Episode 141. Blood Relations: The Hills Have Eyes (1977 & 2006)

You've got to stay on the main road now, you hear? Stay on the main road!

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Faculty of Horror podcasting from the horrid halls of academia. I'm Alex West with Andrea Subisati. And it's summer. It's summertime. It's hot. It's sticky. Dante's hot and sticky. He's very furry. I'm sure he's very uncomfortable. But what better dog to take on a road trip? Exactly. We are back in the studio after our trip to Salem. We took another trip recently, as our patrons will know about. Everything's bump-a-lumpin' over on the Patreon.

But today we are going to talk about a horror film that is pretty entrenched in the annals of American horror. It's kind of one that I figured we'd get to eventually. And that film is The Hills Have Eyes. It's in some ways a really important film, but also the title is so evocative. It's so good. I feel like the title has almost transcended the horror genre, so it's become kind of a figure of speech in so many ways. So it was really fun.

to get to revisit these films. I haven't seen them in a really long time. And I had some pleasant surprises. I had some less pleasant surprises based on my memory of them. And it really got me thinking about the kind of... wide open spaces that we're always tempted to go to and like the idea of a road trip and the idea of a road trip with family and then what does family mean and who do you like let die first I have a list Do you? Oh, I have like a ranked choice list. That's fucked up. Yeah.

can be patreon content here which ones of alex's family she would let die first yeah we've got to put that behind a paywall because i don't know about your family but mine's cheap they wouldn't want to know anyway but yeah these are films that we're going

to be talking about the 1977 Wes Craven original as well as the remake, which they're very similar, but they're also very, very different. And I don't know about you, Alex, but The Hills Have Eyes to me was always like, what you see is what you get. in terms of the poster. You know, you've got Michael Berryman front and center. You probably know, even if you haven't seen it, that this is about, you know, an American family running afoul of cannibals out in the desert.

It's got a little bit of Texas Chainsaw Massacre energy. It's got that exploitation energy of the 70s, but it also has that subversive streak of the films that were coming out a la Romero, Carpenter of that time. And, you know, I think they aged really well. Yeah. At least the first one. Yeah, definitely the first one.

And I mean, Craven kind of makes no bones about what he's trying to do. Like he's not trying to hide the meaning and message of these films behind an obscure metaphor. He wants us as an audience to understand what he's trying to say. and to be challenged by it and to grapple with it and to think about it. And in some ways, that makes our jobs doing this podcast really easy. In some other ways, it makes it trickier.

But I think we have some really interesting and different things to say about it. Well, why don't we get into it? Here's 1977's The Hills Have Eyes. They wanted to see something different, but something different saw them first. The Hills Have Eyes. Mister, don't take your family back in that area. The silver has been gone for 40 years now. There's nothing back in there but animals. A lot. The old creep told you not to get off the road.

began as a vacation, ended as a nightmare. I'll be hell to pay now. What the hell was that? She thought she knew what the world was all about. But nothing prepared her for this. The hills have eyes. A mother fighting for her child loses it in the worst possible way. I hit him with a tire iron and I spit his face wide open. That was a bad mistake. I come back for you later, girly. Why are you doing this?

The story of an American family who lost everything except the will to survive. Murdered. Raped. Burned, but not beaten. The Hills Have Eyes. The story of one family's refusal to die. I'm going to get those animals. The hills have eyes. A night of terror. A day of vengeance where no one was spared. No one. Kill the babes! Kill me! They fought back. Anything was a weapon. A family dog to the family car. It's working! The Hills Have Eyes. The most shocking, terrifying film...

you will ever see by Wes Craven, writer and director of The Last House on the Left. The hills have eyes. The lucky ones died first.

On their way to California, the Carter family passes through the Nevada desert. They stop at a gas station where Fred, the proprietor, tells them to stick to the main roads, but informs them of a more scenic route if they go through some of the hillier areas. Doctors decide to take the detour, but soon find they've fallen into the trap of the Jupiter clan who lives in the hills, killing and eating passersby and taking their belongings.

The patriarch of the Carter family, Bob, goes back to the gas station where he encounters a distraught Fred, who tells him the backstory of Jupiter and his family. Fred dies and Bob is captured by Jupiter, who crucifies and lights him on fire to draw out. his family and create chaos. From there, it's an all-out battle between the two families for survival with only a few making it to the end.

Yeah. So that's the basic premise of both films. Uh-huh. But now I want to talk about the differentiators between the original and then the 2006 remake. Yes, because on the one hand, it's almost beat for beat in terms of what happens, but tonally.

It's completely different. Yeah. And so Wes Craven's 1977 film, you know, you get into a little bit of like the Halloween. element of it. It's like they're all related. But Fred, the proprietor of the gas station, is Jupiter's father. And he was this kind of huge, wily, Paul Bunyan-esque child who was evil and chaotic.

and basically fred ran him into the hills and wanted him to just die there but he didn't die and instead he kind of amassed this family he took a sex worker and has been like raping her and like she's giving

to these children and everyone's like kind of fucked up and it's all a big old mess. Now in 2006, which is the Alex Aja remake, they are mutants. Mutants. There has to be a reason other than evil. So these are mutants due to nuclear radiation. This is really front and center from the very opening of the film where they're like, the American government did this and this and this and that. And I really get this sense.

that the remake was, you know, this was Alex Aja's English language debut, having made his new French extremity splash. You've got Greg Nicotero on board, so the special effects are amazing. I think he even performs as one of the mutants throughout. asthmat suits, radiation.

That backdrop doesn't actually change things fundamentally. I feel like it makes the, like the violence is a lot splatterier and more glorious. But overall, this is fundamentally a... tale of these families and you know how they're interacting with the american dream absolutely and i you know the remake is very much part of that early aughts remake horror boom like the platinum dunes of it all and apparently craven

after seeing the success of Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake and a couple of the other ones was like, let's do one of mine. Let's get some of those dollars coming into the old Craven household. And so he was like really a big proponent of making this happen.

And, you know, in thinking about it, you know, 77, you're looking at, it's obviously an indie film. It's Wes Craven's second film, as Andrea already said. But it's a much smaller production. And I think in many ways it speaks so much more to the time. Whereas as you get into... 2006, we're into like...

Got the internet now. Smartphones are on their way. Social media is on their way. So the kind of platform with which to draw blame and assign blame and to kind of reckon with all these things that have been hidden.

from like the government and all of that, there's a sense that the space in which to create character and create family and dynamics is a lot bigger and a lot more present. Like the stage to play on is really big now. But also that more modern... an inclination to really zero down on the hows and whys and wherefores, whereas the 1977 film, I think, lends itself to a lot of different interpretations because it's a bit more bare bones.

you know, Wes Craven had made his surprise hit with The Last House on the Left back in 1972 and was apparently reluctant to make another horror movie, but was challenged by his producer to bang out another genre cheapie. And as I mentioned,

mentioned before, this was the era of George Romero, Tobey Hooper, these lefty American dudes bringing the horror home, addressing post-war pinko concerns and finding super low budget ways to make them deeply uncomfortable. And, you know. he calls the hills have eyes his version of the grapes of wrath that he was really interested in the idea of rage as he felt it was brewing at that time but i think that non-specific american rage just like god

Here we are podcasting in 2025, looking at these people on an American road trip when we're grappling with no one's going to America on a road trip right now. The travel ban is fucked. protests no kings it hasn't gotten better and it hasn't made this film any less relevant no and it's like we were just cycling through it every couple decades and so you know with the remake coming out almost 20 years ago now Uh, cause we're old apparently.

But it just feels like we are still grappling with this. And, you know, there is so much to talk about in, you know, when we think of America, and that's what the remake does, interestingly, in the opening title sequence, is it's, you know, the kind of, you know, boomer mentality. of the wife at home cooking and all of this technology coming into the household, but at what cost? And it's a look back in both iterations of what have we sacrificed?

And what will we sacrifice to maintain a protective stance around what we individually have deemed as important to us? And I think the dynamic between these two families is really about this.

this isolation, this insular quality to the family. It's not about the larger community. It's about this internal looking inwards. And I really love how the Carter family is intergenerational. And I think that really plays into this. It gives you a lot more...

more room to play with those dynamics. Whereas, you know, a group of teens heading out into the woods and getting picked off, you don't really have those tensions inherent in the groups as well as... at odds with the other groups and even the like iconography of the way it's set up in both films it's like they've got a car and they've got a camper van and as your point like there's generations of this family from like the uh shockingly rather old patriarch who still has these

relatively young kids to like a baby. And it just it's so reminiscent of the American mythos of going west and this manifest destiny that you're traveling on a route and you're taking all your belongings. with you and you've got your fucking dogs with you and your cattle and your livestock and you're going to California because that's where something else is going to happen for this family. So in a very kind of, you know, couple centuries later, we're even still evoking.

this kind of Donner path.

Yeah, totally. Another famous group who packed up everything they had and en route to California met with a terrible, terrible end. I'm sure that was one of the many influences to this film, but a couple of the others. I mentioned already Last House. on the left was sort of a rape revenge, but it turns into a home invasion siege movie with a middle-aged couple defending their house against the people who raped and murdered their daughter. You've seen that one, right? Do you love it?

Love is a strong word. Yeah. I appreciate it. And I just want to say, I do also agree that Last House on the Left is an influence on this film, but also, like, what a fucking move to be like, I'm influenced by my own work.

Well, I mean, when you're told to kind of... strike lightning again yeah you know it's uh it's it's tempting to make something really repetitive and derivative but credit to Wes Craven was like oh I'm also interested in these other things and some of those other things were strangely enough

Hansel and Gretel. Craven was working on a children's horror flick in Hansel and Gretel with Sean Cunningham from Friday the 13th fame, but it was producer Peter Locke who really wanted another last house on the left. And what he got is The Hills Have Eyes. and just like how the children were lured to the witch's gingerbread house. The Carters are lured by these, you know, silver mines. But oh no, cannibals who eat children. So there's a bit of that in there. And then of course, the legend.

of sawny bean. And it's times like this where I'm always so aware that our editor is Scottish. I know. I was like, not even going to try. Not even going to try. gonna try because like look the great thing about legends is we're not really sure oh i meant the pronunciation of certain areas where he lived oh jesus i'm not there's like a cave there's a cave we'll we'll put well there'll be stuff in the show notes but lord knows i'm not gonna say it on my

right now yeah yeah no i'm just happy saying scottish legend um but like that cave is a tourist destination as i saw some pictures of it and looks crazy but sonny bean like cannibalism came up in a lot of my research on zombies so i'm pretty well acquainted The legend tells of a social outcast who holed up in a cave with a woman and together, and with a whole lot of incest, founded a clan of up to 45 cannibals who murdered unfortunate passersby.

And, you know, conflicting reports about how it ended. I think the prevailing one was that they were brought to heel by King James VI, who sent out a search party to bring them in and had them executed as per, like, sensation. criminalized crime tabloids were reporting upon. And it's, you know...

it's one of those things that looking back, it's just like, did it really happen that way? Why would it be sensationalized that way to make King James look good, to reinforce the taboos surrounding cannibalism and incest? Like, who knows? Either way, it's gory and evocative stuff.

And one of the things that struck me when I was reading about Sonny Bean, which I hadn't come across before this episode, was that violence begets violence, which is so much at the core of The Hills Have Eyes. And in the version of the lore that I read... What happened was, is when this family was apprehended, the 20 odd men who made up this group, they were killed by having all their limbs cut off and they bled to death. Yeah. And the women were burned as witches. Yeah.

I saw that too. So you're making like a spectacle to your point of the violence, but who's more violent and when is state-sanctioned violence okay and when is it not okay, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. And who's just a bad guy and who is a demon who must be burned. And what does it mean to-

just be like oh i'm king i get to do this yeah don't question divine right too much hashtag no kings but then there's also texas chainsaw massacre as we mentioned before that had come out in 1974 and again we're tackling america's crisis confidence the rotting american dream post-war moral decay stuff like that but also the broad daylight the really dustiness and the really bleakness the minimal soundtrack the horror comes from the fact that it's just portrayed very starkly.

Yeah, there's nothing hiding in the shadows. It's like everything is happening in front of us for everyone to see. Again, something very important as we've talked about in past episodes with like protests for like Vietnam and then Vietnam itself, that war being broadcast.

back to Americans. It's like, this is all happening in front of everyone. There are no secrets. There's not like this big shadowy thing and the discrepancy between, you know, what I can accept on a news report versus what I can accept in real life.

of dissonance there was you know a lot of people's minds at that time and i think that's why so many of these filmmakers were like let's dig into this if you're going to show me this on the news then i can show you this in your film and let's see what happens when i place a metaphor

or a different narrative over top of it, how do you react to that? And insofar as I think this is a very American movie, like obviously in its production and more specifically in its themes, I feel like, you know, Night of the Living Dead just had a...

very overt American flag, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It's in the title. The Hills Have Eyes remake. Lots of not so subtle American flaggery about the whole thing. But this first Hills, insofar as like... it's mentioned and it's very strong, like, I can't even say implied. It almost feels like it could be Mars. It almost feels like it could be anywhere on Earth and indeed a kind of post-apocalyptic feeling to it, a bit of Mad Max.

Yeah. And even in the opening, when you've got like, you know, Fred just being like, he's packing up, he's ready to go. And that's the only gas station around there. And it's so abandoned. And you think of like the urbanization, the way we just kind of.

built out, but there are still these huge gaps of uninhabitable to us, to us like petty bourgeoisies that we could never live in. But then what does that mean for the people who still live there? Well, that's right. And this isn't like a Manson family. rejecting that notion of civilization and we are choosing to live out here as we choose to live. These people seem very outcast. They seem to feel very disenfranchised. They seem to be very resentful that they haven't had access to all.

the prosperity that the American dream promised them. So when we talk about cannibalism, cannibalism remains the ultimate... And Alex and I both found this really great interview with Wes Craven that we're going to share. But he said in that interview that there was something very intellectually appealing about cannibalism in that it's so direct.

and honest. And he's absolutely right because it's very simplicity, like it's very existence is enough to arouse severe disgust. Like somebody who is willing to do that is monstrous in so many ways. Of course, disaster cannibalism abounds in the genre, in our public consciousness. And it's actually like a favorite of mine, like when it comes to historical nonfiction. The Terror is one of my favorite books. I read an amazing one on The Donner.

party that really goes into the ins and outs of cannibalism and then of course there was that 1972 andy's plane crash where those survivors apparently waited until near starvation before succumbing and eating those who had already died and one survivor roberto canessa felt that to eat his fellow passengers would be stealing their souls like he had a very kind of like spiritual response to that the ultimate indignity and desecration of their bodies

So insofar as this like disgust seems really innate, it is also very circumstantial and very, you know, frankly privileged. If you've never had to do that, it's because you've never had to do that. In spite of the fact that in the aftermath, he said that he, like many others, had declared that if they died, he would be glad for the rest of the group to survive another day if it meant desecrating their bodies or stealing their souls.

or whatever. So it begs the question, like, why the taboo, even if it's consensual, or post-mortem and there isn't really a great answer for that i mean like ask any meat eater and like they'll say we hold human meat to a different standard than other meat the way we hold human beings to a different standard than animal There's that thing that sets us apart, however you want to describe it, be it rationality, personality, an essence, and a soul. And it's both a natural and natural.

At the same time. And I did also kind of come across how like, you know, we consider dogs because there's so much like people. Yes. They have such loyalty and they seem to have traits that we see in ourselves. So it kind of equates a bit more to the uncanny valley where like the more human like an animal is, the more our disgust is with it. Yes, because we. We personify our pets. We personify these animals. We give them names. We put them in clothes. We give them an Instagram.

We do all these things because we are so close to them, yet there is this- There's this vast stuff, and this is what vegetarians and vegans and PETA are always on about. It's the distance that we have between the kind of mass market meat factories. That's a huge theme of Texas Chainsaw.

have that distance from each other if i don't see the cow i'm eating then that's fine i can enjoy this burger but you know put me on a fucking farm and i'm like oh my god this cow is my best friend yeah then you watch babe and you're like i'll never have bacon again and tomorrow morning. It's all of these kind of mental gymnastics we do on ourselves that if we don't see the thing in front of us, we can kind of get around it. But once we encounter them, it becomes harder to ignore. That's right.

And I think I've mentioned this book on the podcast before, but once more, The Indifference Stars Above by Daniel James Brown. We were just hanging out with Stacey and she's also read it and we were raving about it. It's about the Donner Party. And he talks about how...

When push came to shove, they were like, okay, we're going to have to eat each other, but not our own family members. We draw the line at family members. And then it goes on to describe how the first thing you do is cut off the head so that you can't really tell exactly who it is. And then you...

cut off the extremities before you start butchering the meat. So like the less and less it looks like a human being, the easier it is to kind of... hang on to but i think it should also be said that this disgust that we feel you know like people who get into butchering

get desensitized to it pretty quick. It's just one of those things that in our culture, just like death, just like anything pertaining to the dead body and the abject, which we go on about all the time, we put ourselves at a distance. from it for our comfort's sake. But that discomfort is largely learned and cultural and not innate.

Yeah. And so when you've got this Jupiter family who is not surrounded by that culture, they're not like everything is so tactile to them. And, you know, they're talking about like eating the dog at first and then they're going to eat the baby. then they're going to do all this stuff. It's because they don't have that societal structure that tells them that's bad.

No, indeed, they seem to revel in the whole misanthropy of it all, like the way they're utterly, I'll eat your children. Yeah, I will eat your children like that is I won't just kill them. I'll fucking eat them. So like they're kind of really digging deep on that disgust. Yeah, and people get so mad in Toronto when you say that to them. Some of them. There'll be some freaks out there. So, I mean, should we go into the Jupiter family? Mars.

Pluto, what's going on there? Okay.

I'm teasing like this because I thought it was obvious, but apparently I'm just really smart. Go off, queen. So where I got with it was I thought of the god Kronos from Greek mythology who swallowed each of his children to prevent a... prophecy that they would usurp his power and then of course his wife Rhea tricked him into eating a rock instead of Zeus who grew up and fulfilled the prophecy banishing Kronos to Italy where he ruled as Saturn so that was kind of my

connection with the planets and cannibalism. Yeah, and isn't Mars God of War? Mm-hmm. Yeah. I don't know. Really banished to Italy, huh? I'd like to be banished to Italy. I'll eat a rock for that. But, you know, I was seeing people mentioning that the Jupiter clan are like doppelgangers to the Carter family. That, you know, you've got the Daddy Jupe and Bob Carter as these patriarchs, the head of the family. He makes decision, doles out.

arms and stuff and then there's kind of the younger ones but like I don't know I wasn't able to unpack that quite as neatly as per us or something like that no it's it's like they're very uh foggy mirror images of each other if we want to say something like that I think there can be an argument made for it. But these these people just kind of tend to merge into each other. And I had a hard time differentiating the cannibals with the exception, of course, of Michael Berryman, who like.

God, if you don't know, he is a horror mainstay. He has many, many congenital conditions going on, including exodermal dysplasia, which means that he can't sweat through his skin. And apparently that shoot was deep. uncomfortable for him to be under all that makeup and overheating but uh

I am a huge fan of his. I think he's a very sensitive man. I've seen him at multiple conventions. He truly loves the genre. And I consider him a champion of the genre. I just always think back to that film, The Evil Within. Oh, yes. That film that... I love that nobody else does, but like he was in this movie and like it was started by this eccentric billionaire from the Getty fortune and he died before they finished it. And Michael Berryman really like rallied the troops to get this put out.

And he was also in Voyage of the Rock. Aliens, like he does some weird shit, but no matter what weird shit he's doing, he gives it his all. Oh, yeah. You know, he's never just relying on his face to bring the scares. He is the real. deal. Yeah, no, he's very like present. And I think, well,

Can I tell you about the killer ape theory? I would love that. I don't know this one. So this theory came to me as I was researching something else, something from my book that I'm writing right now. And it doesn't have anything to do with the book, but I just kind of...

distorted away because I thought it was so interesting. And this theory, I'm going to say it off the top, has largely been disproved. And we'll talk about why, but we'll also talk about why, theoretically, it's really fucking interesting and very appropriate for this conversation. So the killer ape theory really originates with an article called The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man by Raymond Dart. And he wrote that in 1953. Now, Dart and some other people who kind of glommed onto this.

suggests through this theory that humans are different from other primates because of our aggressiveness and willingness to murder and we think like my god no I'm not supposed to murder What do we think about wars? What do we think about genocides? What do we think all about that? And so it's this idea that we achieved mammal primate dominance.

Because we just had this predilection of like eat or be eaten. Okay. Survive or don't survive. And we'll kill anyone who gets in our way. And there's, you know, some kind of theories as part of this. Like we... forced ourselves to go bipedal because we wanted our upper arms free to hold weapons you know like it was we were like so like we just want to fucking kill and dominate fascinating how you can twist human biology to fit

any ideology anything and so this theory is like been disproved by many hundreds of people and like theorists and scientists um because there are other primates such as chimps and baboons who also exhibit this like violent unprovoked behavior will kill the shit out of people. However, it's kind of interesting as we start to think about human evolution and human history, because once we became a culture, a society, as we started to evolve in that. way. What did we do? We suppressed.

other people either through murder or through enslaving them. There was like, well, if I can kill you, then I am the dominant one. I can kind of section off parts of the population and say that I am better than them, usually done through violence. violence of all kinds, outright murder to, as I was saying, just being enslaved. And-

As our, you know, modern society progresses and progresses, then it just becomes about, you know, which parts of the world can I dominate? Who holds dominion over these spaces? And you can kind of apply this to anything from like World War II to... Vietnam, to the war on terror, to, you know, what's going on in Israel and Gaza right now. It's a really massive, icky part of ourselves because I think individually we are taught, you can't murder, you can't kill.

You can't be a cannibal. You can't do any of this stuff. But as we talk about, as we've talked about before on this podcast, state-sanctioned violence, whether it's violence against people, whether it's violence against the environment, any which way you want to throw it, there is...

a level of control and if we lose control then we like immediately turn to violence and we go through all of these mental gymnastics to get to that space and that's why i always think the killer ape theory is really interesting And we will go after each other before we admit defeat.

before we admit that we are not as good as someone else and i think we see that here in these films because this theory suggests that human nature is to dominate and that again interpersonal violence to war genocide and it goes against all these loftier philosophical beliefs that we have about ourselves and i think a lot of those philosophical kindness beliefs are real and relevant but there's also a dark part of ourselves that we often

don't want to acknowledge. And, you know, just as the Jupiter clan survived through violence.

That's how certain members of the Carter family survive is when they turn to violence. That's right. That's right. And so like to get into the civilization versus savagery discourse, like civilization refers to socially. stratified organization that like when people come together and they form a society they form institutions they form law they decide who gets to do violence so that we're not all doing violence but of course I think at that time where the

The killer ape theory was, you said the 50s? Yes. It made me think of Lord of the Flies, where it's like we're aware that... It's precarious. This whole civilization thing is precarious because when that breaks down, it does come to might versus right. And that is something that abounds in the horror genre when people are cooped up. You know, I'm thinking yellow jackets. I'm thinking the mid.

I'm thinking we're always kind of aware that there is a very fine line. And when that line is busted, all hell breaks loose. And another trope to emerge from that time is the noble savage trope. And we all know that the term savage is racist and pejorative, but in Western literature, it was used to describe a stock character uncorrupted by civilization. It's kind of an idealized concept.

of the other, kind of a relative to the magical Negro. This is where we see like Pocahontas, let's say. The idea is that civilization, which is to say an advanced society where our basic needs are met, overseen by government. morality is imposed upon you through social contracts and religion but this noble savage however possesses an innate sense of morality based on their intellect and their emotion that the civilized person is believed to have lost

And I feel like like the ghost of the noble savage kind of like it abounds in the Western. But it was making me think of Ruby. Oh, yes. Well, Ruby, is it just her feminine instincts that makes her be like, we can't kill the baby. I have feminine instincts toward this baby. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the hardest one for me to walk like that line with because it just... felt a bit like...

Just kill the fucking baby. It looks so juicy. It looks so plump. And I feel like the film is implying that morality has less to do with like city folk versus rural folk or white versus black, marginalized versus mainstream, colonist versus, like nobody.

is right or wrong. Because both sides are essentially doing the same thing. They're defending their territory and families with everything they have as per the American way. Yes, that's how America was founded. That's how it stayed in power. That's how it's become an empire. It doesn't mean it wins its wars, but they keep building up their military and their bombs. And so they have this kind of big dick swinging attitude that's like, oh, oh, they have bombs that can like blow up metal.

But insofar as Cannibal Holocaust exists, and it was only in 2015 that Eli Roth made that Green Inferno movie, I think that this film from 1977 deals with... with so much nuance pertaining to that line between savagery and civilization and family and American dream that...

It's why it still holds up. And can I tell you one of the parts that like haunted me the most about the original film that's not in the remake? Oh, tell me. It's when, can we all agree that Bobby is the true villain of both versions of this film? I can definitely agree that he got on my fucking nerves. And definitely in that same interview with Wes Craven and Christopher Sherratt that we're going to drop in the show notes for sure, Wes Craven mentioned that he...

drew from some of his own experience with regard to masculinity, where when you try to protect your family by not telling them something, it actually makes things way worse. So that was to me the most interesting thing about Bobby.

And it was just like, if you know there's a threat out there, you should be telling everyone and you should be protecting them. If you're going to be quote unquote man of the fucking airstream or whatever the hell it is, if you're going to protect your family, you actually have to protect them. You don't hide.

your zombie bite. No. And it comes from the dogs. So Beauty and the Beast. I think it's very interesting how much of the original is brought into the remake, which is this, you know, as we talked about, early aughts, boot cut gene, like dick swinging masculinity.

And one of the things that they left out that... knocked me over my head when i was re-watching the original was this part i wonder why the beast isn't chiming in beast never barks until he's ready for the kill likes to catch his victims unaware hey you know you're right Remember that poodle he killed in Miami? Do I? Oh, boy, was that lady ever fit to be tied. Was Daddy ever mad? He had to pay vet bills for a dead poodle.

So it's this brief moment in the film. It's quite early on before we fully understand the severity of their situation, what they're really up against. But they're having this casual conversation about their two German shepherd dogs. And Beast... killed a poodle. And they were like, yeah, that other owner was sure mad about it. And then they just kind of laugh it off. And it was just like, oh, these are in some ways already intrinsically violent people.

They have a dog who, you know, does come through to save the day. for them you know he attacks some of the the hill people but there's this innate aggression that has been like festered within this family to the point where you know now if that happened the dog would likely have to be put down because it is so aggressive

There would be lawsuits. There would be all of this stuff. But here in 1977, they can laugh it off and say like, wow, what a great dog we have. Yeah. And there's this kind of eerie sense of pride in this. throwaway moment that has haunted me ever since. And I mean, you have a small beloved dog. Well, see, that's just it is I think, you know, even within dog ownership, there's obviously a huge spectrum when it comes to different breeds.

and how they behave, but also the purpose they serve for you. I have known drug dealers who have had really, really aggressive dogs, and that's why they have them. For protection, for guard dogs. And Beauty and Beast are lovely, lovely animals, but they... They're inclined to run away. These are clearly animals that these people keep to protect them and to protect their family. And poodles are not such dogs. And so they're kind of a joke to people who see animals like that, who see the animals.

destiny as to protect its master and all the other dogs are pussies or whatever yeah and it's so interesting because it even kind of like ekes its way up to the patriarch of bob he's like i'm a fucking cop i'm this i'm that um I thought it was kind of fun that in another connection to another very famous cannibal movie, Bob in the remake is played by Ted Levine, who of course played Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs.

And the two patriarchs meet a very similar fate. They are, you know, played very similarly. But the big distinction in the remake is they make a big deal about gun ownership and being Republican. I know! When they dropped that word, I was... like, whoa, I don't think I knew that word in 2006. Or if I did, it didn't mean what it means to me today. Can we talk about

the crucifixion? Yeah. Talk to me about it in my lap, Catholic. I wish I had something to say other than, you know, I think like they were definitely trying to make a spectacle and they were perhaps... I don't know if we want to give the Jupe clan credit. Let's. Being symbolic. Yeah. But here's your savior. Here's your lord and savior, Bob.

Yeah. Up on the cross, what now? I mean, come on, think about it, Andrea. You're in those hills. Uh-huh. You're not getting passersby through very often. You got a lot of time to plan, to daydream. You know, you meet, you're thinking like, oh, I'm going to meet this real shithead one day. And this is what we do. Yeah. I feel like you would get there eventually. I think so. But I was also like, wouldn't that spoil the meat? Like, I guess you're roasting it on the offset, but they say that it...

Tastes tougher when the victim is scared. I don't know. But, you know, I mean, it's such an aggressive visual and almost artistic death that kind of like it changes your perception. Like these aren't just like. crazed people. These are crazed people, but they have an aesthetic that they want to go for. Well, they're not Hannibal Lecter either. They're not eating flesh with a knife and fork. They're going for barbarism. Yeah.

And they want to shock and to scare and to, you know, what are you going to do to get this family to run out? You want the patriarch to be in pain. You know, if we can take the... big bad one, the one who's like really out there throwing his gun and his badge around, if we can take him down first, that will make everyone else, including the audience, feel very unsafe. Yes. Yeah, with the Bob to the Bobby to the beauty and the beast.

It's like this family has created this circle around themselves that is just aggression. It is often quite overt. And even the mom, she's very like diminutive. She's like demurs a lot. She's just. She doesn't push back against anything. No. You know, very kind of passive voice in the whole thing. She bakes cookies. Yeah. She's your sweet mom. But it's like we've kind of like, again, to that toxic masculinity that has, you know. Truly, it's a door that locks from the inside.

Yes, indeed. And I was seeing some takes on this film on Reddit where it's just like, oh, well, you know, like they left the women unguarded and I would have this and I would have that. And I was just kind of like, this isn't that kind of film, man. You watch it.

and you strategize how best to protect the women, you're missing the fucking point. Yeah. That's all. So I want to talk about war. What is it good for? What is it good for? And more importantly, who is it good for? Nobody and nothing. Well, you say that unless you're a Republican government. Both of these films, without explicitly saying it, are dealing with two of the major wars that we have...

dealt with in the last several decades. The 77 Hills Have Eyes is very much a reaction in several ways to the Vietnam War, which lasted from 1955 to 1975. And it was... know the U.S. going in thinking they were going to dominate this country that they were going to win and that it was going to be a landslide and then it was going to create all this internal support amongst all of this other political nonsense that the governments who

oversaw it at the time and it changed over the 20 years of course what they wanted out of it but ultimately it was dominance however what happened was The Viet Cong, they dug tens of thousands of miles of tunnels under the combat areas, and this allowed them to have surprise attacks against the U.S. Army. They booby-trapped them. They had entire comm systems. of like this kind of network that they had fashioned that the U.S. A, didn't know about.

And then once they got wise to it, they couldn't keep track of because they didn't know the territory. They went in with their belief that they were better and that they had this technology and that they had the weaponry to just decimate this population. not so fast. It was an incredibly bloody war on both sides. Massive protests at home. This was, you know, as we've talked about already on this episode and in prior episodes, this was being broadcast at home to U.S. audiences.

like why are we in this war yeah what are we doing and why because all we are seeing is our conscripted sons come back maimed injured traumatized if they come back alive It was an incredibly scary time. And ultimately, the U.S. had to retreat. Flash forward to more recent times and the war on terror, which is a war that lasted from 2001 to 2021. And this is all kind of coming out of the 9-11.

attacks and the second Bush administration just being like, we need to go get these guys. And it led them to start wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. And similarly to the Viet Cong, Al Qaeda. and ISIS used a very similar tunnel system in their own familiar territory to their advantage. Once again, dragging out this war that everyone thought they were going to walk in, they were going to beat everyone. going to get the oil they wanted and everything was going to be.

fine. It was not fine. It ended in 2021 when Biden called for troops to leave those areas. And even that was a absolute shit show. And as of the time of recording, we now possibly have the US going to war with Iran through Israel. So it's like we are just perpetuating this. It's like really conservative war hawkish guys tend to get really antsy after a couple decades and they're like, I want to start something again.

And here we have these two families, the one with the technology, the one with the trailer home, the car, all of this stuff. They've got fridges, they've got food, they're barbecuing, they're doing all this stuff. And yet they are completely lost in this landscape where you have the Jupiter clan who still suffers casualties.

But they're able to completely destabilize this family and take out, again, the patriarch. They take out these really sympathetic female characters. They assault them. It's Bedlam. That home team advantage. you know i think the other thing about 9-11 is uh insofar as the attacks on 9-11 happened on american soil there was also so much unrest happening within america of like mccarthyism all over again which is now again

happening with ice where it's all like we have to kind of like look within and look without and that paranoia just grew. And it's a great distraction. All these wars and all of that like going in to get people get the quote unquote wrong people is a great distraction.

When populations are going, actually, all this stuff that you promised me either isn't coming to fruition or it's just plain not working for me. So it's like you've got to kind of keep everyone quiet and galvanize them around these myths. conditions that these these crusades that are meant to seemingly make us more secure, but they only make us more vulnerable. Yeah. And I think that's what's really interesting right now is that, you know, it's a lot harder to control the media and the popular.

opinion that we are the good guys and we're doing the right thing. Like that is not... That is not the case. Yeah, and I think in both of these versions of Hills Have Eyes, it's especially the 77 one. I question which side the remake really comes down on, but it's just showing us, like, here's these people with these advantages. Here's another family with their own set of advantages, and they're coming to a head.

Yeah. And what do you do? Yeah. And I think even that when you kind of start gaming it out for yourself, what would I do? What would I do like that? I'm like, I see the temptation there because you can't help but wonder. Sure. But here it's like we get to see it all played out.

thing i take away from it is no one really wins no that's right i have this great quote from matt carden who wrote this like feature on the movie website but i just loved it i was like damn i gotta get this guy writing for room org he writes one of these families seek to survive and feed themselves. The other family is a nomadic group looking to ransack a silver mine in a gas-guzzling house on wheels. You would be forgiven for thinking you were going to root for the family looking to survive.

sustain. And I just thought that was so beautifully put because that's not to say that we're rooting for the Jupiter clan, but... Neither are we sympathizing with the other side necessarily. No, there are no heroes in this story. And even, you know, in the original version, when you get Fred talking about, like, my son Jupiter was evil and I had to cast him out.

Fuck, dude. It's like, well, okay. That's one way to look at it. But it's also like you abandoned this child. Yeah. No wonder he's a little fucking testy. Yes, this isn't Loomis and he is pure evil thing. We're like, oh, poor guy. So-

Maybe to wrap up our discussion here, the emphasis on nuclear radiation being front and center. I mean, I think that's nuclear warfare is obviously technology of war. That is technology that was developed. hurt the other side, and yet look what it did to us at home, you know? It's kind of on the nose, and I'm not mad at it for that, but that's a thing. Also, Doug Wood is now Doug Bukowski, a less traditionally American.

than Wood, perhaps. And then, of course, as you mentioned, the whole Democrat gun-hating tech bro who was bullied by his father-in-law, but he can't fix the air conditioner, whereas Bobby had, because he learned to be a more frugal guy from... his paw and then of course the again not so subtle mom used to be a hippie now she wants to pray every five minutes oh my god the prayers oh yoy yoy that's all like front and center and i feel like in the end

What the original is driving home is anyone can be a quote unquote savage under the right conditions. Whereas the remake is kind of anyone can be a superhero under the right conditions. Like Doug's journey and the like symphony flourish when he emerges as this shotgun toting fucking. Ash.

Like, I didn't want to stand up and cheer for that. No, and I was questioning if that's what the movie wanted me to do. I didn't want to believe it, but I'm also like, I don't have a good argument against it not doing that because Doug has to adopt, let's say, the tool.

of his oppressors, let's say. His father-in-law, brother-in-law. I like that. The guns, the just like, fuck you, this is my family. All of this, he's having to take all of these emblems of this family, the aspects of it he doesn't want to be part of. And he has to adopt. them and then he is able to save his baby daughter yes that's where i'm like i don't think i can argue against like this film being like you know what the republicans have some good points

Especially as, you know, we are in like the relatively speaking early days of the war on terror. That's right. It's like I have such affection for Alex Aja. I mean, especially because of high tension. Even all of his films have these like problematic elements to them.

But I'm like, this one, I'm like, I don't see the satire in it. I don't see anything in there that isn't pure. Like, you know, you should probably learn how to shoot a gun. No, that's not his thing. Like, he satisfies audiences with... bombastic gore and on that front um the hills have eyes 2006 really delivers and uh you know i'll sign off on that but it's not it's not the same

No, I mean, rewatching the 77 version, I forgot how much I liked it. And that it's quite.

haunting it's like eerie and these like really for me unexpected ways of just it's bright sunlight and like when push comes to shove who do you become that's right and that's what i love about american horror films of the late 70s is there's subversive they're creative they're like they've got that grindhouse dusty grime on it but underneath there are good ideas and these uh these filmmakers do really have something to say and i think the fact that you know

It resonates. I think it slumps. I think, you know, obviously the makeup wasn't that great, but its message still holds true. And there's a reason it's a timeless classic. Absolutely.

So that's it for our hills. That's it for our eyes. As we head into summer, we've got one more episode before we go on hiatus. And do you know what it is, Andrea? Because I know what it is. You know what it is? I do. know because i know that you know that i know what we're gonna do next what we're gonna do next summer what we're gonna do this summer or this july our next episode is going to be about

I know what you did last summer. We got there. Really fun 90s urban legend-y shit. This is so your shit. It's so my shit. There is a remake on the horizon for this summer. Maybe we'll get to see it in advance of the episode. Maybe not. But either way, that is your homework for July. Yeah. And then one other quick announcement we wanted to do. We've already mentioned her on this episode, but dear friend of the show, Stacey Ponder, she is back with a new...

fucking podcast. Hell yeah. Our prayers have been answered. Final Girls After Dark exists. She just drew from her profoundly influential blog, a blog that, you know, Alex and I have long said really inspired us when it came to journeying into horror journalism. And Stacey's made a podcast.

The first episode is out now. Actually, two episodes out now. Two episodes? Yeah, the second one on the road just dropped. Oh, amazing. You guys, that fucking movie. Yeah, we all watched that in Bangor together. Yes, we did. We'll talk more about that on our Patreon. But in the meantime, we will link Stacey's show in the show notes. So please go find it wherever you listen to podcasts. Show her some love. Spread the word that Stacey's back. We're so excited about it.

And I'm so desperate to listen to that episode on The Row. Holy fuck. So until the next time your father-in-law becomes a literal Christ figure, ooh, office hours are closed. Thank you. Thank you.