THE CLIMACTIC EXPLOSION COULD’VE BEEN DEADLY.īecause the budget was small, production on The Hills Have Eyes often meant taking risks. “We always had to cover him up as soon as we finished these scenes,” Craven recalled. He soldiered on, though, even in intense action sequences.
MICHAEL BERRYMAN CONSTANTLY FACED HEATSTROKE.īerryman, who became a horror icon thanks to this film, was apparently game for just about anything Craven and company wanted him to do, though he personally told the producers he was born with “26 birth defects.” Among those birth defects was a lack of sweat glands, which meant that the intense desert heat was particularly hazardous to his health. According to Locke, significant footage was removed from the scene in which Papa Jupiter (James Whitworth) kills Fred (John Steadman), the scene in which Pluto (Michael Berryman) and Mars (Lance Gordon) terrorize the trailer, and the final confrontation with Papa Jupiter. Though it might seem relatively tame by modern standards, the film’s graphic violence earned it an X (what we now call NC-17) rating from the MPAA, which meant cuts had to be made. “Let’s just say we bought a dead dog from the county and leave it at that,” Craven said. According to Craven, though, the dog was already dead. THE DEAD DOG WAS REAL (BUT THEY DIDN’T KILL IT).ĭuring the scene in which Doug (Martin Speer) discovers the mutilated body of the family’s other German Shepherd, Beauty, a real dog corpse was used. Don’t worry, though: Wallace didn’t actually stomp the spider in the scene. According to Craven, they simply found the spider on the road during shooting, put it in a terrarium, and decided to add it into the film.
The scene in which Lynne Wood (Dee Wallace) discovers a tarantula in the family trailer is a foreboding moment that signals the trauma to come, but it wasn’t in the script. He appears as “Mercury,” the feather-covered savage who appears only twice: once in the film’s opening minutes, and then again as he’s pushed off a cliff by the Carter family’s dog, Beast. PETER LOCKE PLAYS A SMALL ROLE IN THE FILM.īecause of the film’s small budget, even Locke was drafted to join the cast. JANUS BLYTHE WON HER ROLE BASED PARTLY ON SPEED.įor the role of Ruby, the filmmakers needed an actress who could pull off the flighty and feral character convincingly, so, in the words of Locke: “We had sprints.” Actresses trying out for the role were asked to race each other, and Blythe’s speed won out. He suggested that Craven set the film in the desert, and Craven began to craft the screenplay.īudget was also a concern, so Craven structured the film to feature a relatively small cast and very few locations. At the time, Locke’s wife Liz Torres was performing regularly in Las Vegas, and so Locke was frequently exposed to desert landscapes. IT WAS INSPIRED BY NECESSITY.Īfter Craven released The Last House on the Left in 1972, he tried his hand at making films outside of the horror genre, but according to the late director, “Nobody wanted to know about it.” In need of money and searching for a better career path, he finally answered the request of his friend, producer Peter Locke, to write a horror film. He adapted the story to instead be about a group of wild people in the American West, and The Hills Have Eyes was born. Craven heard the story of the Bean clan, and noted that the road near where they lived was believed to be haunted because people kept disappearing while traveling on it. IT WAS BASED ON A TRUE STORY.Īccording to writer/director Wes Craven, The Hills Have Eyes was inspired by the story of Sawney Bean, the head of a wild Scottish clan who murdered and cannibalized numerous people during the Middle Ages. So let’s look back on its unflinching terror with 11 facts about the film’s production.
The film was released 40 years ago today, and it’s just as brutal as ever. Produced on a tight budget, under sometimes grueling conditions, The Hills Have Eyes cemented Craven as one of Hollywood’s great horror masters. Though he may not have been in a hurry to admit it, Craven found that he was really good at scaring people. Though he was itching to branch out and make other kinds of movies, he could only find financing for horror films, so he agreed to make a movie about a group of hill people savaging a vacationing family. In the late 1970s, Wes Craven was a struggling filmmaker known for only one thing: a little horror flick called The Last House on the Left (1972).