Tobe Hooper, whose 1974 shocker The Texas Chain Saw Massacre “became one of the most influential horror films of all time,” as Pat Saperstein puts it in Variety, has passed away at the age of seventy-four. Saperstein: “Shot for less than $300,000, it tells the story of a group of unfortunate friends who encounter a group of cannibals on their way to visit an old homestead. Though it was banned in several countries for violence, it was one of the most profitable independent films of the 1970s in the U.S.”
The second film to come to mind when we think of Tobe Hooper is, of course, Poltergeist. “In the summer of 1982,” wrote the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips just a few days ago, “one movie imagined with eerie accuracy the film medium’s most persistent and successful competitor—television—as a supernatural force fighting for control of American hearts and minds.” Thing is, “Poltergeist was in truth co-directed or, depending on various accounts, even primarily directed by Steven Spielberg.”
As Clarisse Loughrey reported for the Independent last month, those rumors “have now been more-or-less confirmed by one of Poltergeist’s own crew members, John Leonetti. A director now in his own right, behind 2014’s Annabelle, Leonetti worked as first assistant camera on the film and revealed the truth to the Shock Waves podcast. . . . ‘Steven Spielberg directed that movie. There’s no question,’ he stated. ‘However, Tobe Hooper—I adore. I love that man so much.’”
Whomever history decides to credit for Poltergeist, no one would dispute the lasting impact of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. As Gregory A. Burris wrote in the Monthly Review in 2010, critic Robin Wood
argued that this gruesome tale was not just a bloody exercise in senseless brutality and nihilistic spectacle; instead, it was an attempt at artistically rendering the state of human relations under the pressures of late capitalist society, and it therefore represented a far more significant social statement than anything offered by those more polished Hollywood horrors, The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976), The Sentinel (1977), and the like.
For Wood, it was no coincidence that director Tobe Hooper chose to portray his film’s macabre family of cannibals as former slaughterhouse workers who had been replaced by more modern methods and machinery. Out of work as a result of the callous and morally indifferent logic of capital, the family continues practicing their butchery upon human victims, thus reproducing the rapacious, dog-eat-dog conditions of capitalism quite literally.
Hooper, who was born in Austin, had a long and close association with the city’s alt-weekly, the Chronicle. Editor-in-Chief Louis Black spearheaded the rediscovery of Hooper’s first feature, Eggshells (1969), “very much a slice of life and rare record of Austin circa 1968,” as Black wrote in 2009. “Eggshells makes explicit what many have long assumed—that Hooper's sense of cinema is the defining characteristic that makes Chainsaw great. Eggshells is a true 1968 film, psychedelic and political; it seems clear that Hooper had watched more than a film or two by Jean-Luc Godard. The film celebrates alternative lifestyles and politics and people and an odd, kinky semimysticism that is grounded more in humor than the supernatural.”
“The influences in my life were all kind of politically, socially implanted,” Hooper told the Chronicle’s Marjorie Baumgarten in 2000. Chain Saw, he said, came to him “in a matter of literally seconds, literally under thirty seconds . . . The structural puzzle pieces, the way it folds continuously back in on itself, and no matter where you’re going it’s the wrong place. That was influenced by my thinking about solar flares’ and sunspots’ reflecting behaviors. That’s the reason the movie starts on the sun. It’s amazing how it all kind of zeitgeisted into my head so quickly.”
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