![]() ![]() They have homes and roofs over their head in an abandoned town set up for nuclear test detonations by the government. ![]() Of course, these mutants are not cave dwellers living on the fringes. The trailer raid in the original sees the family focused on raiding it for supplies, while Aja’s mutants are less concerned with supplies than they are assaulting the Carters. In the original, it’s an accident that strands the Carter family, while in the remake the mutants lay out road spikes. Sadism in horror movies evolves naturally, and both The Hills Have Eyes pressed against the limits of the R-rating, but the remake still takes things up a notch. It’s also indicative of the broader difference between the bad guys in the original and the remake in that Aja’s mutants are more sadistic, and more organized than the family in Craven’s film. Somehow, in a movie full of blood splatter, people eating, immolation, and mutation by radiation, this one scene feels the most uncomfortable. Yes, cannibalism and dog eating is gross enough for your average horror fan, but the rape of the teenage daughter Brenda somehow plays even more obscene in the remake while Brenda’s big sister Lynn, a nursing mother, has her shirt ripped off by another one of the other mutants so he can feed on breast milk. It’s like comparing the look of the Klingons of the original Star Trek series to how they appeared in later movies and TV shows.Īja also lets his bad guys to become somehow more uncomfortably gross. Craven’s crew did what they could with wigs, and furs, and funky teeth, not to mention Michael Berryman’s own natural physicality, but Nicotero and his team went wild with all manner of deformities and maladies, largely created with make-up with some occasional CG assistance. So the big difference in the remake is that the dessert dwellers to whom the titular eyes in the hill belong are enhanced and given more peculiar character traits thanks to modern prosthetics. “Blessed (or cursed) by having only so much money to go around, Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes has a visceral, almost snuff film kind of quality.” On the remake scale, Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes is probably closer to Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho than Marcus Nispel’s one-shot remix of the first three chapters of Friday the 13th. With a budget 12 times higher than Craven’s, even after inflation is factored in, Aja had a lot more room to play in terms of make-up, explosions, stunt work, and top of the line gore courtesy of Walking Dead maestro Greg Nicotero, so it’s interesting to watch him hem so closely to Craven’s original story. This would be the challenge for Alexandre Aja some 30 years later. The effects aren’t elaborate, and no stunt performers on set meant Craven couldn’t put the actors in any kind of real danger so the violence is always up close and intimate POV shorts, frenzied editing and an appropriately erratic score by Don Peake do as much, if not more, to leave you unsettled than buckets of blood and faux dismemberment. Both films play off the idea that dark stuff lurks for people brave enough (or foolish enough) to get off the main road, and both play off the vulnerability of isolation.īlessed (or cursed) by having only so much money to go around, Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes has a visceral, almost snuff film kind of quality. The low budget original, and its glossy 2006 remake, both follow an extended family on a long drive to California through a rugged and desolate desert, and their subsequent encounter with an area family with cannibalistic tendancies. Under the theme of vacations gone bad, there can be no better example than Wes Craven’s 1977 classic The Hills Have Eyes. But sometimes vacations don’t go according to plan, and the movies remind us to be weary of gas station owners in the middle of nowhere that encourage us go off the beaten road. In ye olden (pre-pandemic) days, March Break sometimes meant piling into the family car and heading away to parts warm and familiar, a place where the family can relax and recharge together in all their loving dysfunction. In the spirit of our March Break theme this month on Nightmare on Film Street, let us take a moment to think about the family vacation.
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