Ranking Every Tobe Hooper Film From Worst To Best
1. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
The most effective horror films are those which challenge the viewer to fill in the blanks for themselves, because nothing a filmmaker can show will ever measure up to the nightmares residing in our own imaginations.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre belongs to an elite group of the genre's finest. With its largely bloodless depiction of slaughter and implied cannibalism, the film proved less can indeed be more when you're trying to scare the snot out of the audience.
Not only did Tobe Hooper fly the flag for nuanced and visceral horror, he also exploded the slasher sub-category into the mainstream by introducing the world to Leatherface. Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger... the chainsaw-wielding maniac predates them all.
With Texas Chainsaw, Hooper proved where his strengths as a filmmaker lay - he delivered it on a minuscule budget and got so much out of a relatively unknown cast.
The film's iconic imagery - from a blood-soaked Marilyn Burns screaming her head off, to Leatherface holding his chainsaw aloft - will remain burned into your retina after a single viewing, and that's Hooper's legacy right there.