|
||||
TRIVIA | PRESS | QUOTES
|
||||
|
Tobe Hooper (1943 - ) Date of Birth: 25 January 1943 BIOGRAPHY Tracking the trajectory of Tobe Hooper's career is a sad and depressing experience. The man who made one the all-time great horror movies, who threatened to change the very nature of the genre, ended up reduced to a string of remakes, direct-to-video cash-ins and television guest directing gigs in an alarmingly short space of time. Born William Tobe Hooper in Austin, Texas on 25 January 1943, Hooper was quickly bitten by the film-making bug. At the age of 9 he started experimenting with the 8mm camera owned by his father and by the age of 16 had shot his first proper short film, The Abyss (1959), the first of series of such amateur efforts. Hooper decided that film-making was the way he wanted to go in life and attended the University of Texas at Austin's Department of Radio-Television-Film where he studies his future craft. He gained valuable experience producing a PBS documentary on the popular folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary before completing his first feature film, Eggshells: An American Freak Odyssey (1969), ostensibly a coming of age film about the Vietnam war but which also features a group of people in haunted house with a poltergeist. The film won a prize at the Atlanta Film Festival but was never officially distributed. Hooper took on a teaching gig at the University of Texas at Austin where he met and befriended several of the upcoming technicians and performers, including director of photography Daniel Pearl and actors Marilyn Burns. Bith would become key players in Hooper's next film, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). It's easy now to underestimate just how important The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is in the development of the modern horror film. While mainstream audiences were still reeling from the visceral onslaught of William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973), Hooper and his crew of largely University of Texas students created one of the most genuinely upsetting and relentlessly gruelling films ever made. It remains a masterpiece, not only of horror but of low-budget film-making in general, and it made the name of its director infamous. Tales of a nightmarish shoot and of people vomiting and passing out at screenings only added to the mystique and Hooper looked set for a fabulous career. But things started to go wrong for Hopper almost straight away. His follow-up film, the under-rated Eaten Alive (1977) fell foul of disinterested producers who recut the film then failed to promote it effectively and a possibly third film, The Dark (1979), was completed by John 'Bud' Cardos after Hooper was fired following disagreements with his producers. Things picked up a little when Hooper made his foray onto the small screen with his excellent two-part adaptation of Stephen King's Salem's Lot (1979), a faithful and at time genuinely scary work that was successfully released to cinemas in Europe in a recut version. But further disagreements with producers led to him losing out on Venom (1982) - a lucky move perhaps as the finished film, directed by Piers Haggard, was nothing short of a disaster. Hooper instead made The Funhouse (1981), a derivative but stylish slasher which once again fell foul of interfering producers, something that Hooper was going to have to start getting used to. It's a fun movie nonetheless, just lacking in the raw kinetic verve that Hooper had brought to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Those who had been following Hooper's career to this point were somewhat surprised by his next move - having created the rawest, most draining horror film of the 1970s and having pushed to the limit what was possible on prime time television in Salem's Lot, Hooper unexpectedly hooked up with Steven Spielberg to helm the big-budget horror film Poltergeist (1982). The film was a huge success, thanks in part to the state of the art special effects and to Spielberg's name attached as producer - though sadly Hooper's reputation didn't really gain anything from the film as most audiences and critics saw it as a Spielberg film. Indeed for years there have been stories questioning just how much of the film Hooper actually directed. In retrospect, Poltergeist was the apex of Hooper's career - if things had been tough before he made it, things were going to get an awful lot worse in its wake... After making a promo video for Billy Idol's Dancing With Myself, Hooper signed what seemed later to be a very ill-advised three film deal with Cannon Pictures in 1984 which resulted in three very different films united by a single factor - they were all box-office disasters. Lifeforce (1985) is one of the most ridiculous genre films of the 1980s, yet also one of the most entertaining, if, perhaps, for all the wrong reasons. Inspired by Nigel Kneale and his Quatermass TV shows and films it features insane dialogue, laughable situations and special effects overkill but Hooper keeps the pot boiling nicely throughout and the filnm is certainly never dull, Which is more than can be said for the good looking but vacuous and pointless remale of Invaders from Mars (1986), a well-deserved box office flop. In a last ditch effort to save a failing career, Hooper turned in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986), a messy but undeniably powerful follow-up which looks better now than it did at the time. Where the first film had relied on pace, atmosphere and a mounting sense of hysteria, the sequel went for splashy gore effects and although it's not a patch on the first film it now seems like that last gasp of creativity from a once promising talent. With the Canon deal firmly behind him, Hooper found himself skipping from project to project apparently without any real sense of direction. Spontaneous Combustion (1989) staggered out to a few theatres before gathering dust on the bottom shelves of video shops the world over, a part share in the John Carpenter headlining Body Bags (1993) was unremarkable and the Israeli made Night Terrors (1993) didn't even get a US release. But by this time, Hooper had found a new niche for himself - he had begun working on the plethora of horror, fantasy and science fiction shows that were suddenly springing up on US television, including episodes of Amazing Stories: Miss Stardust (1987), Freddy's Nightmares: No More Mr Nice Guy (1988), Tales from the Crypt: Dead Wait (1991) and the one-off I'm Dangerous Tonight (1990). As others tried to continue the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise without him, Hooper found himself consigned to the world of the direct-to-video low budgeter, with titles like Crocodile (2000) and continuing his work on television, taking part in such shows as Dark Skies (1996) and Taken (2002). A belated return to the big screen came in 2003 - as the dismal remake
of his seminal 1974 classic was released, Hooper turned his hand to
another remake, The
Toolbox Murders. Although it again proved that Hooper is
pretty much a one-trick pony (fine with power tools, not so hot with
anything else) it was far superior to the tedious original, suggesting
that Hooper still knew what he was doing in his best film in years.
Another theatrical release, Mortuary,
followed in 2005 and a slot on the anthology show Masters
of Horror (2005) confirmed that genre fans still held Hooper
in the highest regard - time will tell if he can pull off a very belated
comeback. But whatever happens, he is the man who made The
Texas Chain Saw Massacre - and for that I for one will
forgive him just about anything else he's done in his career since. * = television 1969 1974 1977 1979 Salem's Lot
(director) * 1981 1982 Poltergeist
(director) 1983 Fear - Angst (performer (himself)) * 1985 1986 Invaders
from Mars (director) The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (co-producer, script, director,
music) 1987 1988 1990 Leatherface:
Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (characters) Spontaneous
Combustion (script, director) 1991 Tales from the Crypt: Dead Wait (3 July 1991) (director) * 1992 1993 Night of the Living Dead: 25th Anniversary Edition (performer (himself)) Night
Terrors (director) 1994 1995 Nowhere Man: Absolute Zero (28 August 1995) (director) * Nowhere Man: Turnabout (4 September 1995) (director) * 1996 1997 Perversions of Science: Panic (director) * The Apartment
Complex (director) * 2000 Crocodile
(director) The Others: Souls On Board (director) * Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Shocking Truth (performer (himself)) 2001 2002 Taken: Beyond the Sky (director) * Masters of Horror (performer (himself)) 2003 The Toolbox Murders (director) Toolbox Murders: As It Was (executive producer) 2004 2005 Mortuary (director) 2006 1959 1963 1971 1983 1985 2001
Last Updated: 15 October, 2008
|
||||
