Cinemaphagy is the study of an artist’s working life, his bountiful creativity, his ardent cinephilia, his prolific career in film and television, his lasting influence beyond the saw. Horror movie directors are too frequently pigeonholed as purveyors of the macabre, but in truth Hooper was one of the most boldly experimental genre filmmakers in the game, fusing a Texan psychedelia with an earnest classical style gleaned from years watching classic films. Hooper’s life and work is like four years of film school, and every film he made, no matter how thankless, no matter how silly the assignment on paper, became a rich, roiling text on the political underside of the American cinema. No one made movies about cinema less ostentatiously and with more love. Movies with lurid titles like "Spontaneous Combustion" and "The Mangler" hide essays about the history of labor, Cold War iconography, and the corrosive legacy of a culture built on lies. Hooper is still too often represented as a man with a monolithic legacy, the creator of one great film and nothing else. It’s well past time the depth and breadth of his obsessions and his gifts were discussed by a culture that ignored his years of hard work. "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" is literally just the start of one of the most exciting, free, and expressionistic bodies of work in the American cinema.
Poltergeist (1982)
There’s some controversy about the individual contributions to the film made by Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Hooper, best known as director of The Texas Chainsaw [sic] Massacre. I’ve no way of telling who did what, though Poltergeist seems much closer in spirit and sensibility to Mr. Spielberg’s best films than to Mr. Hooper’s. ~Vincent Canby, The New York Times, June 4th, 1982
To the sounds of a slightly gaudy version of “The National Anthem,” the credits fade in and out in the unmistakable Citizen Kane font. Both it and Poltergeist are about the corrupting influence of money and media, and Hooper was about to become the Orson Welles of genre film. Poltergeist is less overly literal than Kane, but it’s no less potent, though there’s a slightly better allegory in Welles’ body of work. In Welles’ 1946 film The Stranger, a perfect suburban family is broken up when they realize that one of them is a Nazi out to steal their daughter. In Poltergeist, a perfect suburban family is broken up when a ghost invades their house and steals their daughter. The connections between Welles and Hooper is everywhere once you notice it. There’s the fact that both were judged their whole career against their iconic first success. Welles’ work with cinematographer Greg Toland seems to define Hooper’s relationship with the camera. Salem’s Lot and The Stranger have the same story beats and New England setting. In 1951, Welles adapted Othello, which is about a man driven to kill by a manipulative puppet-master, not unlike Leatherface and the Carny Mutant from The Funhouse working for their evil father figures. The Trial’s persecuted Josef K and The Funhouse’s Amy Harper both spend the third act fleeing malevolent forces in expressionistic lighting. The decaying family tree of Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons shed leaves all over Hooper’s filmography, most notably in his Texas Chain Saw movies. Texas Chainsaw 2 even has a deranged spin on the Ambersons’ ball, that film’s famous centerpiece.
Poltergeist starts by taking on the neuroses of filmmakers from the ’50s: the emergence of TV. Film after film (All That Heaven Allows, It Should Happen To You, Sunset Boulevard, etc.) feared the small screen would usurp the silver screen, that people wouldn’t leave their houses if they could stare at a hole in a box in the corner of the den. Having made Salem’s Lot for CBS and having grown up in the ’50s when the television first started making its way into American homes, Hooper understood the allure and drawbacks of TV. Poltergeist’s first image is of the blurry lines of a TV screen in extreme close-up. Director of photography Matthew F. Leonetti, playing by the Amblin Entertainment guidebook, lights to pick up maximum dirt and dust, making the TV screen and the living room it’s housed in seem pre-owned in that 1970s fashion (the look was just going out style, resurrected for nostalgia purposes by Douglas Slocombe for the Indiana Jones movies). The national anthem playing while the family dog gives us a view of the house says that this is the new American dream under Ronald Reagan. The TV tucks everyone into bed. Leonetti follows the dog away from its sleeping owner, giving us a survey of Funhouse’s start and endpoints, from the head of the family, Steve (Craig T. Nelson) ensconced in his easy chair like a gargoyle, the light from the TV like the sparks flying from the murder of the mutant and the fortuneteller. The dog finds wife/mother Diane (JoBeth Williams) asleep alone and a bag of potato chips under sleeping daughter #1 Dana (Dominique Dunne), then licks the hand of son Robbie (Oliver Robbins) and daughter #2 Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke), which rouses her. With his dozens of movie posters and Star Wars toys, Robbie is almost one of Hooper’s archetypal, precocious tykes. But his expertise in all things science fiction is never put to use (which says more about Spielberg’s script than Hooper). Carol Anne walks to the television, drawn by some strange beckoning force, seeing patterns through the static like a junior Max Renn. “Helloooo? What do you look like? Talk louder I can’t hear you.” As she yells at the television, Michael Kahn’s edit takes us upstairs where Diane is woken up by Carol Anne’s voice, the sound transition edit is identical to the ones Hooper used in Texas Chain Saw, Eggshells, and The Funhouse, maintaining continuity between the different areas of the set and linking them through character. The whole family comes down to watch her communing with the TV set, unsure what to do or say.
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