05 · 05:45
The Hills Have Eyes
dir. Alexandre Aja · 2006 · USA
A family stops in the desert. The desert was waiting.
- Starts
- 05:45
- Runtime
- 107 min
- Language
- English
- Subtitles
- Lithuanian
- Age
- N-18
About the film
An American family drives across the New Mexico desert and turns off the main road. Their car breaks down where there is nothing. Or where it only looks like nothing.
People live in these hills, left behind decades ago by a nuclear testing programme, and they look at the new arrivals not as people but as supplies. After the first night the film stops being about survival and becomes about how far an ordinary person will travel when no other option remains.
Alexandre Aja remade Wes Craven’s 1977 film at the moment French cinema was producing the wave later called the New French Extremity. The result is one of the cruellest horror films of its decade, still cited as a line the genre rarely crosses.
Trailer
Why this hour
By six in the morning the only people left are the ones who came for the horror. This film is for them: no comfort, no jokes, no promise that it ends well. Aja's remake is the heaviest work of the night and it screens when the body has nothing left in reserve. That is why it sits highest on the scream scale, and why not everyone stays to the end.
Stills
Facts
Cast
- Aaron Stanford
- Kathleen Quinlan
- Vinessa Shaw
- Ted Levine
Content warnings
- extreme violence
- sexual assault
- violence against animals
- violence against children
- heavy gore
This list is here so you can decide for yourself whether the film is right for you.