Horror obsessive and director of Hostel, Eli Roth, introduces The Hills Have Eyes

There may not be gold in them thar hills, but there's trouble aplenty.

Wes Craven's notorious debut The Last House on the Left should have established him as one of the 1970s leading horror directors. Yet, The Hills Have Eyes was his only film of note before creating horror icon Freddy Krueger.

Luckily, for lovers of good old-fashioned scare the pants off you horror, The Hills Have Eyes is a classic fright fest.

At a swift eighty-fives minutes, Craven neatly establishes his central family, mom and pop, three kids and a son-in-law within the first twenty minutes and then unleashes mayhem.

Influenced by the Manson family murders, plus The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Straw Dogs, The Hills Have Eyes' rogues gallery is a genuinely terrifying collection of mutant psychos, (bald) headed up by horror icon Michael Berryman as Pluto.

The unfortunate Berryman was born with Hypohidrotic Ectodermal Dysplasia, meaning that he was born with no sweat glands, hair, teeth or fingernails!

For Berryman everyday must be a horror story, so it's no surprise he became one of the cinema's scariest characters, although reportedly he's a lovely guy.

The Hills Have Eyes still shocks due its low-budget rawness, psychos named after planets of the solar system and a rough, grainy visual style that looks like an alien world.

The cast (featuring a pre-fame Dee Wallace) are no-name B-movie types just right to be killed with casual brutality in the central set-piece: a nocturnal attack on the family's trailer that is a textbook example of sweaty-palmed tension.

This is a seventies horror flick, so it's all about the Family losing their sense of America, rural folk biting back at well-heeled middle class suburbia, and passing references to nuclear testing and the military industrial complex.

The remake has added a couple tens of millions onto the budget, put in respectable actors and added a visual sheen that makes it numbing but not scary, rather than pulpy but nail-chewingly suspenseful.

Sadly, Craven followed The Hills Have Eyes with a belated sequel in 1985 (before Freddy got big) that resurrected the baddies with scant regard for logic and ran out of money halfway through, meaning it is flashback heavy (including a scene from the POV of the family dog!).

Ignore the sequel and the remake and go for the original, beastly best.

Rob Daniel