The Hills Are Alive, With the Sound of Mutants: A Review of The Hills Have Eyes

by June Pulliam

05/02/2006

The Hills Have Eyes, 2006, Alexandra Aja, Director

Alexandra Aja’s remake of Wes Craven’s 1977 film The Hills Have Eyes is reasonably faithful to the original . . .  perhaps too faithful.  Allow me to explain.  I am a good deal older than the average horror movie-goer. Not only did I see the original Hills in a theater when it was first released, but I have seen a good many horror films since then, and so have built up quite a knowledge about the rules of the genre, rules that the allegedly self-referential Scream doesn’t even begin to deal with. Alas, my own personal body of knowledge—combined with the fact of this film being a remake—made events entirely too predictable.

For those of you who haven’t seen Hills, let me give you a brief synopsis of the plot:  An extended family is traveling through the desert in a motor home when their vehicles are sabotaged by a family of mutants who live in the hills. The mutants, who are for some inexplicable reason bent on mayhem towards anyone not of their tribe, terrorize the family. There’s a lot of bloodshed, and some from each side do not survive the encounter.

When Craven made this film in 1977, some of the plot was already the stuff of horror cliché; after all, remote locations always contain savage Others bent on terrorizing hapless city folk, who they see as people who look funny, have questionable family values, are not to be trusted, etc. When Aja remakes this film nearly thirty years later, he adds even more clichés to the plot, and updates the gore a bit too.  In Craven’s version, the curiously deformed hill folk sprang from the misbegotten child of Fred, a crusty old gas station proprietor who lives alone in the middle of the desert. In 1929, all looked bright for Fred and his wife, who had given him a baby girl two years previous and was currently with child. But for some unknown reason, she is impregnated with a demon of sorts. The 20 lb. child makes his entrance into the world by coming from his mother’s birth canal sideways, nearly splitting her apart. The unusually large baby, hideous and covered with hair, grows to become an even larger child whose malicious actions rival those of other cinematic monster children.  Chickens have their heads bitten off. The dog ends up in the well. One day, Fred returns from a trip to town to discover that his son has burned down the house, killing his wife and daughter. Certain that his son is the cause, Fred splits his skull with a tire iron and leaves his son in the desert hills to die. But of course, he doesn’t die. He thrives. Upon reaching sexual maturity, he steals a prostitute and sires his own misbegotten clan on her loins. The family of savages roams the hills, looking for food and robbing the occasional human foolish enough to leave the interstate.

In an attempt to add more continuity to Craven’s original story, Aja’s version reaches back to the 1950s for yet another horror film cliché—radiation. In some horror, radiation is a force so powerful and inexplicable that it has supernatural powers. In the 1950s, radiation caused men to shrink and women to tower over cities, and in the late 1960s, it might have also been responsible for George Romero’s epidemic of zombies that brings to a halt civilization as we know it. Aja plays with this cliché in the first five minutes of the film when a caption before the movie tells us about government tests with radiation that were performed in the desert inhabited by a community of miners who refused to leave their homes and so had horribly mutated children. From here, he cuts to either an old ad, or a parody of one, for the wonders of domestic technology. A smiling modern 1950s housewife exclaims that her cake is ready. She then removes from a phantom oven a completed cake that has even been frosted and decorated with candles that suddenly light of their own volition. The ad captures the zeitgeist of the 1950s, as seen through advertising—better living through a technology that is so powerful that it is almost magical. Soon we will learn that this modern technology has a very dark side as well since it resulted in a tribe of hideously mutated people who prowl this desert wasteland for prey.

The camera then cuts to another scene, which has become yet another horror film trope—the deserted gas station. Like others of its ilk, this building is a classic of 1950s architecture, now fallen into picturesque disrepair, and small details of the scene from the original have been preserved. Those conversant with the genre of horror film already know that nothing good lurks inside, and that the hapless traveler should have never gotten off the beaten path, perhaps should have done something more modern still, such as fly.

And from here everything gets still more predictable.

Aja updates the original by attempting to humanize the characters who will be terrorized by the hill folk—they are all slightly less two-dimensional, and Big Bob doesn’t go off on a racist tirade about the various ethnic groups who shot at him while he was a police officer—but he remains relatively faithful to how each family member is dispatched. Nonetheless, you wouldn’t necessarily have had to seen the original to know what’s coming since each shot is quite predictable. And then there are the annoying exposition scenes.  In one of the earlier of these, Big Bob, the family patriarch, has returned to the gas station in search of assistance for his family, who is now stranded in the desert after the mutants have caused them to wreck their vehicle. Unable to locate the station’s proprietor, Big Bob embarks on some snooping. A sweep of his flashlight reveals a bulletin board above a desk. Yellowed clippings pinned here tell of the story of the miners who had worked and lived here for several generations, and who refused to leave when the government decided to make it into a test bomb site. After the blasts, the miners, who had taken refuge in the shafts while the testing took place, began to give birth to mutated children. It’s certainly convenient to stumble upon this much information in one central location.

Still another annoying exposition scene occurs later, when another member of the family encounters perhaps the most horrifically deformed of all the hill folk. He is a white, bloated creature who spends his days overflowing an old baby stroller. His head is so grotesquely oversized for his body that hydrocephaly doesn’t even begin to describe his condition. Perhaps macrocephaly would be a better term. He seems to be a white trash version of John Merrick, the Elephant Man. This creature, nevertheless, possesses the gift of intelligible speech (something many of the other hill folk who aren’t so magnificently deformed do not possess), and reveals to us while he has never been out of this room, the others are planning on killing the family baby. How he knows the intentions of the others is not entirely clear. It’s all too convenient.

And then some scenes of violence just strain credulity, even in a fictional universe where we are to accept that radiation has endowed some people with unusual powers of recuperation. I am willing to accept, for the sake of argument, that a mutant can, for example, survive being stabbed through the stomach with a broken baseball bat, and that he can even just pull it out of his body as if it were no more than a really bad splinter, and then go on to chase someone through hundred degree heat. But how can non mutant characters be able to do things such as live for several hours after being gut shot with a .45 and hold a lucid conversation, or not go into shock after having a finger cut off? Are we to presume that the fight/flight response has similarly endowed some of these people with superhuman powers? That’s not clear.

However, I am still not prepared to put Aja on my infamous list of directors who owe me money, and here’s why: In spite of serious problems with the plot, there is some important visual storytelling going on which constitutes another, bigger narrative about radiation and class and state power that is not contained by the plot itself. As I’ve already mentioned, the film begins with a 1950s television commercial vaguely touting the wonders of technology. This moment is fairly meaningless if not also thought of in context with later images of the town used by the government for nuclear testing. We’ve all seen this town either from the actual footage shot by the government during the test, or reconstructed and represented in other films such as Kalifornia. The before scenes show cheerful modern houses inhabited by eerily smiling mannequins which are soon to be blasted with a nuclear wind; the after shows those same houses littered with broken glass, the mannequins still smiling but variously melted or encrusted with soot.

In Aja’s Hills, the mutants inhabit this apocalyptic simulacrum of suburbia. It’s not clear if this rag-tag collection of buildings was originally the homes of the miners and were seized by the government for their tests, or if the miners just decided that their own post-blast irradiated state would make them uniquely suited to inhabit the actual dwellings used for nuclear experiments. But there is something so appropriate, visually anyway, of the mutants’ conducting their daily lives among these ruins, complete with blasted mannequins. The mise en scene speaks volumes about how large forces such as government or global capitalism manipulate the individual to their own ends. The mannequins, thoughtlessly deformed by the government experiment and now abandoned, are really not that different from the mutants who have been similarly marred and discarded by the government and mainstream culture. And in this way the mutants are yet another trope of horror film.

Ultimately, the mutants aren’t that different from other families in horror cinema, such as the Hewitts from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, who have been horribly distorted by much larger economic forces. Each family looses its livelihood as a result of larger forces, and as a result, loses its place within humanity as well. The mutants and the Hewitts, finally, have much in common with other very real groups of people—the homeless, poor people displaced by Katrina and screwed by FEMA come to mind—who have lost their places due to forces a thousand times greater than themselves, and as a result have been rendered invisible. Only in genres such as horror can they be seen once again, even if only in distorted, monstrous form. So when the very mainstream Carter family travels through the desert in that quintessential modern symbol of Western hubris—an SUV topped with an American flag—they are fated to have a nasty encounter with that which is not normally seen. 

The visual imagery of Aja’s film taps into one of the major Ur-plots of horror. Alas, one would have to look closely to find this vein, which itself is nearly rendered invisible by some predictable script writing and a director who insists on sticking too faithfully to the original story, reproducing−even magnifying all its flaws.