Pack your car and mind the detours because we’re kicking off summer with an episode on The Hills Have Eyes. From familial tensions to political warfare in the original and the remake, there’s a whole host of darkness to be found under the summer sun.
REQUIRED READING
The Hills Have Eyes. Dir. Wes Craven, 1977.
The Hills Have Eyes. Dir. Alexandre Aja, 2006.
EXTRA CREDIT
Sawney Bean – Scotland’s Most Famous Cannibal. An overview of the Scottish legend.
Fairy Tales for the Apocalypse. Christopher Sharrett’s interview with Wes Craven.
Through the Eyes of America: Wes Craven’s “The Hills Have Eyes.” Matt Carlin via Mubi.com.
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I have heard that in Jewish dietary practice/law there’s something called “building a wall around the Torah”. So you can’t combine meat with dairy because God commanded that you not boil an animal in its own mother’s milk, and that more extreme step means you never get close to the actual prohibition. Similarly, banning voluntary cannibalism helps ensure that involuntary cannibalism never happens. It also helps to avoid kuru.
The US didn’t go in expecting to dominate North Vietnam, as it didn’t set out to invade them in the first place. Rather, as with the Korean War the US set out to defend the government of the South from the North, although we endorsed a coup against Diem unlike Rhee (even though lots of Americans also disliked Rhee a lot and felt uncomfortable supporting him). The Viet Cong never recovered from the Tet Offensive. South Vietnam fell when the North Vietnamese Army rolled their tanks in following the US pulling back and Watergate making US intervention a non-starter.
Biden pulled US troops out of Afghanistan, which doesn’t have any oil. The government the US set up in Iraq (which does have oil) is still there. ISIS is not much of a threat anymore, though they carried out attacks against the new Taliban government as they took over.
The Jupiter clan are trying to “survive” by eating other humans. The other family aren’t “ransacking” anything owned by anybody.