Love your violence? Like seeing axes in heads, people stuffed in living tombs of dismembered limbs, and enormous, egg-shaped noggins mutated by radioactive waves? Then Alexandre Aja's The Hills Have Eyes could be for you! We spoke to its director, longhaired Frenchman Alexandre Aja, to discuss all things nasty (like annoying censorships people who slash your work to pieces. The gits)...

Remaking a cult 1977 Wes Craven favourite. Brave or silly, considering the common disdain for remakes?
 
You know, I was a big fan of The Hills Have Eyes because it was kitsch and funny. But it wasn't supposed to be that way. It was comical because of Michael Berryman [the lumbering Pluto character], because of the look of the people, because of the music, because of the bad acting - it was pure '70s porn kitsch funny! So I thought it would be possible to take the concept and do a real nasty horror, in the vein of The Last House On The Left, twist it round into something genuinely scary. If someone asked me to remake The Texas Chainsaw Massacre I wouldn't touch it because the original was perfectly powerful in its original evil state.

Plus the fact someone has already beaten you to a Texas Chainsaw remake.

And there's my point - the original is much better than the remake. Even though my Hills Have Eyes is very close to Wes Craven's original story, it's really different in the way it's made.

You've introduced the radiation mutation backstory, making the bad guys extremely uncomfortable and grotesque.

Yes, this nuclear testing background has given us the look of the people, and the way they interact, without ignoring the fact they're real people as well as bad guys. Plus that village at the end, with the eerie mannequins, it was a fantastic set-up to allow us to convey different feelings and provide a shocking finale to the movie.

It's also enabled you to film arguably one of the most uncomfortable rape scenes ever, not just because it's rape, but because of the rapists' appearance. How do you feel about the audience being repulsed on a totally different level?

Well, that's exactly it. But if people are hideous or monstrous, it's still vital to make them believably real. We based all the design of the bad guys in the film on real footage and pictures from the effects of radiation caused by the Chernobyl disaster, the Hiroshima bombings, and chemical weapons, used in places like in Vietnam. We wanted to create people who were so disturbing, yet at same time human.

What was it like to research all that?

That was really hard to come to terms with. We were researching every single picture, film and book we could find. There was one book, which was simply impossible to finish. It was so cruel that all this can happen, with those effects and the devastation. It was more twisted than the imagination can almost imagine.

We understand the DVD version of the film is a fuller, more uncut version of the film.

The DVD version is exactly the one I wanted to present on the [big] screen, and the one that I couldn't present because of the ratings boards and censorship.

Were the ratings people a pain to work with?

It was really hard because they wanted us to cut half the movie, and then, step after step we managed to save most of the film, and cut only two or three minutes, which are now back in the DVD.

So there was considerable behind-the-scenes bitching?

Yes, it was like five submissions before we got there. They moaned about it being too violent, and more importantly, too intense. But it was an intense movie. You know, it's not about blood, it's about extreme shock and having the tension growing and growing. The censorship board is not protecting the audience against violence, it's about protecting them from being placed in a very uncomfortable position. They're cutting and cutting because they don't want the audience to be scared in such a way. Which is silly, because the best way to make the audience to be against violence is to re-enact it, show it as real, and not just like 'I shoot you with a gun, you're dead', you know. But if 'I shoot you with a gun and drag it out over 10 minutes', it's much more disturbing, and they'll react to that.

There certainly is a big trend for sadistic horror films at the moment, with protagonists being brutalised in every way possible. Wolf Creek, Hostel, Saw, The Devil's Rejects...

Yeah, Devils Rejects is great. I loved it a lot. But it's kinda different [to Hills Have Eyes] too, it's not actually scary. But sadism, yeah, great. It's not only me, but a lot of other [film-makers] who are very frustrated by the '90s. You know, all the movies after Scream, with the emphasis on spoof and the ironic, they just weren't scary at all. A lot of us are trying to bring back that true '70s spirit.

So it's a reactionary movement against the tired '90s teen slasher flick?

Yeah, I really feel so.

Do you think we have a dawn of new 'video nasty', like we had during the late '70s and '80s?

Yeah. I guess so. You know, I think the '80s were really interesting. I think maybe the next step in horror will be to revitalise the '80s spirit, bring out movies like The Evil Dead.

Do you feel a rivalry among fellow horror film-makers to devise the most callous acts of sadism in your films?

I don't know. My approach is to always be on the side of the victim, and I'm always thinking about what would scare me the most. Like losing my family, having my sister raped...that's what scares me, so that's what I put on screen. It's not a sadistic approach, more like a masochistic approach. I'm trying to understand what scares me to, in turn, frighten and unsettle the audience. I'm not 'yeah, it would be great to rape a girl' - that's an opposite approach. But at the same time, I think that someone like Rob Zombie approaches films like 'we're outside of society, and we're really tense of mind', so he would explain his [sadistic] content like that.

You have two more films in the pipeline?

Yes, we're currently finishing a script for Fox, which is a supernatural movie, more in the vein of The Shining.

So that'll be the '80s revivalism thing already then?

Haha, yes.

The Hills Have Eyes, 2006 remake, is available now on DVD.