A staple among horror fans’ collections, some would attest that one could not go wrong with the 1977 film—The Hills Have Eyes. Made into multiple installments and remade multiple times more, it is a cult classic. The film garnered a lot of attention, good or bad, from critics to the crowd during its release, earning a ban from many. Set in the 1970s in Nevada, the story follows a family of seven people and two dogs out on vacation in a trailer. The family meets a man called Fred, who warns them of the dangers of the deserted landscape. They pay no heed and move on until they skid off the road. The trailer ends in a crash, and as they begin to explore the barren land, their dog is found mutilated and very dead. Throughout the plot, each member is hurt, raped, or killed brutally by a mysterious family which secluded itself from society.
While the rest is history, what behooved the audience was what came after. There was a rumor going around—the gruesome household in the movie was based on a real ‘family’—which sent a chill creeping up the audience’s spines. The truth that such monsters among the living could not be residing too far from their dwellings was unnerving, albeit exciting to others.
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The True Cannibals
Director Wes Craven confessed that the script was ideated from a similar Scottish course that took place in the eastern part of Lothian. The legend of the land uncovered the tale of a clan that lived among the caves. A tribe of humans that had chosen to depart with their humanity dating back to as far as the 16th century. It started with a single man named Alexander “Sawney” Bean. The young man had no skill for the labor of hedge-trimming and digging ditches like his father did. Soon enough, he met his partner in crime and matrimony, a Mrs. Bean, and in some variations, a witch by the name of Black Agnes Douglas. Sharing alike disinterest in working for food, the couple resorted to living in a cave in Bennane Head, where the tides of the seas flooded twice every day. As days passed, the number of travelers wayfaring across the Head seemed to diminish, and the count of people living inside the cave swelled.
One would think that these lonely voyagers were being adopted by Mr. Bean’s hospitable family. On a fine day, a man and his wife were on their way home from a fair when they were attacked by a horde of humanoid creatures. The frightened horse reared, and the woman tumbled over. In a blink of an eye, she was caught by one of them and disemboweled. The husband, overcome with grief and shock, watched on, trying not to meet the same fate. Luckily, another troupe was along the same path en route to their village when they came upon the horrific mutilation. The inhuman horde, which was now outnumbered, rushed back to their haven.
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The crestfallen widower took his plea to the Chief Magistrate of Glasgow. Something about the bizarre happening piqued his curiosity. He compiled his list of missing people and maimed fragments and brought it before the King. The ruling Monarch, King James I, perplexed by the situation, arrived promptly with 400 of his army and packs of tracker dogs to Ayrshire. Together with the countrymen, he began a manhunt, skirting the lands. The dogs soon got a sniff of rotting flesh in a waterlogged cave, and the battalion trailed. The dogs led the party down the Bennane cave, twisting and turning in its labyrinth until they witnessed the truest of horror that cuddled their blood and haunted their nightmares henceforth.
Piles and mountains of human limbs were staked up to one wall of the damp cave, and another hoard of valuables, clothes, and bones from leftovers was staked to the other. The Bean clan, 48 of them, was captured and brought to Edinburgh by the King to answer for their crimes. And the answer they did, but before answering, they confessed. They confessed to over a thousand murders spanning 25 years, some recalling over 5000. They confessed to dismembering and feasting upon their victims and to incest between siblings and parents. The crime was considered wicked and beyond madness; the King found it just to mutilate the men as they had done to the passersby and to burn the women like the witches he believed they were. Songs began to be sung upon the execution, and the tale was passed down from generation to generation until it reached the modern world.
Or Were They True?
Most researchers claim the story to be an absolute hoax. Scottish historian Dr. Louise Yeoman says that the fable, though was based in the 16th century, and the news of it cannot be traced further than the 18th century. During the Jacobite risings in 1745, the rebellion of the Scots against the British throne led the English Press to paint the men of Scotland in a murderous hue. They were portrayed to be barbaric and uncivilized for rebelling against their monarch. The Scottish cartoon was drawn and christened “Sawney” by the English papers. The idea behind the creation was that the Scots were not fit to have the kingdom for themselves because they were savage and lived in caves. That with the publication of “The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D” by James Boswell around the time of the war linked a parallel between the two where there was none to be linked, birthing the Legend of Sawney Bean.
The ‘alleged’ sources of the story themselves are scattered and confused over during which King’s rule Sawney Bean must have existed. Was it James I of Scotland in the 1400s or James I of England in the 1600s? No one knows.
A Similar Story From The Witch Hunts
The story of Peter Stumpp might be of much interest in light of Sawney. A tale from Germany about a man popularly known as “the Werewolf of Bedburg” who was brought to trial in 1589. By his own words, Peter, by the practice of black magic since the age of twelve, could coax the Devil into giving him a magical girdle that would allow him to metamorphose into a great wolf with cruel, sharp teeth that he would use to rip his victims apart. He confessed to 16 murders, out of which were two pregnant women whose unborn babies he had torn out from the womb and ate “panting hot and raw”.
The man even ate his own son’s brain while having an incestuous relationship with his partner-cum-daughter, Sybil. He added that he was in a relationship with a succubus gifted by the devil. In some alternatives of the story, as a young man, just like Sawney, Peter was too lazy to work and feed his young wife and began to hunt humans to feast on. One day a witch saw him jump over a dead body and granted him the power to transform into a wolf to aid his quest. His days were going well until the parent of a young child he was eating happened upon the scene to witness a humanoid wolf-life creature crouching over the body. Peter was then captured and brought before the court.
Whatever it might be, it ends the same way with his limbs being stretched out until they tore in several places, his joints broken to prevent resurrection before finally beheading and burning him on a pyre. Though he was not the first man to earn the title of ‘Werewolf’, he was the first confessed one of his kind. While that does not make his actions any less forgiving, it most definitely adds to the myth.
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