Category: Directed by Tobe Hooper
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The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is either terrifying or horrifying. Sometimes it’s a combination of the two. Sometimes it’s visual terror or horror, sometimes it’s audial, sometimes it’s just implied. Director Hooper has three different styles–daytime, nighttime, indoor–and each goes from terror to horror multiple times. The film takes place over less than twenty-four hours,…
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The Mangler is terrible. One hopes the rumor producer Anant Singh replaced director Hooper is true because the film’s bad enough and desperate enough, you occasionally want to cut it some slack. You can’t, because it’s terrible, but you still kind of wish you could. Here’s the movie. Small town in Maine (it’s a Stephen…
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The Funhouse is terrifying. Director Hooper opens the film with a dual homage to Halloween and Psycho and then proceeds to do something entirely different in the end of this film. Like those two films, he takes a while to get to the violent acts. He does, however, announce he’s going to terrify the audience…
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Invaders from Mars, while it’s occasionally obvious it’s a comedy, can’t seem to decide. For a while, Hooper directs it absolutely straight–which doesn’t do the film any favors. Hooper’s composition is excellent (he and cinematographer Daniel Pearl have some great Panavision shots) but there’s no menace. Hunter Carson plays a kid convinced aliens have landed…
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In a practical sense, one can just watch Poltergeist and be in awe of the technical qualities. Hooper’s Panavision composition and Matthew F. Leonetti’s photography alone are enough to make it a singular experience. But then there are Hooper’s additional touches–like how a scene’s establishing shot is usually the third shot in the scene, the…
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During Salem’s Lot’s finale, Hooper gets this amazing physical performance out of Bonnie Bedelia as she is exploring the vampire’s lair. At that moment, I realized Hooper was intentionally making Lot palatable for a television audience—he could have made the entire three hours terrifying, but he was handicapped by the format. The miniseries issues are…
The Stop Button 