Like many other of the scariest stories ever told on film, the 1977 movie “The Hills Have Eyes” by director Wes Craven is based on real events. Or in a previous report, at least.
In the film, a lovely family (like all the families in horror movies, right?) is traveling from Ohio to Los Angeles, California.
They decide to stop in a gas station in the middle of nowhere in Nevada, where they have the misfortune to become the next victims of “Papa Jupiter” and his family.
Well, Scottish folklore has it that during the sixteenth century, there lived near Edinburgh a man named Alexander Bean, popularly nicknamed “Sawney.”
He became the leader of a clan of no less than forty-five people, dedicated to killing and eating the travelers that passed by a road near the cave where they all lived.
Keep on reading as we explore ten details of this legend and how it inspired one of the most famous horror cinema movies.
10 /10 The Ayreshire Countryside
If you were a traveler of the Scottish Ayreshire countryside of the 1500s, according to Alexander Smith’s 1719 book entitled “A Complete History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen,” you would have heard of the many strange disappearances that took place around those parts.
You may also have been questioned yourself, and who knows if also lynched by the justice-seeking populace of these places: they were looking for revenge for over one thousand disappearances that had been taking place for years.
But no matter how many innocent souls they lynched, the disappearances kept happening.
9 /10 A Runaway
Indeed, the real guilty person was no other than a runaway son of a hedge-trimmer and ditch-digger, whose name was Alexander Bean and who ran away from home in the company of an evil prostitute who had been accused of being a witch: Black Agnes Douglas.
Together they started life as highway people (highwayhusband and highwaywife, you may say), robbing the travelers that passed through the deserted and lawless roads of that part of rural Scotland.