Remembered mostly for one landmark film, Tobe Hooper still became one of the most emulated directors in the history of motion pictures.
I’m a sucker for numbers, statistics, and the like. I have a spreadsheet of over 800 horror films I’ve given one-line reviews. On a regular basis, it informs me of titles worthy of a re-watch and, just as importantly, keeps me from re-watching those odious pieces of cinematic shit I never want to see ever again.
For curiosity’s sake, this list is forever being sorted, cross-referenced, and ‘rejiggered’ (technical term!). I can see just how many horror films were out in 1981, which year had the most sequels, or the average number of titles I see each year.
During a recent slice and dice of this spreadsheet, I looked at a list I had compiled of my top 40 favorite horror films of all time. Like the rest of the list, I’m constantly bumping worthy items up the ranking while sadly demoting things that no longer have the sparkle they once did. In the midst of a recent shuffle, I noticed only one horror director had three entries on my top 40 list.
Willard Tobe Hooper was born and raised in Texas, attending UT Austin before venturing into the world of teaching. He later started making documentaries and threw together his first feature, EGGSHELLS, an otherworldly take on the late 60s counterculture, for less than $50,000. Though the micro-budgeted feature didn’t exactly make waves, it was tinged with a subversive commentary on political and societal mores that would bleed (and how!) into Hooper next film, THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE.
Though Hooper’s career courted controversy at almost every turn–from the did-he-or-didn’t-he-direct POLTERGEIST debate to the floundering multi-picture deal with Cannon Films that signaled the downturn of his career–nothing he made afterward ever had the impact of CHAIN SAW.
Christ, there’s nothing I can say about the film that hasn’t already been debated for the past 50 years. The movie has become not only a horror landmark, but a cultural touchstone. For fuck’s sake, they sell stuffed Leatherface dolls in Walmart these days! If that isn’t an indication of influence, I don’t know what is. Almost every film Rob Zombie has ever made has been a tribute to Hooper’s classic, and he ain’t the only one. Stanley Kubrick went on record as a fan of the film, and directors as diverse as Wes Craven and Ridley Scott have cited its influence.
As a teenager, I met Hooper very quickly in the late 1980s. He was being mobbed by a crowd of fans I was part of, and his demeanor emanated an air of jarring discomfort, possibly even terror. Even then at my young age, I had heard the rumors of the usually mild-mannered Hooper having a nervous breakdown a few years earlier. As I watched him sign autographs as fast as humanly possible while trying to keep his composure, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. Sure, he was a wealthy, respected, and talented filmmaker, but Tobe Hooper seemed to be a victim of expectation, and THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE set the bar incredibly high for him for the rest of his life. Nothing could compete. It was a shooting star that burned Hooper every time he tried to let go of it and move on to something different.
In the end, though, Hooper should be remembered for more than THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. The sleazy authenticity of THE FUNHOUSE is one of the director’s unsung gems, and whether he or Spielberg had their hand on the throttle of POLTERGEIST is ultimately a moot point, as there’s no denying the cigar-chomping Hooper had significant influence on the film. His leaner later years at least produced some interesting small-screen entertainment. This included episodes of TALES FROM THE CRYPT and MASTERS OF HORROR, but, most importantly, his lone foray into music videos yielded a mini-masterpiece: Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself”. Go check it again and see if you can spot Leatherface’s sledgehammer in it!
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