Historical Texts

The main historical text I will be looking at is the original hills have eyes made in 1977 made by the director Wes Craven who is a known director in the horror and thriller genre. The original hills have eyes will be useful to study as it will highlight the changes in society and changes within representation from the 70’s and today. Analysing the text will allow me to compare differences from the films and then allow me to think about why this change has happened is it due to female rights, or the rise of feminists.

After watching the hills have eyes 1977 I compared it to the more contemporary version of the film which was produced in 2006, after watching the original I found some similarities but also some differences. The first thing I looked at was the representation of women in the film, in this film women were not shown as being promiscuous as the clothing they wore covered their bodies and they did not act in a way which gave a impression of them being promiscuous. The one scene showed a female character putting her top back on while sleeping with her husband, this shows women still have a sex life but the movie promotes the idea of sex after marriage which was a important issue in them and days. In the 2006 edition of the film women were shown differently by the use of clothing is well, one of the first scenes in the film shows the female character wearing a bra only which connotes ideas of sex which shows in today’s society that idea is more of a norm.

In both of the films there is a similar scene where the villains come to sexually abuse the female character within this scene I picked on many similarities and differences. Both of the films show women being abused by men and being treated in a harsh way, the films show the male character throwing the female around and forcing her to have sex this shows that the idea of men being more powerful then women and men having the right to do what they like with women is still around. However one difference is the explicitness of the scenes, the 1977 version is no way as bad as the 2006 version showing that the audience have become desensitised and are used too explicit content that is the usual in the genre. Another difference I found which was interesting was the reaction of the female characters, surprisingly the female characters of the 1977 film put up more of a fight then the 2006 characters. The 2006 film seems to show male dominance being more powerful then before which was strange as society is seen to be more equal now then before but the horror genre has seem to kept its original morals and values. Even through all of this the female characters are still shown as good carers as the female character in both films are shown to sacrifice their own lives for their babies.

From analysing both texts I found how the genre itself has changed, one change in the genre could be that it has fused with other genres as contemporary horror films now show a lot more sexual scenes then before, there was definitely nude scenes in horror films before but now they are scenes of characters having sex which were uncommon before, this means that horror films now offer their audiences aspects of other genres in their films. this film does not show a change in society in terms of how people represented and also with women’s rights showing that the horror genre has stuck to its original ideas and still shows women in the same way which they did before.