The Hills Have Eyes (2006) | 50 Days of Horror, Day 29

A quick content note before anything else. The 2006 Hills Have Eyes is a brutal movie, and it includes a sexual assault sequence that many people find the hardest part to sit through. If that's a line for you, nobody could blame you for skipping this one, and the rest of the countdown will be here when you're back.

For everyone still with me, here's what makes this remake worth talking about. It starts as a road trip. The Carters are a family driving from Cleveland to San Diego, with a pair of German Shepherds named Beauty and Beast along for the ride, taking a shortcut from a gas station attendant who really should have told them to stay on the highway. A spike strip in the road ends that plan. From there, the movie's biggest trick is that it stays out in the open. No haunted basement, no creaking hallway, just white sky, bleached dirt, and a family that realizes how far they are from anyone who can help.

That setting is worth a note on its own. The film is set in New Mexico, but it was shot near Ouarzazate in Morocco, on the edge of the Sahara, and you can feel the difference. The heat looks heavy, the rocks look hostile, and the whole production has a dusty, war-zone texture that gives the violence a physical, tired quality. When night does fall, it doesn't read as relief. It's just another way for the desert to keep watching.

The other half of the story is the mutant clan, the people living in the hills and picking off travelers, and here the remake makes its boldest change from Wes Craven's 1977 original. In the original, the threat is a family of cannibals, rooted in a legend about the Scottish figure Sawney Bean. In Alexandre Aja's version, the monsters are the consequence of nuclear testing, a mining community that got left behind and twisted by what the government did out there. Whether that works for you will depend on how you feel about origin stories for monsters, but it gives the film something more interesting than random menace. These are two families, one that drove into the desert and one that was made by it, and the movie keeps holding them up against each other. Both are fiercely loyal and both are capable of terrible things to protect their own.

Craven stayed involved as a producer, which is a nice thread if you've been following along since The Last House on the Left. That film was a raw experiment from a first-time director, and this one is a polished, expensive, very different beast, made by a younger filmmaker who'd just come off the French slasher High Tension. Aja and his co-writer Grégory Levasseur made their English-language debut here, on a budget of about $15 million, and the movie went on to gross around $70 million worldwide. It also landed squarely in the mid-2000s argument about whether this kind of horror was a bold return to form or just cruelty with a bigger camera. Critics split almost down the middle, and some wrote it off as torture porn while others defended it as something sharper than that. I think the honest answer is that it's both uncomfortable and crafted, and the discomfort is deliberate.

If you collect, the unrated edition is the one worth tracking down. The theatrical cut had to be trimmed to avoid an NC-17, and the unrated DVD that followed in June 2006 restores that footage, which is on the rougher, meaner side. It also ships with a nearly hour-long making-of called Surviving the Hills, plus a pair of commentary tracks, one with Aja, Levasseur, and producer Marianne Maddalena, and one with producers Peter Locke and Craven himself. Whichever edition you pick up, find a transfer that keeps the harsh daylight honest and the night scenes properly dark instead of washed out.

The movie is a lot, and I won't pretend otherwise. But there's a reason it keeps showing up in conversations about the best of the remake boom: it knows exactly what it wants to be. So here's the question I'd throw out: when a remake changes the origin of the monsters, does it make the story smarter, or does it take away something the original understood?

Part of the 50 Days of Horror series.