Director: Wes Craven
Written by: Wes Craven
Cast: Dee Wallace Stone, Michael Berryman, Robert Houston

Year / Country: 1977, USA
Running Time: 86 mins.

A lesser known movie by horror master Wes Craven is The Hills Have Eyes, the shocking account of a family (the Carters) trapped in the desert and attacked by a family of cannibals. It reminds very much of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, both in story as in creepy execution.

Craven builds the tension up steadily. The cannibals are not seen for a long time (only heard) and then, during the nighttime, they appear and deliver a tremendous blow to the Carter family. Afterwards, the surviving Carters strike back and eventually become as brutal as their attackers when they seek revenge.

The movie is based on the legend of Sawney Beane and his family, a feral clan who inhabited and roamed the highlands of Scotland’s East Lothian County, near Edinburgh, in the early 1400s. They captured, tormented and ate several transients. They were eventually captured on the order of Scotland’s King James and brutally executed without a trial, inspiring the aspect of the film that the Carters become bloodthirsty themselves.

This is only Craven’s third movie after the horror movie The Last House On the Left (1972) and The Fireworks Woman (1975), an adult movie he directed under the alias Abe Snake. The Hills Have Eyes is very raw and contains violence that is still shocking by today’s standard. Some of Craven’s fans even say it is his best movie. It might just be true.

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Biography: Wes Craven (1940, Cleveland – 2015, Los Angeles) is the maker of a number of classic, genre bending horror films. The debut was the gruesome The Last House On the Left in 1972. In 1984 he reinvented the youth horror genre with A Nightmare on Elm Street, which became a genre classic and a popular horror franchise. Twelve years later, he again created a commercial and critical success with Scream. This film also spawned many sequels, three of them directed by Craven and all successful. Craven also occasionally worked within other genres, such as drama/music with Music of the Heart in 1999.

Filmography (a selection): The Last House on the Left (1972) / The Hills Have Eyes (1977) / Deadly Blessing (1981) / Swamp Thing (1982) / A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) / The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1985) / The Twilight Zone (1985-86, TV-episodes) / The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) / Shocker (1989) / The People Under the Stairs (1991) / New Nightmare (1994) / Vampire in Brooklyn (1995) / Scream (1996) / Scream 2 (1997) / Music of the Heart (1999) / Scream 3 (2000) / Cursed (2005) / Red Eye (2005) / Paris, je t’aime (2006, segment: ‘Pere-Lachaise’) / My Soul to Take (2010) / Scream 4 (2011)