Texas Chain Saw Massacre director

LOS ANGELES — Tobe Hooper, the horror movie pioneer whose low-budget sensation The Texas Chain

Saw Massacre shocked audiences with its brutally frightful vision, has died. He was 74.

Hooper died of natural causes Saturday in the Sherman Oaks area of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County coroner’s office reported Sunday.

Along with contemporaries such as George Romero and John Carpenter, Hooper crafted some of the scariest nightmares to have ever haunted moviegoers. Hooper directed 1982’s Poltergeist from a script by Steven Spielberg, and he helmed the well-regarded 1979 miniseries Salem’s Lot, based on Stephen King’s novel.

Hooper was a little-known filmmaker of documentaries and TV commercials when he directed his most famous work: 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. He made it for less than $300,000 in his native Texas, and yet it became a landmark among slasher films.

Marketed as based on a true story, the film is about a group of friends who encounter a family of cannibals in Central Texas. The central villain, Leatherface, was loosely based on serial killer Ed Gein, but the tale was otherwise fiction. Hooper, whose inspiration struck while looking at chain saws in a department store, considered the film a political one — a kind of shock to the 1970s malaise. The film’s cannibals are out of work, their slaughterhouse jobs having been replaced by technology.

The film was controversial. Several countries banned it, and it wasn’t received kindly by critics, either. Roger Ebert said it was “without any apparent purpose, unless the creation of disgust and fright is a purpose.”

But its renown steadily grew, and many appreciated its harrowing craft. Carpenter, the director of Halloween, said Sunday that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

was “a seminal work in horror cinema.”