Ranking Every Tobe Hooper Film From Worst To Best
Chainsaws, poltergeists, space vampires and more.
Modern horror has lost another founding father as Tobe Hooper passed away last weekend at the age of 74, his death coming just two months after George A Romero's and almost two years on from Wes Craven's.
The director is celebrated for injecting raw intensity into the genre and pioneering indie filmmaking with his cannibalistic classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a movie which cost just $300,000 to make.
With its shrewd, implied violence and gross misuse of power tools, the original Texas Chainsaw really got horror fans' motors running and raked in more than $30 million at the box office. It also spawned a franchise that's still going today and established Leatherface as the first slasher hall of famer.
Hooper rocked horror to its foundations once again in 1982 when he teamed up with Steven Spielberg on Poltergeist, a groundbreaking ghost story which gives Stephen King's IT a run for its money in the terrifying clown stakes.
Poltergeist's success aside, Hooper always had a mixed track record working in Hollywood but continued to fly the flag for grassroots filmmaking with indie projects such as The Mangler and more recently Mortuary.
Although the horror mastermind was unable to recapture the success of his early work, his contributions to the genre over the years cannot be overstated.
13. Djinn
After the Wishmaster series, the world didn't need another bad film about evil genies, but Tobe Hooper's final contribution was to bring us one nonetheless.
Released in 2013, Djinn is the last movie the director would ever helm, and that's the only reason it deserves so much as a passing mention in his obituary.
Although Hooper can at least claim to have delivered the first supernatural thriller to debut in English and Arabic, Djinn goes down as a failed attempt to tap into Emirati folklore and give the country its answer to Rosemary’s Baby.
All of the cardinal sins you'll find in most bad ghost stories are committed here, from clunky dialogue to wonky special effects topped off with an excessive serving of cheese. If only this one could be put back in its bottle.