Horror Aughts #7: ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ and the Boundary-Pushing Evolution of Schlock Horrors
Alexandre Aja’s 2006 remake isn’t nearly as shocking as it once was — why’s that?
‘Horror Aughts’ is a column in which I revisit scary movies from the 2000s that were big commercial hits at the time but have been largely forgotten ever since.
Back in the mid-aughts, Alexandre Aja was named as a member of the Splat Pack — which included up-and-coming filmmakers like James Wan and Neil Marshall — a group of independent schlock horror directors who squeezed the last drop of blood out of a low-budget scary movie. Literally. Aja’s remake of Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes served as a sort of measurement of how brutal and gory mainstream horror can get in cinemas (alongside others like Saw, Hostel, The Descent, etc). In 2006, Aja’s film was a shamelessly nasty and relentless gore-fest riding on rampant, and at times gratuitous, violence. In 2025, you kinda shrug it off — if you've been actively following and watching horrors in the past 19 years, that is.
It’s not like these horrors have gotten softer over the years (how could they?) but that our stimulus threshold of brutality has been heightened and pushed so far beyond the lines of the 2000s that they simply don’t faze us the way they did back then. We got used to more explicit and cruel carnage. We trained our guts and advanced our tolerance on films like Martyrs, The Woman, A Serbian Film, and 2013’s Evil Dead remake — movies that kept testing and pushing us to see how much more we could take. As a result, we gradually developed a sicker hunger for sicker nightmares.
That's what I've been thinking while re-watching The Hills Have Eyes — an admittedly violent slasher, by the measures of 2006, which plays like a “Disney horror” compared to something like the Terrifier franchise of today. Not once I felt shocked or physically repulsed by the deformed and deviant hillbilly mutants who live in the New Mexico desert and prey on innocent travelers to make a stomach-churning feast out of their flesh. Perhaps that’s a “me problem” belonging in a therapist’s office, but maybe it’s just the natural outcome of being a life-long horror fan — I let you decide.
What I’m trying to say is that The Hills Have Eyes feels more digestible and less wince-inducing now than it did in the aughts. Time takes its toll on schlock horrors, apparently. Consequently, Aja’s film isn’t as much bonkers fun as I remembered. Maybe that’s due to the fact that it has little to offer beyond its cruel and frenzied killings. Don’t get me wrong: it has its deliciously deranged moments like burning a middle-aged man alive, biting the head off a tiny bird, or striking a rusty axe in people’s heads/backs/and-whatnots, but beyond these genre-specific, mandatory murders, there isn't much "satisfaction" to draw from it.
Surprisingly, as someone who otherwise usually enjoyed Aja’s early works, I also found the suspense quite lacking here. Which is a weird thing to notice, considering the rather long 40-minute build-up the director employs before unleashing a savage, if well-contained, chaos that takes over in the second half. Now, it’s not that surprising if you take a look at the characters who are supposed to drive the straightforward plot. Despite a decent B-movie cast — Ted Levine, Vinessa Shaw, Tom Bower, the pregnant blondie from Lost — the people we meet here are nothing but one-dimensional victim-fodders. They're dull, flavorless, empty stereotypes instead of concrete and god-forbid likable personalities. They merely exist to be killed or somehow survive the barbaric butchery that turns them into traumatized and tortured wrecks.
The real “stars” — much like in the original Wrong Turn — are the ravenous and feral monsters who once were humans before the nuclear tests in the area turned them into maimed and horrific cannibals. They’re grotesque, revolting, inhumane beasts — and at times, Aja manages to combine their tragedy with an effective pitch-black humor that’s very much part of the deal here, if underutilized. Take the scene where one of the male protagonists stumbles into the mining town and finds a paralyzed, horrifically disfigured man in a wheelchair, singing the national anthem and briefly recounting how the government made them this way by setting off bombs and turning everything to ashes. Then he starts cackling, and soon a metal flagpole with the American flag finds its way through the neck of a mutilated hillbilly trying to cut our boy down with a pickaxe. What’s that if not a darkly hilarious punchline à la Alexandre Aja?
Scenes like that are what made memorable mid-aughts schlock horrors vicious fun for thrill-seeking teen-Millennials, who found these movies to be a sort of forbidden fruit growing up. But then "torture porn" became a brand (which came and went), and nowadays it’s virtually impossible to put that same “forbidden” label on any mainstream horror film, no matter how gruesome or foul it might be. The lines to be crossed have disappeared or rather evolved into a new norm that we've grown accustomed to. The genre is better for it since psychological terror and more complex themes are more prevalent these days, providing a rich and fertile ground to explore and experiment with what makes us wail internally. For better or worse, we’ve evolved along with horror filmmakers and begun seeking out more than simple scares and old-fashioned gore.
The downside is that previous hits that rode on shock value such as The Hills Have Eyes no longer scratch that itch we desire. Make no mistake, though, without bold and admittedly abhorrent schlock horrors like this one, we (and the genre) wouldn’t be where we are now. And, retrospectively, it’s still quite impressive that a no-bullshit movie like Aja’s had the power to blow up the box office with a $15 million dollar budget and garner over $70 million worldwide in the mid-2000s. But, revisiting it now, it’s hard to shake it was evidently a product of its time that lost its ferocious, rebellious, and startling potency that made it a macabre spectacle all those years ago.
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