To bring the world of THE HILLS HAVE EYES 2 to life on the screen, the producers knew they would have to find unique visual methods of telling this brutal tale. As the film is set in sun-bleached desert landscapes, as well as claustrophobic dimly-lit tunnels and mines, a cinematographer of unusual talent and versatility was needed in order to bring each vastly different location to life. Producer Marianne Maddalena found such a talent in Sam McCurdy upon viewing his work in the British horror film The Descent. “In the movie, his interior lighting of the caves is really beautiful and dark,” says Maddalena. “There are a lot of glowing highlights and backlights around the actors. For a horror movie, that makes it really beautiful as well as having enough shadows and dark spaces to keep it eerie and spooky which keeps the tension up.”

McCurdy welcomed the opportunity to return to shooting in claustrophobic caves and tunnels. He remembers: “There were significant differences between filming The Descent and THE HILLS HAVE EYES 2. We are working in bigger sets on HILLS than we had on The Descent, so there is much more room for intricate camera setups…it’s a bit more fantastical, a little more creative. With HILLS 2, we’ve allowed ourselves the artistic styling to take things one step further so when its dark, its really dark…so much of it was underground, but [you’ve] got shafts of light. [You’ve] got shadows; you can’t see things, and you wonder what is coming out of the darkness. It’s the fear factor—you never want to go underground, you never want to go into the basement, you should never, never go into dark places. We want to try and make it as claustrophobic as possible when you go underground, ‘cause that is what people don’t like.”

McCurdy was also thrilled to work with Wes Craven in particular: “Wes is a legend, an absolute legend as far as I’m concerned, so it is fantastic to be part of that legend… I’ve made a lot of other horror movies, and I’m a fan of the genre at the end of the day anyway. The most important thing to me is to make a horror film that I as a horror fan would want to go to the cinema and watch. And if I can do that, I’m happy.”

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PRODUCTION DESIGN
Because a large part of The Hills Have Eyes’s success stemmed from its vast and gorgeous desert location, the production team decided to return to Morocco for THE HILLS HAVE EYES 2. Morocco, with its miles of endless desert and striking mountain vistas made for a beautiful and eerie stand-in for the New Mexican locale of the film.