Burns’s props he’d designed for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.ġ1. Wes Craven says that The Hills Have Eyes was shot on cameras rented from a notorious California pornographer.ġ2. The film was mostly shot in the Nevada desert, where temperatures could reach 120 in the day and plunge to the 30s at night. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Influence The vastness and isolation of the desert makes it an ideal location for a horror movie.Ĩ. As with Tobe Hooper’s 1974 horror classic, The Hills Have Eyes involves a normal group of people who get sidetracked in the desert Southwest and are then forced to endure unimaginable horrors from a group of deranged locals.ĩ. Craven was a huge fan of Texas Chain Saw Massacreand said that his movie was in part a homage to it.ġ0. Many of the props in the family’s cave were from art director Robert A. The movie tested best with the title The Hills Have Eyes, a title that Craven disliked at first.ħ. Alternately released as: Hill of Terror (Mexico and Venezuela), The Hill of Cursed Eyes (Argentina), Gang of Sadists (Brazil), The Eyes of the Night (Finland), Hill of Bloody Eyes (Germany), The Beasts (Greece), Eyes in the Night (Sweden), Beasts Must Die (Norway), Wild and Deadly (Romania). In the original script, the baby was stolen for a religious ritual instead of being eaten.Ħ. Craven’s original title was Blood Relations: The Sun Wars. The producer disliked the title. This is why, in the film, the Carter family becomes just as vicious as their tormenters.ĥ. The film was originally going to be set in a forest in 1994, and most of the cannibals were teenagers. 18th century artwork depicting Swney Bean, a real life cannibal from the 1400s.ģ. While researching “terrible things” at the New York Public Library, Craven came across the legend of Sawney Bean, who was the patriarch of a wild clan of Scottish cannibals who murdered people throughout the early 1400s.Ĥ. Craven was fascinated by the fact that when Scotland’s King James ordered the capture, torture, and execution of Sawney Bean and his clan, the crown’s violence was at least as cruel and brutal as that of the Bean clan. He decided to write a movie based on that feeling of helplessness. ![]() They mocked him and said they could kill him, toss his cadaver in a nearby salt mine, and no one would know or care. After three locals shot an arrow past his head and insulted him, Craven threatened a lawsuit. Locke’s wife was performing in Las Vegas at the time, and he encouraged Craven to develop a horror movie based in the desert.Ģ. Craven says that his screenplay was at least partly inspired by an incident that occurred while he and his wife were motorcycling through a small Nevada town. Desperately in need of money, he agreed to producer Peter Locke’s request to write a horror film. The Folk Scottish Cannibals Primitive inbred desert mountain-dwellers terrorize a modern family.ġ. After directing The Last House on the Left in 1972, director Wes Craven tried making non-horror films with no success. Here are thirty facts about Wes Craven’s story of a family that must fight for its life against a pack of demented desert cannibals. Trapped in the desert, the Carter family prays for survival. The theme would play out in other horror films such as Psycho, Spider Baby, Motor Psycho, and No Country for Old Men, but few have done it as memorably or as terrifyingly as The Hills Have Eyes. ![]() ![]() The trope of normal city-dwellers who find madness out in the rural desert is a common one in folk horror, and it taps into a broader literary and cultural theme of city urbanity versus the untamed countryside, of present versus past, of modernity versus tradition. When you stare at the hills, they stare back at you. They must fight or die-and even if they fight, it’s likely they will die, anyway. They are then slowly preyed upon by a family of savage, inbred cannibals from the nearby mountains. The Hills Have Eyes is a classic 1977 horror film by writer/director Wes Craven that tells the story of a normal American family-mom, dad, kids, and dogs-who are traveling through the Southwestern desert en route to LA when they take a shortcut through a Nevada air testing range and have an accident that leaves them stranded.
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