MY REVIEW

Wes Craven’s classic radioactive cannibal film The Hills Have Eyes is easily the “scariest” horror film I’ve watched so far this month. Whereas They Look Like People aimed to be unsettling and eerie more than “scary,” and Event Horizon’s gory shock tactics fell flat for me, The Hills Have Eyes combines the best of both worlds into a film that’s at turns thrilling and creepy, dreadful and grotesque.

I’m reading a book right now called Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. I haven’t made it all that far, but in the introduction, Carol Clover gives an overview of a number of critical approaches to horror film. Personally, I like looking for how films deviate from formulas, but Clover (with support from James Twitchell, author of Dreadful Pleasures) argues that formula is the attraction in many cases. Horror films perform similar functions as fairy tales and folklore; there are endless retellings with similar elements, and while details differ depending on the teller, the pleasure comes from the repetition, the repeated beats and familiar plot points, and how they are used to tell a tale with particular significance to the audience. Clover writes that, in horror as in folktale, “there is in some sense no original, no real or right text, but only variants.” As such, Twitchell recommends an “ethnological approach” to horror criticism, suggesting that critics and academics analyze horror films “as if no one individual telling really mattered,” focusing instead on tracing the migrations of horror images to audiences and then discussing why they were important enough to pass along.

This #31DaysOfHorror project is, in a sense, an ethnological approach to horror criticism. In various reviews (over the last two years, anyway, and presumably in the future this year as well) I have taken up questions of audience and circulation as well as genre and form, classifying and situating films within various subgenres as well as hypothesizing about the relevance of these subgeneric classifications to various socio-cultural movements and themes. So, while on an individual level I do think it’s interesting and worthwhile to point out what any one particular film does well, or did first, or provides exemplary subversions of, I’m also intrigued by Clover and Twitchell’s assertion that horror is best served by looking at how well each film “delivers the cliché” rather than what each film does differently.

Because The Hills Have Eyes is nothing if not exemplary of its subgenre, what I like to call “hicksploitation.” The Hills Have Eyes may not have originated some or any of the tropes common to hicksploitation films (which derive their horror from exploiting middle-class fears about lower-class white people in the American heartland). But, it uses those tropes phenomenally well.

Before I get too deep into how I interpret the film, I’ll give a quick rundown of some of the familiar elements in The Hills Have Eyes, and some of the different folklores it seems to be retelling. While it was certainly an early example of hicksploitation horror, it was by no means the first — The Texas Chain Saw Massacre came out three years earlier. And, if we’re reading the movie along Clover and Twitchell’s lines, “first” doesn’t mean much anyway; it just indicates that the film is representing something primal, something that carries resonance in American culture. More on that in a minute.

The Hills Have Eyes opens at a gas station, a familiar locale to many hicksploitation horrors. The grizzled old local who tries to warn off the travelers from impending doom is a well-worn trope at this point; Texas Chain Saw Massacre itself features an obvious example, but so does Deliverance, which, while not precisely a “horror movie,” certainly does trade in horrific goings-on perpetrated by lower-class white people out in the sticks. Since the 70s, ominous convenience-store owners or customers have featured in such films as Friday the 13th and Cabin Fever, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil and Cabin in the Woods.