Only 27 years old, Alexandre Aja had spent his formative years assisting his director father Alexandre Arcady on exotic locations around the world. At 10, he met his best friend and long-time collaborator Gregory Levasseur, who would become a visionary screenwriter and art director. At 18, Aja and Levasseur’s OVER THE RAINBOW received a Cannes Film Festival nomination for Best Short Film. Three years later, their first feature, FURIA, was nominated for a Fantasporto International Fantasy Award for best film. Then, the pair caused a sensation at the Toronto and Sundance Film Festivals with HIGH TENSION, resulting in a wide U.S. release and broad popularity for the small French film.
Aja and Levasseur immediately responded with excitement and passion to the unique proposition of approaching the story of THE HILLS HAVE EYES with their own fresh vision. For these two cinema addicts, it was a dream come true -- the chance to re-imagine one of their favorite films, under the supervision of its original creator yet with the freedom to take it in new directions. They had come as close to nirvana as horror fanatics can get.
“Wes Craven was one of our childhood heroes,” Aja notes. “We grew up watching all of his movies and that was really what got us into horror movies in the beginning. Greg and I actually bonded over one of his movies, SHOCKER, and THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT served as a huge inspiration when we made HIGH TENSION. So given all that, we couldn’t possibly have been happier.”
The filmmaking duo was especially thrilled at the prospect of going even further with the story’s graphic probing of fear and even deeper into the character’s individual struggles for sheer survival than had been possible before. Further inspired by such American survival classics as DELIVERANCE, Aja saw the film as a chance to look at human nature under the most extreme pressure. “For us this film was the perfect follow-up after HIGH TENSION because it was a chance to go another step beyond in the fear process,” Aja says. “I love it when you are watching a movie and it’s impossible to drink a soda or eat popcorn because you are too into the story. THE HILLS HAVE EYES is exactly that kind of movie.”
Additionally, Aja and Levasseur were drawn to the film’s evocation of family – with its diametrically opposed portraits of a relatively normal, if typically flawed, suburban family trying to come together and their literally deformed, depraved, instinct-driven, mutant counterparts. “The idea of making a survival/horror movie about a family and not a bunch of teenagers was very attractive,” says Aja. “When you have a family like the Carters, you have an opportunity to explore so many different characters with so many different behaviors facing the danger. That was very interesting and allowed us to build some very different scenes with each of them. I think that members of the audience will each identify with the mother, sister, brother or son-in-law – and the experiences are always more real and more disturbing when you really care for the characters.”
Movie Database
In Theaters
