“Hills” Remake Too Intense For An ‘R’?
Wes Craven’s 1977 horror classic “The Hills Have Eyes”, in which a suburban family are terrorised in the desert by a family of inbred mutants, was considered too intense and disturbing at the time. Now according to Craven himself, the remake is even more shocking, intense and gory - enough that the American ratings board, the MPAA, have given it the dreaded NC-17 rating.
“It’s a very strong picture and we’re trying to figure out what to do with that, without ruining it. We have to deliver an R rating. We looked at it last night in the screening room and before we started, we said to Alex [director Alexandre Aja] ‘what do you think?’ And he said ‘this is a PG-13 now’. And one of our producers said ‘Alex, can we commit you to an insane asylum if this isn’t an R?’ and then he showed it to us and ohmigod, there’s no way you would get an R for that” Craven told Empire Magazine.
The first film featured a gruelling sequence where the mutants attack the family in their trailer, this remains in the remake - “the attack on the trailer in my film was horrible, but it was over fairly fast. This one goes on almost ten full minutes. It’s fairly faithful to the original, but Alex added other things that also make it worse, what’s happening to these people. It’s protracted. It’s a long, slow process rather than being a chaotic, relatively fast process. It’s just too much for people that have to rate it, by a mile.”
