Remembering Tobe Hooper
If you were to ask me what the best horror film of all time was I would not hesitate for a second before saying Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Never has a movie been so disturbing while doing so little. Even as I close in on 32 I am still shook up when I watch the film. This is largely (if not entirely) thanks to the chaotic direction of Tobe Hooper.
Hooper was a gifted and underappreciated icon in the mainstream world. He was the Texas Chainsaw Massacre guy. The only other big hit he had under his belt was a decade later with Poltergeist and almost every report says that was more Spielberg than Hooper anyway.
Even among the horror community I find his filmography is painfully underrated specifically when compared to other fallen greats like Wes Craven and George Romero.
Beyond making the masterpiece that is Texas Chainsaw Massacre (and it is a masterpiece), there’s many lesser known films that Hooper had a hand in that are absolutely worth your time. For me personally I believe his forgotten masterpiece in 1981’s The Funhouse. The film feels like a slasher flick (and it is) but it’s a very deliberately paced film. You spend close to an hour with no kills as you learn more and more about your main characters and also learn to treat the carnival as a character in it’s own right. Suddenly at night, everything that can go wrong does.
He also gave us some top notch Grindhouse trash with 1977’s Eaten Alive. This film feels the most like a TCM sequel (even more so than Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2) as it’s got the same grainy and gross Texas backdrop but this time at a seedy motel where the crazed hotel owner keeps feeding his guests to his pet crocodile.
Hooper’s run with Canon films is legendary on absurd levels doing. He gave them a crazy adaptation of Invaders from Mars, the sexy space vampire flick Lifeforce and the previously mentioned Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (which might damn well be the craziest horror sequel ever). No matter what film he touched, good or bad, they were all uniquely their own. Today we lost one of the most creative directors in Horror. Let us remember him and everything he did for the genre.
