The Hills Eve Eyes

A Sinister Folklore Horror That Blends the Occult with Cannibal Terror

Forget everything you knew about The Hills Have Eyes. In 2025, horror takes a surreal new turn with The Hills Eve Eyes, a spiritual successor rather than a direct sequel — one that fuses backwoods brutality with ancient witchcraft and pagan ritual. Directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter, Longlegs), this film is slow, strange, and absolutely soaked in dread.

Set in the forgotten desert outskirts of Nevada during Halloween — or, as locals call it, “The Eve” — the story follows a group of amateur urban explorers who travel to an abandoned mining town rumored to have been wiped out in the 1950s by “something that came from the hills.” They intend to livestream the experience for horror content — but what they find isn’t just urban decay.

The hills are alive — not with people, but with watchers. Figures etched in shadows, with glowing eyes that appear only at dusk, watching silently from the ridgelines. The explorers soon discover old runes carved into the rocks, sacrificial pits still warm with ash, and strange animal bones arranged in spirals. Each night, one of them disappears.

The deeper they go, the clearer the truth becomes: the town wasn’t destroyed — it was consumed. And now, on this one sacred night, the spirits return to reclaim the living… not out of rage, but ritual.

Where the original Hills Have Eyes leaned into raw, gritty survival horror, The Hills Eve Eyes leans into atmospheric, mythic terror. Think The Witch meets Blair Witch, but with a burning desert instead of a dark forest. The pace is methodical, letting tension boil as paranoia tears the group apart.

Visually, the film is stunning. Golden-hour cinematography paints the desert in eerie beauty, contrasting with the unsettling silhouettes of “the eyes” on the hilltops. The sound design is sparse, with whispering wind layered with distorted echoes and unintelligible chants. The creatures — or spirits — are never fully shown. Instead, they're felt — through flickers, whispers, and moments of sheer silence that chill the spine.

The Hills Eve Eyes is horror for patient viewers — it won’t spoon-feed jump scares. It’s about what’s not seen, and the ancient, ritualistic horrors that predate modern fear. Its greatest strength lies in its ambiguity: are the monsters real? Or is this mass hysteria born from guilt and superstition?

Sinister, slow, and soaked in nightmare atmosphere, The Hills Eve Eyes is a bold, occult reinvention of backwoods horror. It reminds us that sometimes, the hills don’t just have eyes — they have memories. And on Halloween, they open them.