The reception of Tobe Hooper movie all in all follows the pattern common to his colleagues who made their debut in the midst of a climate of protest: like John Carpenter (whose first work is Dark Starmade in 1974), as George Romero (Night of the Living Dead1968), as Sean Cunningham (with the erotic film Together to mark its debut ten years before the horror Friday the 13th), as Dario Argento (The bird with the crystal feathers1970), Tobe Hooper he paid the price of being an author horror in the seventies. And he paid for it with greater intensity than the others, given the gap that separates the relevance universally recognized today in Do not open that door (1974) from what is attributed to the rest of his filmography, with no major differences from one film to another. It’s a well-known picture and it’s symptomatic, on a large scale, of the reputation and cred of the horror genre as a whole.
In the audience of acolytes gods horror movie no one would dare to question the singularity and prestige of Tobe Hooper’s gaze (or that of Romero, or Stuart Gordon, or others), but it is a matter of recognition that is often limited and confined in time. With the sole exception of Wes Craven, who thanks to Kevin Williamson and the success of the saga of Scream managed to redevelop his name (with a career that until then certainly didn’t need to), all “masters of thrill” are masters until they stop being.
And the moment in which they cease to be, in which “they no longer have anything to say”, would be the moment in which experience and artistic maturity lead them towards the exploration of new shores, of new ways of making cinema (although always horror) and to update one’s gaze on the matter of nightmares. A fate that, judging the fortunate trajectories of the non-horror masters of the same generation, seems to be reserved exclusively for those who have been concerned with tickling the fear and most despicable impulses of viewers.
Tobe Hooper: Misunderstood by critics and audiences
To understand how much Tobe Hooper’s path, in particular, serves as a model for this trend, it is enough to observe the progress of his career in the main aggregators of critics’ and public’s votes on his films: on Rotten Tomatoes and on Metacritic the same can be seen difference in evaluation between the works of the seventies or early eighties and the more recent ones with an appreciation (however discontinuous) for what there was between The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist (1982), a film that is rumored to have been made largely starts from the hand of the producer and screenwriter-script writer Steven Spielberg (non-horror author, in fact).
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Unique horror in Tobe Hooper’s timeless masterpiece
The public is even more severe than the critics, because it lowers the index of appreciation even for these two great works and is decidedly more drastic in evaluating all the others. A real pity, considering that Tobe Hooper’s authorial vision is perhaps the one which, more than the others mentioned above, in the most authentic way possible, brings the concept of the uncanny back to its purest sense, restoring to horror its innate ability to depict the family that degenerates and is corrupted to such an extent that it becomes totally foreign and unacknowledged.
The Counterculture Movie: Eggshells
A summary analysis would suffice Eggshellsenthusiastic and hyper-experimental first work of the young director, to realize it: out of every canon and every genre, Eggshells it uses a “horror” plot to make itself manifest from the hippie culture. Unlike all the other post-sixty-eight horror authors, inclined to find their freedom of expression in the affirmation of the lawlessness and the absence of rules (just consider the satirist Hollywood Boulevard e The Movie Orgyfilm montage by Joe Dante, or the anarchic irony of Carpenter in Dark Star), Tobe Hooper professes the same emancipation by channeling it into the values of the counterculture but projecting it into the very hallucinations that form the film’s skeleton, rather than studying it from the outside.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Leatherface Movie Timelines
Through the visions of the characters Hooper builds the very structure of Eggshells, which is therefore a film of, and not about, the youth counterculture. Shortly afterwards the same author proposes an equally intemperate reflection, but this time disillusioned, on the fate of those same ideals which by now, having passed the threshold of 1970, were beginning to undergo continuous rehashing until they gradually faded away. In 1974, in fact, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre changed the genre with unprecedented impetus, shaping the current form of the slasher film and establishing itself as a new starting point from which to start again to legitimize horror as an independent film genre.
The game-changer: Don’t open that door
In the seventies the genre cinema he reasoned on contemporary society through the dystopian worlds that were born from science fiction, dealing with the present with representations of possible, alternative or uchronic universes. Do not open that door performs an inverse operation, inserting the most classic horror-fantasy figures in a hyper-realistic context that could represent reality, or part of it. The monster is a chainsaw-wielding masked man (who isn’t even the worst villain), the cursed castle is an ancient house adorned with human remains, and the woman in danger is a chaste teenager on a desperate run.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022), the review: a chainsaw that makes a lot of noise about nothing
Cannibals constitute a patriarchal family unit, devoid of female elements or members, in which the notions of right and wrong cease to exist and to be understood or taught. Indeed, the actions of the wicked are dictated by the inability to change and by the total insensitivity to external elements, which instead are consumed and devoured to indulge the inhuman instinct of the dysfunctional family. Do not open that door inaugurates a new great era after the crisis of the great monsters of folklore (werewolves, vampires, mummies and demons), but the crucial aspect of Hooper’s masterpiece is the way in which the new form of the genre is intertwined with a sociocultural subtext structured on narrative tropes inspired by Psycho it’s at Chain reaction. What is disturbing is not so much the actions of the family itself or the iconography of Leatherfacedestined to make school, as much as the chilling prediction on the generational confrontation between adults and young people of the revolution, and on that family nucleus that will affirm its own system of values by engulfing all the others.
In ’77 That motel by the swamp subverts the sense of realism to return to a dreamlike dimension, which is grafted onto a narrative architecture very similar to that of the previous film. It is an imperfect but rare work, reluctant to provide the viewer with what they want and to offer, for example, characters with whom it may be possible to actively empathize. Denied spectator identification, an irrational, feverish atmosphere remains, difficult to describe but more palpable than any moment of violence.
The eighties: Poltergeist and the return to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre
The codes of Do not open that door are further updated in the carnivalesque reinterpretation that makes them The Tunnel of Horrors (1981), while Poltergeist (1982) reflects on the role of technology in human life using the language of horror on demonic possession. Television, in particular, becomes a magical and cursed object capable of reflecting the generalized panic of video and its power of manipulative suggestion (anticipating The Ringin which, however, television becomes a real slit on another timeless and absolutely subjective dimension).
Don’t open that door: we reveal all the secrets of the unmissable limited edition
After Space Vampires e Invaders is Don’t open that door – Part 2, in 1986, to constitute perhaps the most significant phase of Hooper’s authorial journey after the first chapter. It’s hard not to trace numerous followers of Leatherface and that narrative universe (such as, for example, the Rob Zombie films) to the sequel to Do not open that door, which transfers the summary plot of the first film into the clownish frame borrowed from The Tunnel of Horrors and amplifies it to a farcical, ironic, disproportionate in measures and interpretations (the excessive one of Dennis Hopper in the first place) and self-reflexive in multiple ways. The horror franchise trend was just emerging, but Hooper already anarchically rejects its typical settings.
The Nineties: Children of Fire and The Mangler
The children of fire opens the less celebrated period of Tobe Hooper, but appears as a title among those cited by Kiyoshi Kurosawa when he has to name his favorite films. Why is also all too evidenced by the thematic and conceptual similarities of Hooper’s film with Pulse (2001) o Cure (1997), in which the horror is declined to the terror of the return of the past and viscerally connected to the human drama. The discovery of the protagonist (Sam, played by the always excellent Brad Dourif) does not lead him to an active and conscious reaction, but to despair and bewilderment in the desolate lands of terror, depicted scene after scene through remarkable directorial devices that bring the director back to the indomitable dimension and radical of the sixties.
The Missing, taken from a story by Stephen King (it is not Hooper’s first approach to King’s subject: we recall the miniseries Salem’s Nights), identifies the horror in the working conditions inside an industrial laundry, in which male and female workers they begin to lose their lives following unexplained accidents caused by the compressor that gives the film its title. Hooper still uses the experimental language that he has rarely abandoned in his authorial path, but he does it in the service of the extraordinary social allegory coming from the source text: the workers live in the nightmare of the “machine” interpreted by a grandiose and repulsive Robert Englund who it controls, in a broad and literal sense, the gears.
Between minor works and unforgettable works, the horror movies by Tobe Hooper he was one of the most adamant and least quoted of the masters of the seventies generation that conceived modern horror. And yet it is, even in its deformities and weaknesses, an authorial and directorial gaze without equal and characterized by a proud and highly recognizable identity, often traced back to its great work of ’74. If it is true that temporal distance is the main factor in evaluating the ability of a work to read society even in the following decades, Tobe Hooper’s horror is a candidate to be one of the most successful examples of universal cinema and, together of your time.
