Cult film-maker inspired a new genre
TOBE HOOPER was desperate to come up with an idea for a scary film when, standing in front of a chain saw display in a hardware store, he had his eureka moment.
It was Christmas 1973 and everywhere he turned in the store all he saw was a sea of people.
“I just wanted to get out of there,” he later confessed. “And that’s where the idea came from. If I pick this damn thing up and start it, they’ll part like the Red Sea and I can get out of here.”
While Hooper fortunately didn’t act on his thoughts, the idea led him to make his breakthrough film, the 1974 cult classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. More masterly horrors followed from the filmmaker including 1982’s Poltergeist, based on Steven Spielberg’s script and the critically acclaimed 1979 miniseries Salem’s Lot, from Stephen King’s novel.
William Tobe Hooper was born in Austin, Texas, and after studying film at the University of Texas worked as a documentary cameraman and a college professor.
In 1969 he made his feature film debut with Eggshells, described as “a mixture of Andy Warhol’s Trash and Walt Disney’s Fantasia” but Hooper was convinced he needed to make something more shocking to get mainstream attention. A couple of years later he hit upon the idea for Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Marketed as based on a true story, it featured the chain sawwielding villain, Leatherface, and his motley family of cannibals who terrorise a group of young people on an isolated homestead. Apart from Leatherface being loosely based on serial killer Ed Gein, the tale was otherwise fiction.
Made for less than $300,000 and shot in Texas, the film would gross about $30million in the US alone. Critics were not as impressed. An official of the British Board of Film Classification refused to certify it for years, describing it as symbolising “the pornography of terror”.
Nevertheless, the movie would inspire a host of splatter films in its wake and in 1986 Hooper directed its sequel, starring Dennis Hopper.
His other films in the genre included Invaders From Mars, and on TV he was responsible for directing episodes of the series Freddy’s Nightmares. He was also behind the camera for Billy Idol’s music video, Dancing With Myself.
Hooper’s last film was 2013 supernatural thriller Djinn.
He is survived by two sons.