French director Alexandre Aja isn’t a complete sellout. For the American release of his horror film, “High Tension,” he’s figured out a “hybrid solution” to the “problem” of how to “best present the film in English to an American audience.” The problem being that lazy American teenagers don’t want to read subtitles, though they do want to see deranged hillbillies fellate themselves with the decapitated heads of foxy French chicks.

No doubt nudged by an American distributor with high hopes for “High Tension,” Mr. Aja enthuses in the publicity materials about how gosh-darn happy he is with his Yank-friendly improvements. To start with, he has “reimagined some of the characters as bilingual.” Careful, monsieur: In the land of the freedom fry, it’s a short step from bilingual to bi-you-know-what.

Next it was decided that the “dialogue-driven beginning of the film” would be dubbed, while in the section largely devoted to fleeing in boob-jiggling terror, the characters would be allowed to parler en francais. Whether sexy Marie (Cecile de France) and bodacious Alex (Maiwenn) survive their ordeal is for you to discover, but rest assured, my fellow illiterates, you will be spared from having to read such dialogue as “God, we partied too much last night!” and “Hey! I saw someone in the cornfield!”

I’m tempted to pan this version of “High Tension” for its loathsome linguistic pandering. Dubbing is acceptable in one circumstance only – kung fu flicks on late-night television – and then preferably if you’re somewhat less than sober. But here’s my problem, in plain English: “High Tension” is one hell of a horror film. The first 70 minutes are as tight, frightening, and yes, tense, as any scare flick in recent memory.

Lean as a straight razor, the preferred killing tool of its evil antagonist, the scenario is so simple and direct it almost feels theoretical, a diagram of the American Horror Film. Two girls visit a country home. A mysterious lunatic attacks them in the night. They flee, and are terrorized. Various people are killed along the way, by variously gruesome methods. The end.

Well, almost the end. The final 10 minutes of “High Tension” unleash a gotcha! twist of such titanic stupidity it nearly sinks the film. Worse, for a film this terrifically compact, the ending feels superfluous, irrelevant, arbitrary. A tale of ferocious irrationality wraps itself up with the silliest of psychodrama. It’s as if “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” were to end like an M. Night Shyamalan movie.

The French – so perverse! “High Tension” is just about the nerviest movie of the year until it loses all nerve. It is also superior filmmaking, even though it isn’t remotely original. From conception to (throat-slitting) execution, Mr. Aja’s opus is a self-conscious homage to canonical shockers like “Last House on the Left,” “I Spit on Your Grave,” “The Hills Have Eyes,” “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” and “Halloween.”

The blunt, brutal intensity of those pictures has influenced the imagination of French cineastes with particular force. They were a formative influence on Olivier Assayas, who found in their aggressive nihilism a cinematic equivalent of punk music. Mr. Aja is very young, still in his twenties, and almost certainly discovered this cinema on video rather than the social context of a movie theater. Perhaps that explains the apparent lack of subtext.

Released throughout the 1970s, the tense, caustic originals were part of a darkening American zeitgeist: the collapse of flower-power idealism, the nightmares of Vietnam, the decline of the city – all the usual suspects. More often than not, the villains were rural lunatics: The pure products of America gone crazy. Bad things happen when you leave the city.

The “deranged hillbilly” subgenre never really went away. As long as city folk make horror movies, they will do so about fear – and hatred – of the demographic unknown. Recently, however, it seems the dominant modes of the scary movie – “Scream”-style irony and Japanese-style trickiness – may be giving way to a mini-revival of the hardcore backwoods berserker. On the domestic front, the recent “House of Wax” was tangentially related to the genre. But the strongest resurgence of the style has come from overseas. The upcoming Australian shocker “Wolf Creek” is another old-school revival of grim 1970s brutality.

Are these talented young filmmakers simply recycling genre turf unprocessed by Quentin Tarantino and his followers? Are these exercises in style, or is there subtext to be teased out? Were it a purely American phenomenon, the return of the rural crazy might be theorized as blue-state hysteria over red-state ascension. But that’s for the future to unravel. “We are simply too close to the popular cinema of today to read it correctly,” posited Andrew Sarris at the end of the 1960s. The trend continues. A remake of “The Hills Have Eyes” is currently in production. It will be directed by Mr. Aja.