by Matt Dubois

Created on: March 05, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

In her essay, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess," Linda Williams describes the three "low" or "gratuitous" genres of film: pornography, horror, and melodrama. According to Williams, these genres are considered somehow less reputable than others due to their exhibition of perceived emotional excess, not merely the narrative elements that produce these exhibitions. Traditionally, these excessive, or "gross," displays of ecstatic emotion center around the female body and its ability to elicit a response from the viewer. Perhaps the most striking of these three filmic genres is the horror, or slasher genre, because of its propensity to portray elements of excess from all three of the body genres.

A contemporary example of the excesses of horror is amply provided by Alexander Aja's The Hills Have Eyes (2007). A remake of Wes Craven's 1997 film of the same name, Aja's Hills goes above and beyond the call of duty in fulfilling its parameters as a horror film. The narrative centers around the Carter family, consisting Bob and Ethel, mother and father figure, Lynn and Brenda, daughters, Bobby, son, Doug, Lynn's husband, and Catherine, her baby. The film's central conflict arises when they are stranded in the New Mexico desert after being sent down a dead-end road into the wilderness by the sinister misdirection of a gas station attendant. Completely immobilized and cut off from civilization, they are gradually slaughtered by a band of mutants, the legacy of nuclear weapons tests.

"Gratuitous" may be a facile description of the film's excesses, but it fits like a glove; the sheer proportion of filmic time devoted to scenes depicting extreme violence, blood, and gore, at times almost defies justification. For instance, near the outset of the film, when the central conflict is established, a the gas-station attendant is depicted committing suicide with a shotgun, in an outhouse, due to the remorse of having sent so many tourists to their deaths in exchange for their possessions. The viewer is then afforded a view of his mostly-annihilated head, something resembling a pound of hamburg and teeth, heaped on the remains of a lower jaw. Reportedly, this scene is even more graphic in the film's unrated version. On the heels of this grisly scene, the father of the marooned family, Big Bob, is captured by the mutants, tied to a tree, and burned alive and screaming, for what feels like minutes, before his family's eyes.

The burning scene is important, as it coincides neatly

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