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— Brandee J. Tecson
A dysfunctional suburban family suddenly takes a wrong turn and finds itself stranded in the barren desert wasteland of New Mexico. Miles away from civilization, the family members fall prey to a clan of bloodthirsty inbred cannibals dwelling deep within the hills. Steeped in blood, violence and oh-so-explicit gore, 1977's "The Hills Have Eyes" was an outrageous tale of savages and survival that famed horror director Wes Craven first brought to moviegoers nearly 30 years ago.
Now considered a cult horror classic, the film was deemed so graphic and so disturbing when first released that the MPAA slapped it with an X rating (the equivalent of today's NC-17) and Craven was forced to tone down his masterpiece — much to a salivating audience's dismay — until it met the era's R standards.
Now, a generation later and with the fright bar raised to new levels, the man who first stunned filmgoers with his unrelentingly brutal 1972 debut, "The Last House on the Left," is revisiting his old "Hills" — albeit this time around, he's not at the film's helm.
"One reason I wanted to redo 'Hills' is because I could," Craven recently acknowledged with a laugh. "Unlike some of my other projects, I [knew I] could control it."
Though he opted not to direct the remake of his '77 frightener, Craven still retained creative control as one of the film's executive producers, passing the directorial reins over to 27-year-old French filmmaker Alexandre Aja ("High Tension").
"To direct a film you've already made, that just sounded excruciating," the 66-year-old Craven said. "I've already been out in the desert and froze my ass off at night and chased tarantulas and all that stuff, so it's interesting to see another guy do it — and with a totally different style."
Aja's gritty, unapologetic depiction of torment, both physical and psychological, in "Tension" caught Craven's eye and landed the director and his writing partner, Gregory Levasseur, a meeting with the Master of the Macabre.
"Wes asked us, very politely, 'Do you know of any of my movies?' " recalled Aja, whose offices are lined with vintage horror-movie posters, several depicting Craven's films. "And, of course, I grew up watching 'The Hills Have Eyes' and 'The Last House on the Left.' He asked us to find a way, a new technique, to justify why we would remake a cult movie like this in 2006, and days later we came up with the idea of the nuclear-testing background."
Aja and Levasseur concocted a back story that depicts the freakish hill-dwellers of the film's title as mutant cannibals instead of run-of-the-mill savages; they're the inbred offspring of miners forced to abandon their land, as it was being used for nuclear testing by the feds from 1945 to 1992. While the miners and their families who refused to leave sought refuge in the mines, the radioactive fallout went to work on their genes, morphing them from wronged laborers into torturers and killers.
"With those few strokes, Alex made the film very much his own, and the whole second half of the picture is on that territory and completely fresh and new," said Craven, who first shot "Hills" in the fall of 1976 on a miniscule budget ($325,000) in an uninhabited area near Victorville, California.
For his adaptation of the original, Aja trekked an international crew to the harsh deserts of Morocco, filming in 115-degree heat for a month and a half.
"You just had to knuckle down and tough it out," said actor Aaron Stanford ("X-Men"), who plays Doug Bukowski, a cocky tech geek who has to journey across the hills in an attempt to save his kidnapped baby daughter.
The cast — which also includes Oscar nominee Kathleen Quinlan, Ted Levine ("Silence of the Lambs"), Vinessa Shaw ("Eyes Wide Shut") and Billy Drago ("The Untouchables") — not only had to endure hellish conditions during filming; Aja didn't allow them to slack off when bringing the story's unapologetic portrayals of cruelty and sadism to life.
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"I was a big fan of the original and wanted to stay faithful to the soul of it," Aja said of the screenplay he wrote along with Levasseur. "We decided, 'OK, we're going to do a new "Hills Have Eyes" but we're going to go as brutal and violent as we can, and do something that goes beyond everything that has been done until now.' That was a challenge."
"It was really just a matter of getting out of the guy's way," added Craven, "and letting him do what you think he can do."
Aja delivered. The original cut of the remake was so intense that, like its predecessor, it was slapped with an NC-17 rating for gruesome violence until it was mellowed down to an R, but Craven says an unedited version will eventually make its way to DVD.
"Why I love horror so much is when I watch a movie, I'm not just watching a show — I'm living an experience," said Aja. "If it's done well, it sucks you into the story. You're living with the characters and going through the nightmare with them, and that's what we tried to do with 'Hills.' We tried to give the audience a visceral experience instead of just showing them a film."
With "Hills" primed to scare the crap out of a new generation, who's to say that Craven's breakthrough, "The Last House on the Left," couldn't get a little facelift as well?
"We're talking about remaking [it]," the director admitted recently. "I'd be surprised if it didn't happen."
While horror's newest dynamic duo might strike gold with "Hills," don't expect Aja to climb on board to remake what he considers Craven's masterpiece.
"My fear would be how, today — with all the censorship and conservative American feelings — can you make a film as strong as the original, which was already so perfect?" Aja said. "As a filmmaker, I will not do that."
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