Notes on Tobe Hooper (1943-2017)

1) I did­n’t see 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre until 1977 or ’78, when I was a pro­jec­tion­ist at my col­lege stu­dent cen­ter and had to screen it. I say “had to” but I had always wanted to see it. Particularly since hav­ing seen Johnny Rotten wear a “I Survived The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” t‑shirt in some pic­tures of a Sex Pistols gig. The movie’s lur­id rep scared me a little so I, like a lot of people com­ing to the movie for the first time, was a little sur­prised at how not-gory it was. Although of course it was still entirely har­row­ing. And rather unex­pec­tedly funny. I became obsessed with the movie right away and have seen it almost as many times as I have seen Psycho or Repulsion or any of the oth­er romantic com­ed­ies I’m so steeped in. 

I was lucky to have friends who were equally obsessed, and we largely talked to each oth­er in Massacre dia­logue. If Ron was going down the the con­veni­ence store to get cigar­ettes, I’d say, in my Franklin voice, “I go witcha! I go witcha!.” Peter came up with the very amus­ing idea of adapt­ing the movie into a twelve-tone opera, and he would crack me up by dis­son­antly declaim­ing “Look what your broth­er did to the door” in German. Anything our crew approved of was “good bar­be­cue.” And so on. 

The movie was also in my mind inex­tric­ably tied up with punk rock, which I was also heav­ily into at the time. There was Johnny Rotten’s t‑shirt but there was also the fact that the Ramones had a Texas Chainsaw Massacre-inspired song on their first album. The Ramones’ first two albums and Texas Chainsaw Massacre were to me standard-bearers of a cer­tain kind of American art: cheaply made but not ama­teur­ish, fast, brash, loud, unset­tling, pop but intel­lec­tu­al, intel­lec­tu­al but pop, and also in some not insig­ni­fic­ant way, very free. 

2) In 1979 my bud­dies Ron and Steve went up to Toronto’s Festival of Festivals (which is now the Toronto International Film Festival) to see the crit­ic Robin Wood (with whom Steven had stud­ied) head a multi-session sym­posi­um called “The American Nightmare” in which the films of Romero, Hooper, De Palma, Cronenberg, and oth­er dir­ect­ors were dis­cussed. Many of the film­makers them­selves atten­ded, although sit­ting here right now when it’s too early to call Ron or Steve, I don’t recall if Hooper had been among them. I could­n’t go, as I had zero money, but my pals very con­sid­er­ately brought me back the pro­gram, which con­tained essays by Wood and Richard Lippe. Reading these pieces val­id­ated a notion that was incho­ate in my 20-year-old brain, which was that genre films were worth tak­ing ser­i­ously. I began, in a small way, to explore on my own what made movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre tick.

3) The film Hooper made after Massacre, 1976’s Eaten Alive, was a nasty funny grisly guign­ol which made the best use of Neville Brand since 1965’s That Darn Cat. Nevertheless, it did not deliv­er quite the fris­son that Massacre did. That’s anoth­er thing Hooper’s movie had in com­mon with the Ramones; you come out with some­thing that start­ling right off the bat (in the case of the Ramones I would say it was the first two albums, released with less than a year divid­ing them, that count here), it’s hard to top. It’s even harder I sup­pose when the artist has pro­duced that some­thing with a rel­at­ive lack of self-consciousness. That Hooper did not neces­sar­ily want to be a genre director—there was a sense that Massacre sort of wanted to be at least in part a calling-card film, but bus­ted through the bound­ar­ies of such a product in a way that even its cre­at­ors wer­en’t fully in con­trol of—could have con­ceiv­ably com­poun­ded the chal­lenge. In any case, regard­less of who­ever “really” dir­ec­ted 1982’s Poltergeist, my Massacre crew and I left our first screen­ing of it try­ing to tell ourselves that our man Tobe had not been TOO thor­oughly Spielbergized. 

4) Like so many, my boys and I were very con­fused by 1985’s Lifeforce. We were of course very enter­tained but not quite will­ing to go so far as to say it was good. I can see that at this very blog, almost ten years ago, I remained non-committal. Well nev­er mind that shit. It’s great. Hooper’s decision (it it was indeed his) to leapfrog back from Alien and make a full-on Hammer-style space vam­pire movie, com­plete with drib­bling las­ci­vi­ous­ness, was, if not revolu­tion­ary (ideo­lo­gic­ally it’s irre­fut­ably reac­tion­ary), hil­ari­ously trans­gress­ive on a kind of termite-art level. 

5) By the time I landed at Première magazine in the 1990s, Massacre had become at least semi-respectable, so much so that, in my short lived film-technique column in the back of the book, I was able to use Pam’s fate­ful walk from the swing to the house as an example of a great track­ing shot. It is indeed, because we have some ink­ling of what’s going to hap­pen to her when she gets to the porch (and what hap­pens is actu­ally way worse than what we might have been ima­gin­ing; the guy who went in before her was pretty much done with a blow to the head). It’s entirely worthy of Hitchcock’s Psycho and also entirely its own thing. I can­’t find the piece itself. I remem­ber I might have done a phone inter­view with cine­ma­to­graph­er Daniel Pearl, who had by this time gradu­ated to dir­ect­ing music videos (includ­ing at least one for Mariah Carey). He men­tioned that the loc­a­tion itself sug­ges­ted the shot, which was accom­plished with a rel­at­ively small track and a simple tilt. The res­ult is an enorm­ity, doom embod­ied in the loom­ing façade of a white house we know now is hardly inno­cent. It’s a nice door, a shame that the old­est son had to ruin it…