The Philosophy of Horror

Ideological Formations of the Nuclear Family in The Hills Have Eyes

Ideological Formations of the Nuclear Family in The Hills Have Eyes Lorena Russell Horror and Ideology in The Hills Have Eyes The Hills Have Eyes was originally filmed in 1977, directed and written by Wes Craven.1 The 2006 remake (this time produced by Craven and directed by Alexandre Aja) revises the central concept of a family under siege to redirect the film’s focus more pointedly toward a critique of the intensified discourse around “family values.”2 Both versions pit family against family, with violence marking the contact zone. But whereas Craven’s 1977 film describes a mainstream American family under siege by an outlying “wild family” of hippies gone awry, in Aja’s version the “wild family” are mutant miners living in the aftermath of the U.S. government’s nuclear experimentations of the 1950s. In their explorations of the conflict between two families—one lawful, one outlawed—the films offer unique comment on the ideological force of this basic social unit. Both films mobilize the horror genre to discuss ideologies of family and the repercussions of state-sponsored violence, with the 2006 Aja film more clearly illustrating the links between family ideology and state power. I want to begin my discussion of this dynamic by outlining my approach to film. In general, I understand film as a medium that holds the capacity to both reflect and challenge social values. In particular, horror, as a genre that appealstoitsaudiencethroughmultipleandcontradictorymodesofviolence and disgust, complicates the way we view and understand the world. It is horror’s close affinity with psychological processes that accounts in part for its uniqueness. As Rick Worland points out, “While we are likely to experience anxiety and fright in other violent genres—a war story, disaster movie, 102 Ideological Formations of the Nuclear Family in The Hills Have Eyes 103 or crime drama, for instance—a horror film evokes deeper, more personal psychological fears in the starkest terms.” It follows that horror has lent itself to critiques based on psychoanalytical criticism, largely based on the Freudian notion of repression, whereby the fear or terror that horror incites has a cathartic effect on our innermost traumas and anxieties. Catharsis may take place on a personal and individual level, but the anxieties and traumas themselves typically emerge out of a cultural context. As a result, we are ultimately dependent on a social framework for their psychological meanings. Worland describes how recent film critics extend their reading of psychoanalytical processes to include a sociopolitical critique, one that is based on an understanding of horror as “resonating with the return of any number of actions and desires repressed by the dominant social order.” Horror functions in both the private and the public sphere: “A horror film may conjure private fantasies and dreads; its reception and interpretation remain a public and social phenomenon.”3 The divide between public and private is troubled by the psychological dynamics of horror, and that link between the social and psychological is strengthened. Violence is another mechanism of horror that bridges the psychological and the ideological. In his analysis of the 1977 film, D. N. Rodowick maps out how “an ‘ideology’ of violence is an essential, if repressed, component in thefigurationofthebourgeoisfamily.”Henotesseveralnarrativeconventions regardingviolenceinhorrorfilmsthathelptomaintainanoppositionbetween the rationality of the bourgeois family and the manifestation of violence, and subsequently provide a “satisfying” conclusion that maintains the status quo of family. Violence in The Hills Have Eyes, however, repeatedly violates these conventions.4 Thus The Hills Have Eyes may resonate with our own anxieties regarding sexuality or death, yet the very meanings of these seemingly primal elementsareultimatelysocialintheirexpressionsandeffects.Socialerasdiffer in their dominant issues. The ideology of family values has emerged as a particularlychargeddiscourseinthelatetwentieth -andearlytwenty-first-century United States. The function of horror in The Hills Have Eyes is centrally linked to a critique of conservative American ideologies of family and family values. This analysis seeks to explore some of the nuances of cultural interpretation in its reading of the Craven and Aja versions of The Hills Have Eyes, and to do so through a reading of these films’ complex relationship to the changing expressions of the ideology of family. Cultural Criticism and Philosophy In my reading of The Hills Have Eyes, I am drawing from post-structuralist 104 Lorena Russell theories, employing ideas from traditional Marxist as well as psychoanalyst thought. My claim that the films (both the 1977 and 2006 versions) are centrally concerned with family depends on an...