9 Horror Directors Who Deserve An Honorary Oscar
3. Tobe Hooper
As blackly comic as Night Of The Living Dead was subversive, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (the onscreen title) is a virtual textbook on how to make a claustrophobic, trend-setting genre piece with modest resources. Sensationalist but unforgettable, violent but not gory and unrestrained but never camp or overblown, TCM should be screened to the makers of modern multiplex horror pictures as an example of how to get it right.
No career could produce two movies of that calibre, but Hooper came pretty damn close with Eaten Alive, Poltergeist, The Funhouse and Lifeforce. They have a nice line in black humour, eccentric characters and a garish, unsettling look that influenced, among others, Rob Zombie. Face it: every time you see a movie about backwoods cannibals, you’re watching a movie made by someone who grew up watching Tobe Hooper’s movies.
Lauded by author Carol J Clover, in her seminal study Men Women And Chainsaws, as “a jolting experience in more ways than one”, Chain Saw’s unrelieved intensity influenced genre filmmaking more than any picture since Night Of The Living Dead, and you can feel Hooper’s economy and dark humour present in everything from Pete Walker’s films to Rob Zombie’s 31.