The Hills Have Eyes is a 1977 American horror film written, directed, and edited by Wes Craven and starring Susan Lanier, Michael Berryman and Dee Wallace.

Following Craven's directorial debut, The Last House on the Left (1972), producer Peter Locke was interested in financing a similar project.

Other influences on the film include John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).

The film's crew were initially unenthusiastic about the project, but they became more passionate due to Craven's enthusiasm and came to believe that they were making a special movie.

Papa Jupiter suddenly crashes through a window, kills Fred with a tire iron, takes Bob prisoner, and crucifies him.

Hearing their screams, Doug and Bobby rush back only to find Lynne dead, Ethel mortally wounded and Brenda traumatized.

[a] Wes Craven desired to make a non-horror film, following his directorial debut, The Last House on the Left (1972), because he saw the horror genre as constraining.

According to Steve Palopoli of Metro Silicon Valley, the finished film still features elements of "Hansel and Gretel," specifically its portrayal of people getting lost in the wilderness and setting a trap for their tormentors.

[6] While going through the library's forensics department, Craven learned of the legend of Sawney Bean, the alleged head of a 48-person Scottish clan responsible for the murder and cannibalization of more than one thousand people.

[9] Bloody Disgusting's Zachary Paul says that both films center on a group of vacationers who are "stranded in the wide open nowhere and must protect themselves against a tightly knit family of cannibals" and feature an archetypal "gas station of doom".

[5] Like The Last House on the Left before it, the film drew influence from the work of European directors such as François Truffaut and Luis Buñuel.

[10] Other inspirations for The Hills Have Eyes were Craven's neighbors and family, on whom the Carters where modeled,[5] the director's nightmares,[11] and John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940).

Originally, the film was to end with the surviving members of the family reuniting at the trailer site, signifying that they could move on with their lives.

[14] Craven also wanted the two families in the story to be the "mirror images of each other," believing that this would allow him to "explore different sides of the human personality.

"[5] Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, was offered a part in the film and rejected it so that he could move to Maine and focus on his literary career.

He re-used many of the props from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to decorate the cannibal clan's lair, including animal hides and bones.

[5] At one point, Craven considered having the character Papa Jupiter eat baby Katy, an idea which most of the cast disliked.

Due to this, significant material was removed from Fred's death scene, the sequence where Mars and Pluto attack the trailer, and the last confrontation with Papa Jupiter.

[21] The staff of Variety called The Hills Have Eyes "a satisfying piece of pulp," adding that "Gratifying aspects [of the film] are Craven's businesslike plotting and pacy cutting, and a script which takes more trouble over the stock characters than it needs.

The consensus reads: "When it's not bludgeoning the viewer with its more off-putting, cruder elements, The Hills Have Eyes wields some clever storytelling and a sly sense of dark humor.

[31] For the San Francisco Chronicle, Walter Addiego said that The Hills Have Eyes is the scariest movie he has ever seen, describing it and The Last House on the Left (1972) as "a turning point in horror ...

"[32] Comparing The Hills Have Eyes to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Zachary Paul of Bloody Disgusting found the former superior and praised its "overwhelming" tension.

However, Henderson also deemed the film inferior to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and criticized the sequence where the Carters create booby traps for feeling like Looney Tunes cartoons about Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.

[34] In Empire, Kim Newman gave the film a three out of five star rating, saying, "Decades on The Hills Have Eyes no longer seems quite as breathlessly swift as it did.

[12] According to Steven Jay Schneider in Senses of Cinema, the sequence where Big Bob is crucified symbolizes "utter repudiation of" Judeo-Christian ethics.

[44] Steven Jay Schneider, a film critic from Senses of Cinema, views the Carters as a bourgeois family, while the film's cannibals, according to him, may represent "any number of oppressed, embattled and downtrodden minority/social/ethnic groups," including the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, African Americans, hillbillies and the Viet Cong.

Muir instead sees the film as being about the class divide in America, with the Carters symbolizing the wealthy and Papa Jupiter's family representing the poor.

[20] While watching The Hills Have Eyes, director Sam Raimi noticed a ripped poster for Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) in a scene of the film.

'"[14] This inspired Raimi to include a ripped The Hills Have Eyes poster in his film The Evil Dead (1981), as a humorous way of telling Craven "No, this is the real horror, pal."

Craven reacted to this by having Nancy Thompson fall asleep while watching The Evil Dead in his film A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).