Why The Hills Have Eyes Is The Rare Horror Remake That Works

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]It's breakfast time.

[00:00:04]>> Sometimes the hills are alive with the sound of music.

[00:00:12]>> Other times, the hills are full of inbredad cannibals. 2006's The Hills Have Eyes came during a time when horror remakes were very much in vogue. And even something as forgotten or slept on as West Craven's original cannibal tale from 1977 was ripe for a gory new version. It's a tale of massive success commercially that would lead to an unlikely sequel and a movie that critics didn't quite know what to do with.

[00:00:38]>> Yesterday you said tomorrow, SO JUST DO IT.

[00:00:42]>> A film that was threatened with an unmarketable rating if cuts weren't made. and even a scene that was so atrocious that one of the masters of horror, Wes Craraven, had to nyx it out of fear of some deranged audience member trying it at home.

[00:00:59]Maybe most importantly, it's a remake that is seen as an improvement on the original even 20 years later that updated the reason for its villains in a terrifying and uniquely American way.

[00:01:13]Be careful on those family trips to the desert as we look at what the happened to the Hills Have Eyes remake.

[00:01:25]>> The early 2000s was a bearable breeding ground for remakes in the horror genre.

[00:01:30]from the US hopping on the J horror bandwagon with things like the grudge and the ring to domestic classics like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the Amityville Horror.

[00:01:43]It was the latter two entries that caught the eye of legendary director Wes Craraven who had just had a bit of a resurgence of his own. From 1996 to 2000, the Master of Horror had delivered the original Scream trilogy to the big screen. I always had things for you, Sid.

[00:02:00]>> And while 2005's Curse was a giant mess, Redeye from that very same year would bring with it rave reviews and a very successful box office hall.

[00:02:15]While he wasn't keen to direct it himself, Craraven was considering presenting one of his films to be remade after the success of Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 2003 and Amityville Horror in 2005. with their oddly similar $17 million box office results on their sub20 million budgets. While The Last House on the Left would get its own chance to shine in remake form in 2009, Hills Have Eyes was the movie that Craraven was most interested in from his back catalog, which meant the search was on for a creative team to be able to handle it. and it would be Craven's own long-term producing partner, Maryanne Matalina, who would be instrumental in finding the right fit. She had recently watched the French New Extreme flick High Tension or Hot Tension, which had also screened in theaters in the US and thought that it was sensational. She showed the movie to Craraven who agreed that director Alexander Aza and art director/ccoitriter Gregory Lavasur showed a multifaceted understanding of what is profoundly terrifying.

[00:03:21]>> Daddy.

[00:03:22]Daddy.

[00:03:24]>> The studio and pre-production crew agreed. And after Craven met with the pair, he instantly knew that he wanted to work with them and they would be able to bring a new version of his classic tale to life.

[00:03:40]Excited for their first US production after a couple of films abroad, Aha and Lavasur began rewriting the original story with some tweaks. While the bones of the story are the same, a family becomes stranded in the desert as to fight off a family of deranged cannibals, it was updated to have a very specific origin.

[00:04:05]Craven's original movie was loosely based off of the Scottish legend of Sonnie Bean, who led a 48 person family of cannibals who attacked and killed over 100 people in the 16th century. His script had a family of cannibals who would trap and eat whoever came across their land. While the original story gave no real reason for the family's actions or even existence, the French filmmakers decided that they would work an accidental mutation from nuclear tests in New Mexico into their story.

[00:04:34]Even before filming began in earnest, Aza and Lavasour had a clear idea of how they wanted the mutant family to look.

[00:04:41]All of their concept art and descriptions were based on real life pictures and footage of the effects of radiation on the victims of Chernobyl and Hiroshima. While the only confirmed US nuclear test in New Mexico was the Trinity project ran by Robert Oenheimer and his team, the movie expands upon this with a whole test town that had dire and long-lasting effects on those who lived in and around the area. The rest of the United States nuclear tests would be in Nevada and the Marshall Islands. But the film posits that many tests were run in the movie setting with dangerous and horrifying results.

[00:05:18]It's sad.

[00:05:20]>> And the consequences would last for generations. Even the opening credits were filled with pictures of deformed children, which were real life cases of Agent Orange, a chemical herbicide used during the Vietnam War to paint the picture of what the audience was in for.

[00:05:35]To play the role of the family, the cast was filled with young and veteran actors. The patriarch of the family of big Bob played with overly sentimentalized American mentality was gifted to veteran character actor Ted Lavine. Lavine was famous to genre fans for being a night vision goggleswearing very specific question asking and ordergiving Buffalo Bill in the silence of the lambs.

[00:06:00]>> Put your hands over your head and turn around. Spread your legs.

[00:06:04]>> But also had been working through a consistent character arc in the show Monk. The often adlibbing actor would lead a collection of supporting actors that included Academy Award nominated Kathleen Quinland as the family matriarch, Hocus Pocus star Vanessa Shaw as a different and very protective mother, X2's Aaron Stanford as the outsider son-in-law, Cinderella Stories Dan Bird as the youngest son, and Lostar Emily De Raven as the scared younger sister. Shaw, who Aza had wanted to work with since he saw her performance in Stanley Kubrick's eyes wide shut, was hesitant to play the demanding role. But after watching High Tension and meeting with the pair of creators, she agreed to the part of protective and brave mother Lynn. That's just the normies, though.

[00:06:50]The band of twisted and violent mutants would need to be played by actors that could do it all. The producers wanted the portrayals to be handled by people that could handle the makeup and play a creepy collection of monsters, but also do the stunt work required of the script. One audition was allegedly too real for the producers. as Nevak Ogre of the industrial goth group Skinny Puppy recalled later that he auditioned for the part of Lizard, but he was all too frightening and the production team informed his agency after the fact that it was a bit too much. Lizard would end up being played by veteran character actor Robert Joy, who had appeared in George Romero's Land of the Dead the previous year. Ezra Buzzington would play Goggle after being impressed with the filmmaker's pitch and even research cultures that participated in cannibalism.

[00:07:45]And Michael Bailey Smith, who played Super Freddy in A Nightmare on Elm Street 5, would play the hulking Pluto.

[00:07:57]He impressed so much here that he would come back and play Papa Hades in the film sequel. Classic bad guy and interesting looking Billy Drago with his unique acting style would portray the patriarch Papa Jupiter and fresh-faced Laura Ortiz would play the empathetic and heroic youngest of the clan Ruby.

[00:08:16]While the original film was gruesome for 1977, this new iteration was being handled by French New Extreme filmmakers and would up everything to 11. To achieve this, legendary K&B Effects were hired on to handle makeup and gore. They would spend over 6 months designing the mutant family, which included them using three-dimensional design tools to create computerenerated sculptures. This would then be used to create prosthetics used to fit onto the actors portraying the mutants.

[00:08:48]Some of these, including Robert Joyy's Lizard, would take up to 3 hours, and he would enjoy being turned into something that he thought could only be found in a nightmare. Greg Nicotiro, who was always game to be kneedeep in the gore that he had created as far back as Day of the Dead, got in on the fun here, too, as he would portray the mutant with the halo headgear named Cyst. In some of the later scenes inside the town area, Papa Jupiter's character appears to be the only mutant without any easy to spot deformity, but in the special feature making of, it was revealed that he was originally going to have a large parasitic twin growing out of him. Total Recalls Quad would have been proud. To complement the practical effects would be Jameson [ __ ] and his team, veterans of Hellraiser Hellseker and Halloween Resurrection, who would add over 130 visual effects to the Hills Have Eyes.

[00:09:38]While many of these would include warping the main villain mutants facial features even further, or even in the case of the child characters, completely adding their deformities. They would also build out the town that the family of cannibals lived in. The actual physical space that we see on screen is only one street, but [ __ ] and his team worked hard to expand this into an entire town. One effect that was scratched completely from the film takes place in the harrowing attack on the family's RV. The pets inside are cute-l lookinging birds, but originally Aza wanted the family to have also brought kittens along the journey. These unfortunate feline friends would meet a much grizzlier demise when they were put into a blender with milk. Man, I miss that cat. No one's been there to take care of him.

[00:10:24]>> I love her. So, >> and eventually drank by the mutants. The director pitched it to Wes Craraven, who immediately shut it down out of fear that someone somewhere would recreate the brutality. Much like the original film, which was threatened with an X-rating, this remake had to trim down the gore already to avoid the NC17 tag.

[00:10:47]Something the kitten scene in question would not have helped with.

[00:10:51]>> You son of a >> something also horrifying as the cut scene were some of the shooting locations that reached 120° Fahrenheit during the day. Originally Craraven and the other producers wanted to shoot the film where the original movie was made in Victorville, California, but to their surprise in almost 30 years the desert landscape had been filled with condos.

[00:11:15]Aza and Lavasur thought about a few alternatives, including New Mexico, Nevada, and even South Africa, but ended up choosing Morocco, known as the gateway to the Sahara. Fox Searchlight, who had secured the rights from Miramax, was concerned over this location out of fear of terrorist activity, but eventually agreed when no other locations could be found. It ended up working out. The cast and crew hung out with and stayed at the same hotel as a production of The Ten Commandments shooting nearby. The sets were even so convincing that people not involved in the film's production attempted to get gas from the gas station that was created completely from scratch for this film.

[00:11:55]>> Oh, hey.

[00:11:58]Check the fluids, my friend.

[00:11:59]>> Oh, yeah. Right away.

[00:12:00]>> The Hills Have Eyes would be released on March 10th, 2006 on a budget of just $15 million. It would open third at the box office and although it would continue to fall for six straight weeks, the movie would still pull in over $70 million during its theatrical run. It would be released on home video with the very popular at the time unrated version. And even though it sits with a lower thanex expected 51% on Rotten Tomatoes, it's widely seen as not only a top tier remake, but also one of the few that ends up better than the original. like Craven's film. It would also get a sequel that is less liked but somehow preferred to the original sequel, which it is not a remake of. That would be a family affair with Craven producing while also writing with his son Jonathan. But that's a story for another video. For now, this 2006 movie still has teeth and a great reputation amongst horror fans. And that, my friends, is what the happened to the Hills HAVE EYES REMAKE.

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