The Hills Have Eyes

The year was 1977 and the the Vietnam War had just ground to a slow and painful halt. The definition of "family" in America was changing as shell-shocked troops -- considered "lucky" by the naïve for having survived the horrific atrocities viewers at home only glimpsed on the nightly news -- were attempting to return to their families and loved ones and make sense of life in the serenity of the suburbs. But there was no going back; America had changed, and after two excruciating world wars and an extended quagmire in which the nation's youth were fed into the war machine and spat out in chunks, the culture of violence was flowing through her veins like an all-consuming disease. Ambitious horror filmmaker Wes Craven had absorbed the death and destruction that had become too much to bear for the numbed masses, and proceeded to shatter the senses of moviegoers with the boundary blasting sadism of Last House on the Left. As horror fans ached with curiosity to see what terrors he would bring to the screen next, Craven was cooking up a nihilistic tale of raw survival set against the scorching sun of the Nevada desert. Politically, Craven's sophomore vision personified the growing chasm between the right and the left while simultaneously serving to explore the differences between where we thought we were as a culture, and the contradictory reality so painfully obvious to anyone who still had the stomach to keep up with current events.