TOBE HOOPER: THE CREATOR OF THE TEXAS MASSACRE - BIOGRAPHIES - 2025

William Tobe Hooper is an American film and television director, producer, and screenwriter. He was born on January 25, 1943 in Austin, Texas and became especially famous for his horror movies. Although he has worked on different films, the most outstanding productions have been The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, released in 1974, and Diabolical Games (Poltergeist) from 1982.

Although these films, especially The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, marked a special moment for horror movies, Tobe Hooper was not very successful after them. His filmography is long and all his productions fit into this genre. But perhaps the success of these films overshadowed his subsequent work in the seventh art.

Even so, Hooper, now in his seventies, is still quite active in the film world. So much so that in 2014 he was awarded the Master Award of the Fantastic Film Festival 'Nocturna 2014'.

Childhood

Tobe Hooper did not come across the world of cinema by chance. His parents, Lois Belle and Norman William Ray Hooper, owned a movie theater in San Angelo, a city in Tom Green County in the state of Texas. Hooper became interested in filming at the age of 9 when he used his father's 8mm camera.

Coming from a family so immersed in the world of cinema, it was not surprising that the boy decided to take classes in the Department of Radio, Television and Film at the University of Texas at Austin. And that he later study drama at the Dallas Institute of Dramatic Arts, which at the time was directed by Baruch Lumet, a well-known Russian actor, father of the late film director Sidney Lumet.

University and first success

Before turning to film, Hooper spent the 1960s as a university professor and as a documentary cameraman. Thus, in 1965 he worked on a short film called The Heisters. The film was invited to enter the Best Short Film category at the Academy Awards. However, it could not be finished in time for that year's competition.

However, success for Tobe Hooper was already near. Together with a small cast, made up of university students and professors, and in the company of fellow director Kim Henkel, they wrote and produced The Texas Massacre. The film, which had a budget of about $ 140,000, grossed about $ 30 million in the United States, thus becoming the director's first major success.

The film accurately reflected the spirit of the times. But despite its commercial success, it surprisingly did not have an immediate effect on Hooper's career. After The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the director didn't find a Hollywood project so easy.

Eaten alive and other productions

But in 1977 a new opportunity came with Eaten Alive (Death Trap), a film that received nominations at several horror film festivals. He then made his foray into television with The Salem's Lot Mystery, a miniseries based on the writer Stephen King's novel of the same name.

After this success, Hooper was hired by Universal to direct the film The Funhouse (Carnival of Terror). The plot of this story was based on a group of young people who are trapped in a ghost train and are at the mercy of a madman disguised as Frankenstein.

Poltergeist

But the film that would give Hooper equal or greater recognition than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was Poltergeist (Devilish Games). This film was written and produced by Steven Spielberg and it was he who decided to hire him to direct.

However, this opportunity, more than a blessing, became a burden that remains with the director to this day. And, after the premiere of the film and its subsequent success, some members of the cast and crew claimed that the real director of the film had been Spielberg. According to these people, the producer had exercised creative control over Hooper.

Some failures

After that job, a disastrous period began in the director's career. He landed a deal to direct three consecutive films for Cannon Pictures, but none of them were really relevant.

It was about Sinister Force (Lifeforce) released in 1985, Invaders From Mars (Invaders From Mars) and a second part of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre entitled Massacre in Hell (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2).

Television career

Already with a directorial career that did not promise much more in the cinema, Hooper, found new opportunities on the small screen. Thus he directed several horror films for television, as well as several episodes for series.

Other of his works were Spontaneous Combustion (1990), Night Terrors (1993), Body Bag (1993), The Mangler (1995), Crocodile (2000), The Toolbox Massacre (2005), Mortuary (2005), Masters of Horror: the dance of the dead (Television, 2005), Masters of Horror: the cursed thing (Television, 2006) and Djinn (2012).

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the movie that started a new era for horror

Over forty years have passed since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released, and yet this horror film continues to be one of the best of its kind. Despite its apparent simplicity and having a budget of just over $ 100,000, this film falls short of many of the more recent horror films.

At the time of shooting, Tobe Hooper knew he was making a great movie. This was revealed in 2014 when he was interviewed on the occasion of the tribute paid to the film at the Madrid Fantastic Film Festival at Night. And it is that The Texas Massacre has been classified as a film that changed the horror genre, as well as one of the most influential films of modern horror.

Argument

80 minutes are more than enough for the anguish that is experienced from the beginning to the end of the story. Starring Marilyn Burns and Gunnar Hansen, as well as Edwin Neal, Allen Danzinger, Paul A. Partain, Jim Siedow and Teri McMinn, the plot of this film is based on two brothers who travel with friends to Texas.

The purpose of the trip is to check the grave of his grandfather that supposedly had been desecrated. But after verifying that the tomb is still intact, they stop at a gas station and are attacked by a family of cannibals.

From that moment its protagonists begin to live an anguish that in an intelligent and progressive way extends to the audience. This creates an atmosphere of terror and uneasiness, but without reaching explicit graphic violence.

Originality

Perhaps the best thing about this film - and what made it so famous and impressive in its time - was its way of continuously disturbing the viewer without falling into the excessive use of aggressive visual resources.

Fear is infused through the viewer's own thoughts, based on what he thinks will happen. So little by little the audience is infected with a bad feeling, the one that tells them that something bad is about to happen.

Beginning of the gore

With all this, The Texas Massacre also claims to be the precursor to the subgenre of terror called "splatter" or gore. Over the years, many films have been seen that exploit this terrain, such as the famous Saw saga or the Hostel saga.

Of course, we must bear in mind that the times have a lot to do with the impact of the tapes. The most recent films have had a different reception from the Hooper film. In fact, many critics and experts in the field are of the opinion that none of them has managed to make a mark as this movie did in the 1970s.

Ed Gein, the killer who inspired The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Ed gein

Although Tobe Hooper confessed that part of the horror story that viewers saw in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre came to his mind on a Christmas shopping day, one of his inspirations was an American psychopath and murderer named Ed Gein caught in the 1960s. fifty.

Ed Gein, like most killers, came from a dysfunctional family. His father an alcoholic who abused him constantly and his mother a religious fanatic who despised her husband and dominated every aspect of her son's life.

His mother was determined not to let her son be like the men she saw around him, those who committed lewd acts, who were atheists or alcoholics. For this reason, she raised her children with strict discipline, punishing them and avoiding contact with other people. In this way she formed a repressed and dependent man who did not understand the world and did not know how to behave.

After the death of his mother in 1945, Gein began to live alone and made a living doing various jobs for people in the community where he lived in Plainfield, Wisconsin. But no one suspected that behind his harmless appearance was a complete psychopath who terribly murdered a woman, removing her organs, and who spent a long time opening the graves of women who had recently died to steal their bodies and outrage them.

Ed Gein was caught after kidnapping and murdering Bernice Worden, who was the owner of a hardware store located in the town where she lived. When the authorities entered the murderer's house, they found the woman's body hanging from the ankles. She was naked, decapitated, open at the torso and gutted.

But this was not the only ghoulish find. In the house they also found about ten skulls that had been modified as bowls, plates and ashtrays, as well as seats made with human skin. Worden's organs were also found stored in the refrigerator, a shoebox with nine vulvas, and a belt of human nipples.

Upon being detained and questioned, the psychopath admitted to having stolen corpses, as well as having murdered a waitress who had disappeared since 1954. Gein was declared mentally ill and was confined in a psychiatric institution where he spent the rest of his days. He died at the age of 77, in 1984, from respiratory failure.

The 'Poltergeist Curse'

The film Poltergeist, titled Diabolical Games in Spanish, was the film that brought Tobe Hooper back to success after The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, at least momentarily. But beyond the tangle of whether it was he or Steven Spielberg who actually directed the film, there is another controversy that revolves around the famous 1982 horror film.

Around this time, people began to talk about the "Poltergeist Curse", because four of the actors in the film died in tragic ways. The most notorious case was that of the girl Heather O'Rourke, remembered by the phrase "They are here." Heather died in 1988 at the young age of 12 while filming the third part of the film.

At first it was said that the cause of death had been a poorly cured flu that was complicated by a disease that the girl suffered. However, doctors later confirmed that she had suffered cardiac arrest and septic shock when she was operated on to fix an intestinal obstruction.

But Heather had not been the first victim of the supposed curse that the film had. In 1982, Dominique Dunne (22 years old), who had played Heather's older sister, died after being strangled by her boyfriend. In 1985 Julian Beck died at age 60 of stomach cancer. And in 1987, a year before Heather, Will Sampson died of kidney problems.

These deaths were what generated the famous legend of the curse. However, nothing in them suggests that there was something mysterious in the events. In Heather's case, although it was a tragic death for being so small, it was a congenital disease.

Dominique Dunne was killed by someone else who decided to take his life, allegedly out of jealousy. And the other two actors died as a result of diseases they suffered. Certainly a fact that draws attention, but that does not seem to be more than coincidences.

However, Tobe Hooper himself, who for years denied what was said about the alleged curse, said something interesting during an interview in 2014. The director indicated that when you play with the supernatural, it is like having an Indian war dance in the one that goes around and creates something from another world or another dimension.