American horror iconoclast Tobe Hooper’s bestfilms spoketo his weird, bitter sense of humor. Hooper would try, in a handful of post-“TheTexas Chain Saw Massacre” efforts,toconfirm what many fans of that earlier film already knewabout that darkly comic 1974 horror show of pitiless post-Vietnam disillusionment: everything is a joke because nothing is funny in a world hell-bent on its own destruction. “TheTexas Chainsaw Massacre 2,” the queasily comic1986 sequel,often plays out likea punch-drunkself-parody. The Hooper-directed sequel’smost memorable scenes are tellingly the oneswhere Dennis Hopper’s impotent ex-Texas Rangerarms himself in alumberstore with chainsaws of various sizes, and then latersword-fightsflesh-wearing psychopathLeatherface … with a chainsaw. Before that,Hooper siccedgonad-shaped aliens on poor littleHunter Carson in his beguiling 1986 “Invaders from Mars” remake. And don’t get me started onjoyfully lurid 1985 scifi/horror hybrid “Lifeforce,” the “Citizen Kane” of sex-negativenaked-space-vampirefilms. The fact thatMathilda May’s clothing-challenged cosmicsuccubus antagonist is discovered aboard a spaceship that looks suspiciously like an I.U.D. says a lot about Hooper’s knowingly twistedsensibility.
Hooper’s style would change over time as his career hit more valleys than peaks, especially after rumors about whetherhe really directed “Poltergeist” overshadowedhis involvement in that pop horror milestone. But if you watch enough of his films,you can’t help but feel likeHooper never really tookhorror tropesseriously, not even the ones that heinstinctivelystumbled through in his breakthrough 1974feature. Then again, one of the reasons that“TheTexas Chain Saw Massacre”left a searingbrandupon the brains’ ofgenerations of horror fans and filmmakersis that Hooper caught viewers completely by surprise. I suspect that heknew he couldn’t capture that kind of lightning in a bottle twice, though he would necessarily try anyway. There was, in that sense, a dark creativedesperation, and gallows humor coursing through the arteries of hisdisjointedfilmography.
You could even seeHooper’spersonalityin lesser efforts like “Spontaneous Combustion,” with a lead performance from Brad Dourif that is unhinged in a way that makesthis otherwise stillborn 1990post-atomic-age creature feature fitfullycompelling. Even “The Mangler,” a disposable Stephen King adaptationabout a possessed laundry-folding machine, has a handful ofindelible images, especially anything involving thefilm’s inhuman,industrial-agevillain which, in the right light, looks like a more nakedly maliciousversion of the man-devouring machine that gobbles up Charlie Chaplin in “Modern Times.” Hooper’s films stand apart from the post-golden-agework of contemporaries like George Romero, and Wes Craven because they arecharacteristically infused with barely-sublimatedresentment and self-conscious regret about their inability to escape the trappings of the horror genre.
To get in onthe gag, you’d have to start with “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” a film that getsmore disturbing and funnythe more you watch it.You can never tell how seriously you can take Hooper’sfilmbecause what made his and co-writer Kim Henkel’s pitiless scenario so upsetting is thatit almost neverlets up.There’s nomoral relativityin “TheTexas Chain Saw Massacre,” notlike thereis in Craven’s “The Last House on the Left.” And there’s no superficial humanity to Leatherface’s family as there is inRomero’s “Night of the Living Dead”since all ofthe Leatherface household’sdomestic activities are grotesque. Just look at the scene where Leatherfacesprints after the lateMarilyn Burns’s heroine Sallyin the woods at nightfor what feels like aneternity.Leatherfacedoesn’tstalk his prey, so the choreography—or maybe just the roughtrajectory—of this chase scene is ragged and inelegant. What makes it so disturbing is that Leatherface seems inexhaustible, and omnipresent.You sometimescan’ttell ifthehelplessnessyou feel while watchingthis sceneis itself the punchline, orthe set-up to a gruesome,still-unfoldingshaggy dog joke.
This sequence is even funnier and moresurrealwhen you realize that Gunnar Hansen, the 6’4” Icelandic actor who played Leatherface, was performing this scene on a 12-16 hour day while sweating through his onlycostume (it was summer in Austin, and temperatures ranged from 90-100+ degrees Fahrenheit). Hansen’scrudeflesh-suitmake-upwasdesigned by artdirector Robert A. Burns, andpatched together with stitches and wire. The amateurish, hand-made qualityof Burns’s handiworkenhanced the effect of Hansen’s ghoulish appearance both for hiscastmates, who did not see Hansen in full make-up until their characters were assaulted, and for viewers, who believed that thisskin-shroud was fashioned by Leatherface out of hisvictims’ body parts. The deeper you examine this scene, and how it works, the more you realize that it’s making you squirm with laughter because it’sendlessly dark.
Hooper would go on to make a handful of films before revisiting Leatherface in the fitfully effective 1986 tongue-in-and-out-cheek horror-comedy “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.” That film’s very existence is a product of Hooper’s wayward career, which sadly did not take off thanks partly to the controversy surrounding hisauthorshipof“Poltergeist.” Hooper would spend the rest of his career defending himself fromaccusations that claimed his contributions wereminor compared to the directorial work ofscreenwriter/producer Steven Spielberg’s. First there was a 1982Los Angeles Times article that suggested Spielberg was the film’s real helmer. Then cast and crew members delivered conflicting reports followed, including the late Zelda Rubinstein’s not-too-subtle insinuation that Hooper was incapacitateddue to cocaine use.Spielberg himself could not stop these rumors, so it’s not surprising thata new wrinkle is added to the Spielberg vs. Hooper story every few years, like Blumhouse‘s recent interview with “Annabelle” director John Leonetti about brother and “Poltergeist” cinematographerMark Leonetti’s experience working on that earlier film’s set. According to Mark, Spielberg did a lot of heavy-lifting for Hooper in anticipation of an impending director’s strike.Still, the general consensus at this point, is that while Hooper was involved behind the camera,his work was perfected, or adjusted by Spielberg.
Fast-forwardfour years later, when “TheTexas Chainsaw Massacre 2” went to be the most successful of Hooper’s three collaborations withepochalIsraelischlockmeistersMenahem Golan andYolan Globus. The film did so well for Golan and Globus’ Cannon Groupthat he was, at one point,nominally attached to direct a Spider-Man movie during the brief period that Golan and Globus owned the rights to the Marvel Comics superhero. Still, it’s telling that “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2” was, on many levels, an over-sized, playfully immodest response to Hooper and Henkel’s earlier film. Their previous commentary onpost-Summer of Love Americans’ failure toforce a paradigmshift away fromsociety’s general trend ofobjectifying andterrorizingwomen is subtle compared to the ostentatious,anti-final girlrole that heroine Caroline Williams takes on as radio DJ Vanita “Stetch” Brockin “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.” The film tellingly concludes with a shot of Williams twirling around the chainsaw she uses to defeat Leatherface with, a callback and reversal ofthe very ending of the first “TheTexas Chain Saw Massacre.”
Not everyone got, or maybe more accuratelyappreciated the humor of “TheTexas Chainsaw Massacre 2.” For example,Rick A. Burnsdisliked the relatively polished look ofmake-up artist Tom Savini’s design for Leatherface. Burns probably understood thatthe humor in “TheTexas Chainsaw Massacre 2” stemmed from the understanding that whileeverything is bigger,nothing has substantially changed. But so what?The dark road that MarilynBurns, laughing maniacally while covered in blood, ridesdownat the end of “TheTexas Chain Saw Massacre?” That’s the ’80s the Hooper sends up in films like this sequel, as well as “Lifeforce,” “The Funhouse” and “Invaders from Mars.” It’s fitting then that, while “Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2” was made in 1986,it was the last feature film Hopper made during the ’80s. What else could he say about his disgust abouthis participation andinability to prevent the sheer empty-headeddecadence of the period? The film remains loud, unpleasant, and sometimes rather inspired.It’sjust asmucha productas a critiqueof the maximalist excesses that Hooper,screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson, and their collaborators targeted, right down to its “The Breakfast Club“-mocking poster.
In the following years, Hooper’s projects were often defined by their wild tonal shifts from goony gross-out humor, as inhis contributions toEC Comics-inspired ’90s projects like“Tales from the Crypt,” “Perversions of Science,” “Night Terrors,”and “Body Bags,” tomerciless darkness, as in his two short contributions to the short-lived“Masters of Horror” TV anthology series in 2005 to 2006. These projects all feel like they were made by a singular personality, despite their varying degrees of quality. I can’t think of too many otherfilmmakers whose horror films are as inflected with suchcreativehelplessness, and mirthless humor (maybe Lucky McKee and Takashi Miike). Hooper’s films alwaysgive me thesense that he might, at any moment,take a hard-left turn, andbrattily self-deconstruct everything that came before him. Horror was always a funny business for Hooper, and it showed bythe way thathis audience’s laughterstuck in our throats.
