10 Best Wilderness Horror Movies
6. The Hills Have Eyes
No, not the more overtly political, painfully violent and slightly over-the-top remake (an American flag through the skull? Really, Alexandre Aja?).
The original and the greatest, Wes Craven’s 1977 horror set the blueprint for wilderness horrors to follow by combining the most disturbing elements of its predecessors into one nightmarish, politically charged slice of bleak seventies horror.
Deliverance had monstrous mountain men assaulting and attacking our heroes? This one has an entire family of them scavenging through a nuclear wasteland and eating unfortunate tourists for sustenance.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre already had an entire family of cannibalistic backwoods monsters? This film pits them against a clean cut all American family with a baby and dog in tow instead of some burn out college kids.
The stakes are raised immeasurably when it's a nuclear family under attack in this gruesome siege horror, and the "we're not so different" parallels are far more obvious and evocative than in Craven's earlier shocker The Last House on the Left. After all, this is the story a small American family just trying to survive by any means possible... From either perspective.