Hooper’s follow-up to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre might be his most misunderstood work, as it hints at what was to come as he moved away from the naturalism of his most notorious film
There was no chance in Hell that Tobe Hooper was going to have a comfortable career in the American film industry. Beyond the usual stories of the bad luck he suffered at the hands of Hollywood, with even his greatest triumphs being soured by bad business deals and poisonous rumors spreading from his highest profile sets, Tobe Hooper’s life as a filmmaker is one of the oddest careers in the history of American horror filmmaking. But even using the word “career” in relation to Hooper just doesn’t feel right. Hooper is responsible for at least two of the most famous and critically acclaimed horror movies of all-time — The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Poltergeist (1982) – but the rest of his career is messy in the most fascinating sense. The years between and after his two major critical successes are filled with movies and television productions that more often than not touch brilliance in their own cockeyed ways. And to make matters more interesting, nearly all of these movies have at one time been cited as the one that caused critics and fans to write Hooper off entirely. It’s easy to forget that the outliers in his filmography are the movies that actually connected with mainstream audiences. Hooper began by making strange avant-garde films in Texas. His instinct to follow the most bizarre urges of cinematic expression, no matter what the project was, more or less remained a constant.
Special effects and makeup artist Craig Reardon worked with Hooper on multiple occasions, first on Eaten Alive (1976) and most famously on Poltergeist. Reardon came to understand how to read Hooper in a way that many struggled to. “You’ve got to kind of lean in to catch what Tobe’s got to say,” Reardon said in a 2015 interview. “Sometimes he doesn’t articulate absolutely clearly what it is he wants to do, but you get the idea. He had wonderful imagery in his mind… In other respects, he was a little diffuse.” Reardon tells of an interaction on the set of Poltergeist, when Hooper approached him with a concept for a monster design. Reardon describes Hooper as mumbling and searching for the right words before tossing out that his creature is like a “snake pill.” Reardon eventually realized Hooper was referring to the old snake fireworks, the ones that start as little black tablets that, upon being lit, expand and contort like cigarette ash growing out of a miniature portal of fire.
As Reardon came to recognize, Hooper thought in complex and vivid imagery; imagery that he often couldn’t articulate. Hooper was described as brilliant and amiable outside of a film set, able to talk about nearly any subject. But once he was in production mode, he tended to disappear into himself.1 Other collaborators have spoken about this, including Robert Englund, who, perhaps better than anyone, got Hooper, how he liked to work, and where his instincts tended to focus. Much like Reardon with the “snake pill” monster, Englund learned to sift through the mumbles to grasp what Hooper wanted from his performance, often recognizing it wasn’t an emotion or a register of voice he was after, but a performance to match a color, like the red of a brake light on a car. Hooper himself spoke of his favorite collaborators like they were telepathic. He mentions James Mason, with whom he worked on Salem’s Lot (1979), as one of the best actors he ever directed because Mason “could read your mind and fill in the gaps with where you were trying to go with him.”
Hooper believed in energies, auras, and forces beyond our understanding or control. He often worked to put those energies on film, and whatever influences drove his creative instincts were disruptive and geared towards unsettling all who witnessed his art. Even his joyous debut short film, the Looney Tunes-esque The Heisters (1964), is filled with death, destruction, and music and sound levels set to overload. His films are deeply political, and often leave their most scathing impressions the further they lean into outlandish forms of expression. The Song is Love, his 1970 film about Peter, Paul and Mary, plays simultaneously as a concert tour diary and a dirge for the optimism of the ’60s folk revival. Hooper’s feature debut, Eggshells (1969), is similar, a dreamy but dead-eyed stare through the flower-powered kaleidoscope of the hippie counterculture. Eggshells recognizes how unrooted in reality their lifestyle was, and how close to conforming to traditional American values they were from nearly the start. It’s a film about ghosts and a fear for the future, and how every generation, no matter how hopeful it begins, is destined to have the life drained out of it.
And then came The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the film that brought the violence and terror boiling beneath much of his previous work to the surface and instantly cast Hooper into the pantheon of great American horror filmmakers. The film shows a particularly tragic death of the American imagination, of an isolated and outcast family left to their own devices in a big, wide-open country built upon promises of freedom and mythical notions of individuality that can disappear in an instant. Without the means to move on, and with the sudden threat of young hippies invading their space, they respond by bastardizing their obsolete rituals and holding dangerously tight to traditions, existing in a hermetic world where closed-mindedness becomes the last stand for misunderstood freedom.
With Texas Chain Saw, Hooper and his collaborators struck a nerve that has yet to stop twitching. It’s one of the few films I am willing to call perfect; it is utterly sublime in nearly every aspect. Texas Chain Saw was obviously a major success, but, for Hooper, there was an asterisk. He made very little money due to a crooked distribution deal. He also stayed in Austin, Texas, rather than follow any careerist momentum to Los Angeles, which kept him out of the industry’s orbit while his film was tearing up the box office. But even if everything would have gone smoothly for him, how do you follow a success like Texas Chain Saw? Its brilliance was immediately recognized and the film was scaring the wits out of everyone who saw it. Many in Hooper’s position would try to repeat: go to a studio and grab the cash and see what they could do with the same formula and a bigger budget. In a way, that’s what Hooper did — but again, there’s an asterisk.
Hooper signed on to direct a script that even he might not have realized how far up his alley it was. The film would become Eaten Alive, a film pitched as Jaws with a crocodile. It took many alterations to the original script, but Hooper was eventually able to use the project to engage with many of his greatest obsessions. It also points towards many of the stylistic tendencies that would become hallmarks throughout his subsequent career. Eaten Alive was far from a success when it was released. For the most part it was ignored. To this day, many critics incorrectly recognize it as a kind of sophomore slump or a mere rehashing of Texas Chain Saw. And while it remains one of Hooper’s most misunderstood films, it is also one of his most fascinating.
The creative situation Hooper walked into on Eaten Alive was unlike anything he had seen before. The producer who hired him was Marti Rustam. Rustam and Hooper could not have been more different, but it makes a lot of sense for these two to have ended up on a set together. Rustam was an Iraqi-born businessman whose first credits as a film producer were in the early 1970s. He mostly dealt in schlock, like Al Adamson’s Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971) and The Psychic Killer (Ray Danton, 1975). Rustam’s own work as a director includes the bonehead sci-fi flick Evils of the Night (1985), which features not only gratuitous nudity and gore but geriatric aliens — played by the likes of John Carradine and Julie Newmar — who steal the lifeforce of young coeds. In 1976, Hooper was, in the public’s eye, untried. Sure he had cut his teeth in Austin making underground films, but to the audiences who would eventually eat up Salem’s Lot on TV and Poltergeist at the megaplex, his name meant little as they lined up for Texas Chain Saw. But Rustam knew what that name could mean for his latest film. Hooper, once hired, brought aboard his Chain Saw writing collaborator Kim Henkel and drastically altered the shape of the film. Hooper exited the shoot before production wrapped over differences with Rustam, but the finished product remains quintessentially a Hooper film.
Under the guidance of Hooper and Henkel, Eaten Alive became about Judd (Neville Brand), a grizzled, shell-shocked veteran who mutters to himself and limps around his swampy Starlight Hotel and its attached zoo. Taking inspiration from the life of Joe Ball, the American murderer now known as the “Butcher of Elmendorf,” Judd’s zoo houses a giant “croc” — which he claims to be an alligator imported from Africa — who helps many of his guests check out. Judd snorts headache powder for a high and tends to go berserk on his customers, most of them females. Eaten Alive introduces us to Judd when a young woman, Clara (Roberta Collins), comes looking for a room after being fired from the brothel down the road. Clara lost her job because she refused to give in to the whims of Buck (Robert Englund), a client who also happens to be Judd’s powder supplier and a frequent guest at his hotel. Judd snaps upon learning of Clara’s employment history — his rants often convey a violent puritanical streak — and proceeds to kill and feed her to his croc. Shortly after, several more guests arrive, including a family of three, and Clara’s father (Mel Ferrer) and sister (Crystin Sinclaire) who have come looking for her. Judd explodes under the pressure, which results in multiple scythe killings and a feeding frenzy for his zoo’s main attraction.
The production was immediately beset with issues. The original plan was to film portions of Eaten Alive on location in Texas, but due to budgetary constraints, the entire shoot ended up in Raleigh Studios, the Hollywood soundstage where the pool scenes from Sunset Boulevard (1950) were filmed. Under the circumstances, in Hooper’s words, they decided to “Wizard of Oz it,” by isolating themselves within a controlled environment, setting the entire film at twilight, lighting it in blood-red neon, and “obliterat[ing] everything with smoke.” The camera Hooper had to use was an old Mitchell Blimp that he described as being “as big as a car.” The massive camera hampered his usually frenetic approach to shooting, but with the hazy artifice of the production, Hooper creates a different type of intensity. While similar in subject to Texas Chain Saw with the scythe-wielding Judd rampaging through the bayou, Hooper worked with what he had to create an atmosphere where the terror feels insulated like a dream. His move into the hotbox Hollywood studio to work with Rustam gave him a lot to experiment with, and the film allows a glimpse of what was to come in his later career as he moved further and further away from the naturalism of Texas Chain Saw.
Hooper’s best work creates a strange mix of the rustic and artificial — a synthetic antiquity where the dust and sweat of the past meets an alien future. Eaten Alive is the first of his films to look somewhat slick — but not slick in the usual cinematic sense; Tobe Hooper’s slick is like dirty oil shimmering under flickering bar signs. Everything feels outdated and lost in time. Characters seem to occupy different eras while passing through the same spaces. This bleeding together of eras shows throughout Hooper’s work from his early city symphony, Down Friday Street (1966), to Spontaneous Combustion (1990), which radiates 1950s America’s white picket quaintness with nuclear genetics to wreak havoc on the next generation. Hooper recognizes things that haven’t been entirely reckoned with in American society’s past. He transports them into an adjacent modern world where they are at once foreign and chillingly familiar. He summons the most primal of urges, and those urges trend towards violence.
Hooper also understood the distancing effect that viewers tend to expect from genre films. He uses that anticipated distance against us to make everything more visceral. In Eaten Alive, Hooper knows how familiar we are with lost figures arriving at backroad hotels in movies. When Roberta Collins, as Clara in her ridiculous blonde wig, arrives at the Starlight Hotel, the Psycho reference is evident. But Clara doesn’t even make it to the shower — she doesn’t even get to her room before Judd has fed her to his croc. Eaten Alive uses the familiar conventions, the blunt references to cinema’s past, and the campy artifice to lull us before shifting into stranger, more uncomfortable territory.
In Judd, the film takes us further into the headspace of the outcast and forgotten people who Hooper made infamous in Texas Chain Saw. Like the Sawyers, Judd knows no other way than to do whatever is necessary to maintain his way of living. Chain Saw lays it all out rather clearly and allows for more readings to be invited in — Vietnam metaphors, Watergate, Charles Manson connections. Through dialogue we hear of laid-off slaughterhouse workers fighting to maintain their known existence, and of the inhumanity of both slaughtering livestock and the cruel contradictions of an economic infrastructure that puts humans out of work in favor of machines that are more “humane” and cost-effective. Hooper is posing similar concerns in Eaten Alive and he casts all of these questions about where the human race is going, and the violence it takes to get there, within — and onto — the walls of the Starlight Hotel. We dwell with, not on, Judd, who has been shoved aside by society to spiritually fester with his jittery, incoherent ramblings. Judd has fashioned his business in the tradition of a sideshow attraction. His room, decorated with WWII weapons and a Nazi flag, shows Judd to be one of Hooper’s earliest characters to have witnessed, or participated in, some of history’s deadliest atrocities, only to bring the worst of it back home with him. And when Hooper allows the film to creep out for some slightly fresher air, back into the modern or “known” world of roadside bars or Hattie’s brothel, there is an overwhelming recognition of the cruelty and backwardness that continues to steer America’s future. The film opens with Buck nearly raping Clara in the brothel and being showered with apologies from management when Clara tries to fight him off.2 The barroom scene opens with racist dialogue from people drinking in the background, while the male bar patrons threaten each other and try to start fights. The music that beams in through Judd’s radio sounds at first like innocuous country western muzak. But a closer listen finds the songs that he uses to drown out the voices in his head to be not only about lonesome cowboys staying true to their ways, but of murder and incestuous love.
Hooper’s interest in forces from beyond plays a major, if not entirely clear, role in Eaten Alive. Early on, we watch a monkey in Judd’s zoo wither away under some kind of red, radiating energy while the gator slithers through the water. This moment has been accused of being almost gibberish, but those who paid attention to the solar flares in the opening credits of Texas Chain Saw will recognize its importance. Just as Hooper succinctly described Texas Chain Saw as being “about a universally bad [day]” while Saturn was in retrograde, he establishes that something fateful is taking place in the world of Eaten Alive. In a retrospective interview, he cryptically states that in the monkey scene, “something about the croc and that monkey knew it was time to die.” The monkey’s death arrives with no context, and the only follow up is the discovery of the monkey’s corpse by the family that checks into the Starlight. They soon suffer from a similarly cosmic meltdown. The father (Phantom of the Paradise’s William Finley) and mother (Marilyn Burns, Sally from Texas Chain Saw) are immediately established as far from the ideal couple. But when their daughter Angie’s (Kyle Richards) dog is eaten by the gator, they are all sent running to their room. Once there, Hooper essentially shoves this prototypical looking all-American family into a microwave to bake. The mother removes her phony black wig, inviting shadowy questions of what led this family to Judd’s hotel, adding yet another layer of artifice to the film. The father quickly becomes agitated. He begins contorting his face, barking like a dog, and imagining that he is being mutilated by his wife. He talks of eyeballs rolling on the floor as the veins on his forehead appear ready to explode in a deeply strange performance of emasculation and male anxiety.
Unlike Brand’s performance, which was largely improvised, Finley’s more extravagant choices were initiated through the script. Finley recollects in an Eaten Alive commentary track that his character was written by Hooper and Henkel in a style similar to James Joyce, which encouraged him to go as strange as he could. Clearly on the same wavelength as Hooper regarding the more ethereal potentials that Eaten Alive was reaching for, Finley plays the scene as if he were fighting off sinister energies from his wife. He holds out his clenched fist at her and struggles to stare her down before slipping back into a more traditional wounded male ego. He goes to “slay the dragon” who ate his daughter’s pet, only to be eaten himself.
These slips between heightened, almost possessed, states weren’t only taking place within the imaginary world of the film. Brand, who took the role largely because he related deeply with the character of Judd, was noted for having similar slips in and out of trance-like or delusional states while performing. Brand was a highly decorated soldier in World War II who came back with severe trauma. He was hospitalized and encouraged to try acting as therapy, which he pursued with success. But he had his demons and suffered from alcoholism. As Reardon says, by the time of Eaten Alive, Brand was “kind of sandblasted by life” and used the role to vent some of his issues. Reardon reflects that when Brand was playing Judd, he “was really the grim reaper.”
Brand, as mentioned, was allowed to improvise a great deal of his performance. He took charge of outfitting Judd’s bedroom with all of the WWII relics and really dug into the mind of his character. Hooper recollected a moment when Brand, between takes, snapped to attention, stating, “I’m here…” as if coming out of a dream back into his body. All of this suggests the atmosphere that Hooper created during his time on the Eaten Alive set, where he and his collaborators were freed to grasp at nightmares and bring them out to life under that red lighting.
Related: Salting the Franchise Fields: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 by Bennett Glace
This of course brought with it a fair share of real terror for the other actors. As Hooper admitted decades later, Brand’s behavior, in particular, would have gotten them in a lot of trouble under modern production standards. Members of the cast and crew, including Roberta Collins and Kyle Richards — who at the time was two years away from playing Lindsey Wallace in Halloween (1978) — have remarked upon how genuine Brand’s performance felt, and how the violence erupting from Judd seemed to come from a very real place. Reardon felt that Brand and Hooper “both arrived at their art from internal means.” There seems to have been an understanding between the director and his star of the role’s requirements that didn’t need to be discussed or questioned. The resulting performance, for better and for worse, speaks for itself.
As with a lot of Hooper’s work, something whimsical emanates from the horror of Eaten Alive. The little girl, Angie, is chased by Judd under the floorboards of the hotel’s porch to crawl with rats and face the crocodile at eye level. She is framed among spider webs and wire hoops, abstracting the sublevel of the hotel into a near dreamscape of all the things that haunt children in their sleep. In their intro to the book American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper (2021), Kristopher Woofter and Will Dodson state that while Hooper’s films do use landscapes and architecture in a metaphorical sense, they are also “spatial manifestations of the darker, revelatory nature of a reality that must be inhabited and physically traversed to be experienced.” It is in this aspect that Hooper strikes his most potent meanings. His films don’t rest on their metaphors or their subtextual potentials, but instead pummel, push, and tear through spaces overloaded with shifting colors and textures. Hooper fills his worlds with so much detail that it often feels like we are crawling or sprinting through the environments with the characters.
Hooper often speaks of the influence of Grimms’ Fairy Tales upon his work, and Angie and Judd meeting initiates perhaps his most twisted children’s adventure. The connection Hooper draws during Angie’s introduction using their matching limps — Angie wears a metal brace while Judd has a wooden leg — sets the stage for one generation’s violence and anxieties to reverberate through the next. As with many of the tales from the Brothers Grimm, the child has to deal with an array of terrors: murder, abandonment, and other tragedies. Angie’s parents scream and fight next to her as she recovers from witnessing the death of her dog. Then her father is killed and her mother is beaten and tied up to be tortured by Judd. Angie’s journey below the floorboards ends with her barely escaping the monstrous Judd, who dies in the teeth of his croc.
But no fairy tale moral can encompass what Hooper was working to put on screen. His films are about climates; they’re about exploring the atmospheres of their times and recognizing cyclical violence and evil throughout the ages; his films are about eternal hauntings. It is worth noting that in a group commentary on Texas Chain Saw with several of his collaborators, Hooper says the film was “inspired by Watergate times,” before laughing at the common academic notion that the film is about “the breakdown of the American family.” Sure, that is in there. But it’s only a part of the film’s fabric, just as it is in Eaten Alive. Rarely do we get the impression in Hooper’s work that he is merely “commenting” on relevant-to-their-times politics. Instead, he engulfs the viewer in the ever-present violence underpinning the push-and-pull of social progress.
Tobe Hooper’s films are often at their most unique when they resemble his style of speaking — when they are freed to mumble in a searching, exploratory manner. Beginning with Eaten Alive, Hooper’s films are often somewhat diffuse, but as he rides barrages of shifting colors and waves of material textures, the messy nature of his style becomes a power. Just as he was critical of American social norms and institutions, he presents viewers with a challenge through his films. He shifts our perceptions away from the familiars of standard narrative filmmaking and into stranger realms by overloading our senses and overwhelming our spirits in order to draw us out of complacent viewing habits. Hooper doesn’t just tell us what is wrong with American culture — he drags us through it.
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- Not to rehash the ridiculous rumor from Poltergeist that Steven Spielberg actually directed the film, but it is worth noting that Hooper’s tendency to retreat into himself during production seems to be what Spielberg was describing in the 1982 Los Angeles Times interview that started the whole debacle. In the interview Spielberg says, “Tobe isn’t … a take-charge sort of guy. If a question was asked and an answer wasn’t immediately forthcoming, I’d jump in and say what we could do. Tobe would nod agreement, and that became the process of collaboration.” I have no doubt in my mind that Hooper was the director of the film, but it makes sense that this trait of Hooper’s might not have instilled confidence in a hotshot producer like Spielberg when a blockbuster budget is on the line.
↩︎ - The early scenes of Buck’s cruelty towards Clara at Hattie’s were Rustam’s additions.
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