilised family's new born baby as 'powerful food'. The inspiration for these gibbering gut-munchers came from the legend of Sawney Bean, the likely fictional tale of a sixteenth century Scottish clan of incestuous cannibals who for years lured their victims to their cave to be consumed until a huge manhunt led to their capture and equally appalling torture and executions. The irony of the accusers using the same violence in punishment as the criminals did in murder was not lost on Craven when constructing motivation within his screenplay
The cast of both camps give much stronger performances than the motley collection in
Last House. The cannibal commune, named after planets, include Papa Jupiter, (a splendidly gravel-voiced, snarling James Whitworth); Mercury (a short-lived cameo for Locke); Lance Gordon's suitably warlike permed and buck-toothed Mars, (an amusing echo of Michael Bentine's mad professor persona from
The Goon Show) and Ruby, the lesser evil token female (Janus Blythe, who already had genre credits in De Palma's
Phantom of the Paradise in 1974 and featured also in 1977's
The Incredible Melting Man. The most memorable is of course the unmistakable bald, striking figure of Michael Berryman as Pluto. In real life the bearer of twenty-six birth defects including a malformed skull, and a much-liked gentility of personality, Berryman went on to convert his unfortunate beginnings into a long, lucrative career in horror for which he was always grateful to Craven. Here he is unsettling whilst earning to a dose of sympathy as the bullied overgrown child of the flesh-eating bunch.
Meanwhile, the civilised family of parents and adult children are weakened by Robert Houston's whiny, not always convincing Bobby who bears a passing resemblance to a sunny Mark Hamill. He later appears in the sequel but found his true metier as a documentary director, most notably of the Oscar-winning short
Mighty Times: The Children's March (2005). The strongest player in the deck is Dee Wallace, a horror cult fan favourite from later classics like Joe Dante's
The Howling (1981) and
Cujo (1983). Her high-voltage nerviness gives her scenes an edgy credibility. She was justifiably proud of the fulfilled promise of her early role in
The Hills Have Eyes - according to IMDb, she has racked up
11 credits in 2019 alone.
Honourable mention should also go to John Steadman's grizzled gas station owner Fred, the father of Papa Jupiter. He channels a hard-bitten, energetic bitterness at having innocently spawned this constellation of psychopaths.
The actual shooting conditions often felt as brutal as the events on screen; indeed, Houston recalled that the cast's physical suffering during filming mirrored that of their characters. The desert temperature soared to one hundred and twenty degrees in the day and dropped to the thirties by night, so they were either boiling with dehydration or freezing. This probably added to some veracity on film, along with an effective documentary feel like that of the superior
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). In fact the set decorator Bob Burns worked on both films and relished bringing his van of 'kit' to augment the rocky landscape with those touches of human skin etc that garnish the home of any self-respecting anthropophagus and his brood.
The last act of the film works well as pretty much full-on action as the 'advanced' survivors gradually regress into admittedly quite ingenious primitives: once Susan Lanier's Brenda stops her grating, hysterical shrieking, she retools their car wheel as a spindle to turn a cable that drags Papa Jupiter toward his eventual demise. This follows Brenda and Bobby luring him using their dead mother as bait (Surely Craven could no longer be bemused by his unpopularity over the canapes now!)
The end is a little too abruptly with a red-filtered, isolated freeze-frame of Doug as he finishes relentlessly stabbing Mars to death. The Anchor Bay two-disc DVD edition contains an alternate ending whereby the murders of Jupiter and Mars are reversed, followed by the three survivors joining hands and walking away. Given the choice, I'd rather go with the sudden end.
The Hills Have Eyes opened in sixty cinemas in Los Angeles, half of which catered to drive-in audiences. The good news for Craven was that the resulting $250,000 in just its opening fortnight, coupled with $150,000 from its San Diego release put the movie into the black almost immediately. Though he might have felt some ambivalence about his defined place in the industry, Wes Craven's name, though controversial, was beginning to be a brand. It wouldn't be long before his singular point of view forged the first of two colossally successful franchises...
