If that were true, I’d watch it all the time instead of hating it as a murky, unfunny, unscary mess.
“Hick’s Revenge” horror isn’t an early 1970s invention. See (the vastly superior and criminally underrated 1964 film) The Sadist, and the really terrible Two Thousand Maniacs (1963 — which is basically Brigadoon with hillbillies.)
The tropes mainstreamed by TTCSM and The Hills Have Eyes (note: link has brief audio) in the 1970s are in abundant evidence in both earlier flicks: southern hicks preying on lost urban outsiders with car trouble in a the dusty, rusty, rustic landscape, cut off from help.
Clearly the film makers saw those movies 10 years before they made their own.
