Movie Review: "The Hills Have Eyes"

In her essay, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess," Linda Williams describes the three "low" or "gratuitous" genres of film: pornography, horror, and melodrama. According to Williams, these genres are considered somehow less reputable than others due to their exhibition of perceived emotional excess, not merely the narrative elements that produce these exhibitions. Traditionally, these excessive, or "gross," displays of ecstatic emotion center around the female body and its ability to elicit a response from the viewer. Perhaps the most striking of these three filmic genres is the horror, or slasher genre, because of its propensity to portray elements of excess from all three of the body genres.

A contemporary example of the excesses of horror is amply provided by Alexander Aja's The Hills Have Eyes (2007). A remake of Wes Craven's 1997 film of the same name, Aja's Hills goes above and beyond the call of duty in fulfilling its parameters as a horror film. The narrative centers around the Carter family, consisting Bob and Ethel, mother and father figure, Lynn and Brenda, daughters, Bobby, son, Doug, Lynn's husband, and Catherine, her baby. The film's central conflict arises when they are stranded in the New Mexico desert after being sent down a dead-end road into the wilderness by the sinister misdirection of a gas station attendant. Completely immobilized and cut off from civilization, they are gradually slaughtered by a band of mutants, the legacy of nuclear weapons tests.

"Gratuitous" may be a facile description of the film's excesses, but it fits like a glove; the sheer proportion of filmic time devoted to scenes depicting extreme violence, blood, and gore, at times almost defies justification. For instance, near the outset of the film, when the central conflict is established, a the gas-station attendant is depicted committing suicide with a shotgun, in an outhouse, due to the remorse of having sent so many tourists to their deaths in exchange for their possessions. The viewer is then afforded a view of his mostly-annihilated head, something resembling a pound of hamburg and teeth, heaped on the remains of a lower jaw. Reportedly, this scene is even more graphic in the film's unrated version. On the heels of this grisly scene, the father of the marooned family, Big Bob, is captured by the mutants, tied to a tree, and burned alive and screaming, for what feels like minutes, before his family's eyes.

The burning scene is important, as it coincides neatly with the elements of horror, as delineated by Linda Williams. Big Bob is the chief bastion of masculinity in the Carter family: strong, an ex-cop, sporting a full mustache, and toting a large handgun, he is the allegorical patriarch of the unit, immediately taking charge when the family is stranded. His graphic, painful, and seemingly senseless death are particularly disturbing to Bobby, his adolescent son, who throughout the film vacillates between a passive, feminine role under the protection of others, and an active, masculine role in which he is forced to offer his protection to women. Witnessing the horrific burning of his father, powerless to stop it, simultaneously serves to illustrate the helplessness and femininity of his own position, and the symbolic passing of the patriarchal mantle to Bobby.

As if this scene weren't horrific enough, the immolation of Big Bob serves as a diversion for an additional massacre, inside the family's camper. The camper massacre scene is one of the most horrifically violent, sadistic displays of excess I have had the dubious opportunity to witness. While the men are outside, but before the conflagration begins, a mutant, Pluto, sneaks into the trailer and seizes Brenda, the Carters' teenage daughter. Muffling her screams, he proceeds to caress, fondle, and rape her. At one point, to highlight the girl's helplessness and the awful irony of the situation, Doug enters the trailer to retrieve a fire extinguisher for Bob, and leaves, failing to notice the desperate Brenda or her rapist. A second mutant, Lizard, enters the trailer and shoves Pluto aside, saying that sex is reserved for "real men." Subsequently, Lynn enters the trailer and, witnessing Lizard menacing baby Catherine with a revolver, strikes him over the head with a frying pan. However, she is quickly overpowered and, seeing Catherine at gunpoint, is forced to allow Lizard to suckle her pregnant breasts. Ethel enters the trailer but is quickly shot in the stomach. In the distraction, Lynn stabs Lizard in the leg with a screwdriver, and is immediately shot in the head at point blank range. Bobby and Doug return to the scene just in time to see the mutants running into the night with the baby.

I do not wish to resort to plot summary, but I feel it was necessary to describe this particular scene in some depth, as it exemplifies the film's general depravity and overall gratuitousness. This scene, while fulfilling Williams' criteria for the horror genre, surpasses it in terms of the sexual excess it may contain. In Williams' estimation, horror films are typically driven by an underlying sexual perversion on the part of the monster, generally a repression of the normal heterosexual urge, and its outlet through unhealthy means (see Jame Gumb's tailoring of women's skin into clothes in The Silence of the Lambs).

However, it is atypical for a horror film to transcend the paranormal erotic urge and feature the actual depiction of sadistic acts. Hills actually depicts the rape of a teenage girl and the sexual molestation of a pregnant mother, on-screen. Lynn's molestation is further compounded by the fact that the mutant, really a twisted, grotesque adult male, feeds on her milk like a baby, while he holds her true baby at gunpoint. A hideous man menacing an infant with a gun, alone, would constitute an excessive scene; Aja depicts Lizard as threatening an infant, hard on the heels of a rape, while suckling the infant's mother in a sexual perversion of a mother-child relationship. Shortly thereafter, he graphically kills this maternal figure come rape victim. However, she doesn't die quickly, but rather dies a gurgling, drawn-out, agonizing death in Doug's arms, intensifying the inhumanity of her death. This scene surpasses the bounds that Williams establishes for the excesses of horror, and begins to spill over into the pornographic.

This form of pornography is what she describes as sadistic and masculine-oriented; the male body onscreen derives sexual pleasure from inflicting pain on the female body. However, the sadism in Hills differs slightly from that of most pornography, in that the female body derives no masochistic pleasure from it; it is mere rape. The scene features both the exposition of ecstatic sex (on the part of the mutants) and ecstatic violence and blood. Thus, viewers, masculine or feminine, derive no sympathetic sexual pleasure from witnessing the acts. Instead, viewers feel an extreme, horrified pathos for the female victims, and a revulsion and hatred toward the male predator. In this regard, the trailer scene does not entirely coincide with Williams' definition of (legal) pornography; neither does it fit neatly within the bounds of horror. Thus, Hills features elements of both.

Hills also adheres to the traditional horror element of vacillating between empowering and victimizing women. In the first half of the film, women are entirely victimized and helpless, serving as subjects of rape and murder in order to intensify the viewer's sense of pathos for the Carters. When they do assume phallic power (i.e. Lynn's striking Lizard with a frying pan, or more conspicuously, stabbing him with a screwdriver), they are promptly punished. Female attempts at empowerment in the film's early stages are largely ineffectual, as well: Lynn's choice of weapons, and the dismisssble effect they have on her attacker highlight her powerlessness, even when masculinized by action.

This trend of women's ineffectualness is consistent throughout the remainder of the film, which portrays Brenda, the only remaining Carter female, as largely hysterical and panic-stricken. There are only two arguable exceptions: near the end of the film, Brenda finishes off an already dying and immobilized mutant, Papa Jupiter, with an ice pick, another object of phallic power. However, Jupiter is already mortally wounded and immobilized, posing no real threat. A second manifestation of female efficacy is observed when Ruby, a mutant girl sympathetic to the Carters, saves Doug's life by plunging herself over a cliff in order to kill Lizard. This scene does empower Ruby, a female, but only through the means of guile (betrayal of Lizard) and self-sacrifice, a convention common to female characters. Even the Carters' dogs adhere to the gender stereotype; the only dog to survive, out of the two, is Beast. Beauty is quickly killed. Beast, however, plays in integral role in the family's survival, singe-handedly killing two mutants. Thus, Hills adheres almost perfectly the horror convention of the female as victim, affirming Williams' anatomy of Body Genres.

During my viewing of The Hills Have Eyes, I truly felt victimized. During and immediately after viewing the massacre in the trailer, I had a strong urge to leave the theater; one or two other viewers actually did. The strong sense of revulsion, bordering on nausea, stemmed largely from the film's intended sympathy with the victims; according to Carol J. Clover, "victim = audience" (Prince, 159). The body genres depend and thrive on this visceral pathos. However, watching the characters I had come to sympathize with so brutally treated, I felt my sensibilities were abused; to depict such horror seemed inhumane, not merely to the characters on the screen. However, I found myself unable to leave, drawn in a perverse way to the carnage. The old adage, "it was like a train wreck," comes to mind. However, paramount to the voyeuristic urge was the desire for vindication; to put it bluntly, I desired to see complete and bloody revenge enacted on the mutants, a desire the film Aja banks on, and readily fulfills.

Alexandre Aja's The Hills Have Eyes is a disturbing dive into the darkest recesses of the human psyche. Its treatment of sexuality, particularly in depicting the rape of female victims, causes it to occupy a cross-genre position in Linda Williams' Body Genres, a film featuring both horror and semi-pornographic content. Bearing this in mind, it is easy to understand why The Hills Have Eyes evokes such revulsion and disgust from so many viewers, and why it has secured itself a dubious but lasting legacy in horror movie fame.

Works Cited

Miller, Toby and Stam, Robert. Film and Theory: An Anthology. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

Prince, Stephen. Screening Violence. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000.