Rampant cannibalism, a horrific capture, and a folk tale that's lived on for centuries. "The Hills Have Eyes" was inspired by the tale of a truly terrifying family.
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00:00Rampant cannibalism, a horrific capture, and a folktale that's lived on for centuries,
00:06The Hills Have Eyes was inspired by the tale of a truly terrifying family.
00:101977's The Hills Have Eyes was only Wes Craven's second movie, and it helped establish him as a
00:16well-respected name in horror circles. It already bore many of the hallmarks that would make Craven
00:21a master of the genre, such as frank depictions of brutal violence, a distinct dash of social satire,
00:28and a wry view of America's darker sides.
00:31Maybe there's some rattlesnakes prowling around.
00:33Craven was also known to draw inspiration for his movies from real life. For instance,
00:37A Nightmare on Elm Street was inspired by a Los Angeles Times story about a young boy
00:42who was the son of refugees from the Cambodian killing fields. As Craven told Vulture,
00:46this boy's nightmares apparently became so extreme that he died in his sleep,
00:51and thus Freddy Krueger was born.
00:53For The Hills Have Eyes, Craven drew inspiration from a true story of a suburban family
00:58set upon by rural cannibals. As recounted by Tommy Hudson in the documentary Never Sleep Again,
01:03The Elm Street Legacy, Craven found the inspiration for The Hills Have Eyes when
01:07he encountered the Scottish legend of Sonny Bean while conducting research at the New York Public
01:11Library. As the legend goes, Alexander Sonny Bean was born in the East Lothian region of Scotland
01:18sometime in the 16th century. A disturbed and violent young man, he was lucky enough to find
01:23a wife who shared his disturbing predilections, a woman named Black Agnes Douglas. Unwilling to
01:29conform to the world around them or deny their base cravings for human flesh, the two retreated
01:35to a cave in the countryside. There, they had several children and, through incestuous relationships,
01:41a few dozen grandchildren. In total, the cave-dwelling clan was said to have been almost
01:4650 strong. The story goes that the Bean clan survived by ambushing, killing, and then eating
01:53travelers and various passers-by. Most often, victims were dismembered in the cave. After they
01:59were done eating, the Beans would allegedly pickle what was left over in barrels. Over the course of
02:04approximately 25 years, the Bean family were said to have killed and eaten over a thousand people.
02:11The Beans were only stopped when King James VI of Scotland was alerted to the dangerous clan.
02:16The king allegedly assembled a team of 400 men to hunt down the Sonny Bean family,
02:20and according to the BBC, every member of the family was executed.
02:24Though the story features prominently in Scottish legend, there is no real proof
02:28that the Sonny Bean clan ever actually existed. What seems to have fascinated Westgrave in About
02:33the Story wasn't just the sheer brutality of the Bean family's actions, but the brutality of their
02:38executions. According to some versions of the story, the men of the Bean family were mutilated
02:44and left to bleed to death in front of the women and children, who were then burned alive themselves,
02:48per The Scotsman. In a 1977 interview with Arrow magazine, Craven explained,
02:53I was so struck by how, on the one hand, you have this feral family that's killing people
02:58and eating them. But if you look at it, they weren't doing anything that much worse than
03:02civilization did when they caught them. How the most civilized can be the most savage,
03:07and how the most savage can be civilized.
03:09This conflict gave Craven the idea for one of the signatures of The Hills Have Eyes.
03:14In the movie, the surviving members of the supposedly civilized Carter and Wood families
03:18end up resorting to the same viciousness as the hill folk who've attacked them.
03:22By cleverly exposing this brutal behavior, Craven reveals that there's very little difference
03:27between the families, and that deep down, all humans are capable of committing shockingly dark deeds.
03:39you