![]() Chain Saw, on a budget that has been reported somewhere between $100,000 and $300,000, turned his relentless and flesh-ripping movie into a sensation, grossing more than 100 times its budget since its initial release. He wanted to wreck audiences’ state of grace. His movies seeded ideas about Vietnam and familial tragedy, but they were never strictly about them. Hooper, a devotee of EC Comics and Hammer horror movies, was a little bit different. Texas Chain Saw was preceded by the rumblings of a golden age of terror innovation made by intellectuals and movie brats, which included The Exorcist, Last House on the Left, A Clockwork Orange, and eventually Carrie and Halloween. (Though the film is actually meticulously staged.) In a filmmaking era that defined influence, few were copied as often as Hooper’s masterpiece. With its serious, documentary-style opening scroll and whirling dervish camera movement, he also laid claim to a sort of “found footage” decades before we called it that. In Sally Hardesty (played by the actress Marilyn Burns), Hooper solidified horror’s “final girl” trope. The youthful, wounded pain that drives Leatherface - who Hooper has said was developmentally disabled - to kill predates Michael Myers in Halloween, Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th, and dozens of other masked slashers. The Sawyers were all laid off from their jobs at the local slaughterhouse, and the family makes do feeding their visceral desires by slaughtering and ultimately eating the human beings who find their way to their remote, entrails-stained Texas home. Leatherface - a chainsaw-wielding, skin-masked maniac - redefined monsters at the movies, removing the stigma of evil and replacing it with a childlike fear and obsession. I saw some things growing up that were bizarre and weird.” That feeling, built around a loose inspiration by the Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein, led to Leatherface and the Sawyer family. Growing up in Texas and Louisiana, Hooper told the journalist Jason Zinoman in his horror history Shock Value, “Those family dinners can go very wrong. Six years removed from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, a movie he adored, and five years out from his flop feature-film debut, Eggshells, Hooper set about to make something pulpy, furious, claustrophobic, and family-oriented. Hooper and his cowriter Kim Henkel called the manner in which they constructed the story of Texas Chain Saw “nightmare syntax.” It’s a flashing, strangulating style that created a template for thousands of horror filmmakers, but was never replicated. The macabre and the cruelly funny commingled in the opening images of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and throughout the films and television work of the writer-director Tobe Hooper, who died on Saturday at 74. A man in a wheelchair urinating into a coffee can. ![]()
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