SMOLDERING EMBERS

 

Buy it now! A rare perspective of, so far as my estimation goes, one of the most important acts of putting to film in the history of the art form.  Chock full of goodies, it is a chronicle of the making of Tobe Hooper's Spontaneous Combustion, no longer worthy of the subtitle "a folly in the making," and so can be classified in the proper library section of a celebration, one about one's relationship to an act of creation.  A natural part of the Spontaneous Combustion extended half-life, an impossibility of atoms reserved only for great artists and genuine enigmas, how Stan possibly could have known is a question for him (and which you may possibly find an answer in the book)!

Review of 'American Twilight' by Thomas Puhr

    "We're all just victims of the times."

(The character of Pam in the original shooting script of 'The Texas
Chain Saw Massacre')

In lieu of my own (unwritten) rundown of the new American Twilight collection of essays, I'm grateful someone else has taken it upon themselves to provide an intended overview of the book and demonstrate the breadth of both: a) the spectrum of pieces themselves, and b) what they reveal of Hooper's filmography: that, while clear now after bated time, the breadth of the works together has always been a vital continuum, duly, and first, showing us how one can meld artistic expression, current trends, and an osmosis of societal factors, and then, second, patiently waiting for its time that it can make its most needful impact.

'The House That Hooper Built - American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper,' review by Thomas Puhr

American Twilight shows a group of people being willing to put the work in to advance an unusual but important perspective, and I for one, who is not an academic by any means, hope to advance it myself in ways that hopefully do not suffer from my lack of a formal discipline.  For now, we have the acceptance that this is a conversation between multiple people that is worth having.

We're Still Talking

Thanks to Joe Bob Briggs for the pomp, circumstance, and know-how.  That is a man for whom reasoned expertise is second nature.  University of Texas Press and the "American Twilight" editors took the momentum to graciously invite the speakers from the Joe Bob Briggs event back to cover things more in-depth.

(Above) Scout Tafoya leads a far-reaching conversation full of allusions with "American Twilight" editor Will Dodson that covers all of Hooper's marginalized TV work and the politics of distrust and paranoia subsumed into all of them, not as a sharpened or pointed political sling (often manifested as satire in those outside works) but as a general malaise of anger and rebellion.  The Bush presidential cabinet is a particular target for Hooper's, and the participants', disdain.

(Above) First-hand observer of Hooper's working methods Stan Giesea and someone who looks an awful lot like myself provide, with the help of moderating presence Dr. Will Dodson, PhD, a more focused, smaller-in-scope discussion on ideas barely formed and secrets unlocked, but put forth in the shape Hooper scholarship has so far taken, which is theses, manifestos, and histories yet to be written.  "American Twilight" is of course the ideal of where scholarship can go, but we show how a live Hooper seminar might play in the future after a few speech lessons and public speaking tutorials.

 

(Above) Co-editors Kristopher Woofter, PhD. and Will Dodson, PhD. discuss the themes running through their writers' essays and get surprisingly passionate about underrated Hooper films from The Funhouse  to Crocodile and Mortuary.  Getting matter-of-fact about Poltergeist is the evolution of Hooper discourse.

References for AMERICAN TWILIGHT Livestream Event (With Joe Bob Briggs)

Invaders from Mars Rough Cut (Raw)

John 'Bud' Cardos's and Tobe Hooper's and Julius Banzon's The Dark Re-cut

Anatomizing 'The Dark' - Long article on The Dark

The Dark Twitter - Where it is revealed Hooper's early shooting work on the film took place largely in Karen Black's home as a location!  Karen Black must have been a longtime acquaintance, as she was then married to his future Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 screenwriter and fellow Texan L.M. Kit Carson. 

SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION: THE ROUGH CUT RECONSTRUCTION (V.1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTzNZXkTL_c

A glimpse into what could have been.

It is by and large the same film.

Hooper is no editor.

But this is the Spontaneous Combustion as borderless genre soap opera he imagined.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa went on to make similar films, predominantly the monstrous romances, with Loft and Daguerrotype.

(Unfortunately, YouTube has flagged the video for copyright reasons from being viewable in essentially all territories outside the US. If you are an international viewer and would like to watch this reconstruction cut, please reply or message me directly.)

"American Twilight" Excerpt: Final Chapter, "Tobe Hooper and the American Twilight" (Christopher Sharrett)

 (Click-through to read)

"My point is that Hooper, like these other men, was constrained by money, his greatness hampered by money issues – although his first masterpiece was as low-rent as one could imagine. Still, that kind of cinema, with its intelligence and wit, may thrive precisely because of its status in its day, a “poverty row” piece of lowbrow drivel never to be taken seriously except by a few nuts who like to overthink such things. 
 

(...)
 
Hooper was as aware of the end of the American utopian aspiration as Romero, his greatest colleague. His ability to realize fully all of his visions was more limited than Romero’s, but what he did achieve is remarkable."

Sharrett, 2021

"American Twilight" Excerpt: Introduction

 (Click-through to read)

"The Song Is Love, named after the 1967 song by the trio, is an inspired combination of political documentary and experimental portraiture, organized around personal statements by each band member. Mixing performance footage with candid interviews, musings by the band members in nature and backstage, and footage of the members marching and speaking at political rallies, the film is a meditation on America’s troubled politics, at home and abroad. Interviewed about the film, Hooper averred, “It’s not a documentary, […] and it’s not necessarily ABOUT Peter, Paul and Mary, although they are featured in it” (quoted in Worley 1970).
 

Several candid moments serve as structuring set pieces, in which the three artists discuss freedom of artistic expression, and the political limitations on that freedom. Hooper parallels these intimate statements with the band members’ more public-facing protests for equal rights.
 

(...)
 

Such feelings about the freedom and power of art against the expectations of the industry seem portentously relevant to Hooper’s own career, since the director was politically and artistically second-guessed at every turn. Though Hooper could not have predicted his future struggles inside and outside the Hollywood juggernaut, he fashioned a documentary that consciously blended the politics of freedom and equality with investigations of free artistic self-expression under stress."

Woofter/Dodson, 2021

IT'S COMING. IT'S HERE.

 

The first academic collection of essays devoted to Tobe Hooper's career - entitled American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper - has finally been curated and assembled by editors Kristopher Woofter and Will Dodson (who contribute their own essays within the book) and released by the University of Texas Press publishing outfit.

Released in June 2021, it is still fresh in the minds of its readers and non-readers (I am lucky to have counted myself in the former group since May, after receiving an early copy in the mail, a real moment of hope and beauty in difficult times) and nonpareil in its in-depth analyses and contributions to a scholasticism of a marginal career and what Hooper means to the landscape of genre.  Promotions are planned and it is an illustrious initiation to upcoming Hooper releases, such as I'm Dangerous Tonight coming to Blu-Ray from Kino Lorber, a possible Poltergeist 4K release for its 40th Anniversary, and a book on the making of Spontaneous Combustion by writer Stan Giesea.

For information and purchasing options: UTPress Book Listing / Amazon / Kindle

NEW HOOPER BOOK: CINEMAPHAGY by Scout Tafoya

So I've pored over and thoroughly imbibed the rich offerings of critic/author/filmmaker/loyal Hooper acolyte Scout Tafoya's new offering in Tobe Hooper scholasticism (buy it online at most booksellers, digital copy also available on Amazon Kindle), and took in his many insights which hit like lightning strikes within Tafoya's oddly business-minded but nonetheless voluminous prose, but his after-release postmortems for various publicity blogs may include the clearest declarations of intent and most candid and impassioned statements on the schisms of perception when it comes to what Hooper was doing and what only he was ever allowed to do in his career pocked by circumstances:

"As in Mortuary, Hooper saw the GOP infecting the people, the land, the sky, everything it touched with its “good old days”.  Rhetoric of a return to norms while the flesh was melted off the bones of their opponents – foreign policy at least as old as the Vietnam war he none too subtly opposes in both Eggshells, his study of a Texas commune, and The Song is Love, his concert doc featuring a show stopping performance from the unlikely likes of Peter, Paul, and Mary." 
http://www.dosomedamage.com/2021/03/scout-tafoya-on-films-of-tobe-hooper.html

"All that rich text just sitting there. That was why I wanted to write Cinemaphagy. Class and money are still such silent but heavy forces in cinema studies. You lose money and you’re off the cultural radar. Look at Michael Cimino. Everyone talks about Deer Hunter (1978), no one talks about Desperate Hours (1990). Just how it goes. You fuck with a producer’s bottom line and the critical establishment is only too happy to do the moneymen the favor of burying them. Hooper was hidden real good. Only his friends could see where they buried him, and they’d occasionally give him work but his reputation never grew past The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Even now it’s tough to get people to take him seriously."
https://frame.land/hooper-dreams-why-i-wrote-cinemaphagy/

Odds & Ends, Yet Again

Experience Tobe Hooper's Invaders from Mars in a new way.  An experimental one-to-one fusion of the theatrical version and the VHS-ripped rough cut that has made its way online here, this is hypothetical in many ways and something actually quite personal in others (the sharp-eyed fans of the film in its original form may notice a completely gratuitous cut made without any precipitation in the latter half of the film, and this was made only to exert some sort of power and predominance over the film, better to not confuse it for anything authorized or completely anyone's vision but my own - to the extent whatever that means).

It can ultimately be said that the best way to experience either Invaders from Mars or its rough cut are separately, as the rough cut gains (and earns) a quiet beauty by being raw and unmediated by post-production sound mixing and scoring, while the logy and lumpy pacing of Invaders from Mars by nature - one will notice, especially from watching the rough cut, that it's the rare Hooper feature that takes place explicitly over multiple days, laying out clearly its methodical passage of time (something I eventually argue is a thematic and philosophic point of the film) - becomes even more enervating when accommodating for the switching media.

I recommend all give it a chance, though, as it shows a film that was the original intent and that seemed to have had better grasp of the roiling ideas contained within it.

Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4USz5Whrq4

ACCOMPANYING TEXT TO 'INVADERS FROM MARS: THE SUPER CUT'

This is an unofficial experimental supercut combining Tobe Hooper's extant rough cut of the first hour and 19 minutes of the film and the full theatrical cut released by Cannon Films. The rough cut footage was taken from a VHS duplication of the director's in-progress cut, and thus reflects the video quality of the source. Rather than try to simply reinstate the larger deleted or altered sequences back into the movie in chunks, I frame by frame matched the two cuts and reconstructed every instinctual editing choice made in the rough cut phase, which ranged from the substantial to the miniscule. This was in order to present as closely as possible a "What Could Have Been" cut, that is, as if Hooper's initial desire of what his film would be actually made it to the screen.

Big thank you to those who've supported, cheerleaded, and those who viewed my initial demo of the film. Explicitly personal touches were added that one may or may not notice (the most suggestive of "creative liberties" more often than not involved sound work and musical choices). Acknowledgements to filmmaker Christofer Pallu for mostly suggesting to add sound effects for the outdoor radar device and the bold, cosmetic statement to chromakey Hooper's credit over the shot of the house, but also for his enthusiasm for the project and audio editing advice.

The frame by frame matching was actually a more necessary and complicated process than one would think, as the final cut exhibited not only deletions, but chronological reediting and swapped takes. Thus, take the following into consideration:

* scenes existing in the final film will appear here but in rough cut quality. This is most likely because entirely alternate takes were used in place of those initially incorporated.
* Shots may have been used in the final cut but utilized in a different capacity or at a different point. Thus, a "clean" final cut shot will be used momentarily within a scene that is by and large non-existent in the final cut.
* Scenes were restructured back to the original ordering and chronology of Hooper's rough cut.
* This is not even to bring up the scoring and sound work. The "personal" and "experimental" side comes up here, with musical workarounds used to change the tone of the film in the way I felt would have been closer to Hooper's primary intentions. The most glaring example would be the replacement of the opening credits theme used in the final cut with what is listed on the film's original soundtrack as "Original Intro and Main Title." In the process of constructing, it was discovered the cue known as "Original Intro and Main Title" was simply displaced, being not used in the opening titles, placed over the scene in which the parents put David to bed in its entirety as a soft, catch-all underscoring. Feeling this was an artificial rendering of the scene resultant of a utilitarian mindset - "if you got it/paid for it, use it" - and a desire to make the film play smoother, I used the rough cut audio in order to go without the scoring. Use of various cues from the original soundtrack recording is also done on occasion, particularly difficult as Christopher Young's score itself was subject to a similar sort of gutting, the film essentially scored twice - once by Young, a second pass, one of synthesizer atmospherics, by David Storrs - and so parsing what made it into the film and what didn't remains, even for me, after poring through the film for the last three months, incredibly difficult.

You can view the raw rough cut footage - before I tried to conform it to some level of theatrical presentation - or enjoy the Rough Cut as its own whole piece here: youtube.com/watch?v=S8JWWVOh91A&t=124s

A statement on the rough cut:

"... Clearer intentions are found in the more fragmented editing...

The rocket destruction scene is symptomatically reconstructed into a slack, Cannon spectacle in the Cannon cut... [which] eliminates dialogue and re-chronologizes the sequence... whereas here it's a fragmentary confusion of splintered world-views.

In its clearer demonstration of David as our proletariat hero... in its bolder assertion of time in the face of illusionary, dreamed spectacle, we see what Hooper truly intended. The intentions and placidity of the rough cut make are undeniably superior."

—————————————————————

Also included at my Vimeo is my 2020 recut of The Dark, directed by John 'Bud' Cardos, but with "contributions" by Tobe Hooper.  It is one of my favorite films, and was even more of a labor of love than the Invaders from Mars recut.  It removed all post-production tampering by the producers to turn it into an alien sci-fi film rather than the supernatural thriller it was intended to be.

"This re-cut of John 'Bud' Cardos's THE DARK involves no commercial interest, but, under fair use law, it does wish to rip the film away from the historic avarice of its producers and reclaim a vision that was much stronger than their misappropriation could ever be. So this isn't just for education, either - this is fair use under criticism/comment that involves piracy and smuggling, the only proper response to its producers... one of who, Edward L. Montoro, is actually a literal crook, absconding with an embezzled fortune to an equatorial region in the early 80s to never be heard from again.

"THE DARK: RECUT is not only a proper excising of studio/producer impositions but also partly a historical record of THE DARK, in particular, Tobe Hooper's role in it."

[End excerpt]"

"In the tradition of RAISING CAIN RE-CUT, THE DARK RE-CUT (2020) aims to restore the original integrity behind a film that some love, most simply have no thoughts about at all. But it’s the principle of the thing. In the year between THE DARK’s filming and its release in January 1979, producers, anticipating the release of Ridley Scott’s ALIEN and noticing the increasing popularity of “space” films from STARS WARS to CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, decided to turn what was a creature feature (one involving a monstrous entity stalking the LA streets and committing a murder every night, a monster of which our inability to explain was the very point of the original story) into a space invader flick, reediting every murder into an attack by an eye-laser-shooting alien using cheap opticals and superimposed stock explosions. Reshoots occurred to implement actual fire effects into the big monster showdown in the end, beginning and end titles imploring of the vastness of space were added, and the rest is history. In the end, even John ‘Bud’ Cardos, who didn’t even develop or work on the preproduction of the film - rather, it was developed by Tobe Hooper himself - was caught off-guard by this imposition by the producers. THE DARK (1979) is a rich text concerning the coexistence of clashing egos, the workings of civil society as a tapestry meant to function as a whole, the illusion of state protection, the nature of fear as a natural outgrowth of social constructs, and the idea of darkness as what hides yet contains that which we fear, so much as being a reminder of a state pre-consciousness and pre-society. This may not all come to fruition in the film that was ultimately removed from Tobe Hooper’s hands, but what remains or is sensed of his and John ‘Bud’ Cardos’s efforts deserves at least the saving from one of the most cynical and scornful moves in producership history.

THE DARK: RECUT is not only a proper excising of studio/producer impositions but also partly a historical record of THE DARK, in particular, Tobe Hooper's role in it.”

The Dark Re-Cut

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Odds & Ends

Some capsule reviews I've written in the meantime of Hooper's films.  Presented in rough chronology, so the repeating of titles and autobiographical elements within the reviews creates an interesting semi-narrative.

THE FUNHOUSE

Many great horror films are war films, in that they're about two opposing parties facing off in ideological or existential opposition. This is the greatest horror-battle film, half the parties unaware they represent a side in a war and that their actions and strategy (or non-strategy) are outright effecting the fate of their respective brothers-in-arms. The subtext is made into the text, which is the subtext, and this is through seeing these structures while the characters never do. The sound design is the ultimate piece completing the Gesamtkunstwerk here (and this should be played loud), as background dialogue, whispered back-and-forth, and repeated whimpers fill out the ever-strategizing, ever-blinkering, of an eternal war.

THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE

This is not a film of exposition, but more a series of scenic warning signs. There is no attempt to create a comprehensive view of our characters and we do not get to know them, they are merely the human figures in a film made up of cautionary events, conceived in Hooper and Henkel's liberally-dispersed and more writerly gestures, incarnate in Hooper's deliberate invention that determines gesture as just that. So extreme are its depictions of irrational terror and social entropy that it forgoes its claims to naturalism early on, tapping into underlying structures and artful syncopation that work on you at a subconscious level, much like a fairy-tale that knows what information to give out and what of its story to truncate and remix. Sally running into a branch leading to an extended moment of disorientation is the point at which the film no longer seems to wish to hide its claims to artifice. Like Hooper's double-window-jumping, the branch is clearly contrived, not to throw an extra jolt in but to support the three-pronged journey Sally embarks on (once her and Franklin enter the woods), acting as a final consecrating indignity - one at a final station of the cross - before the plot can move forward. Only Hooper can make a chaotic chase through a nettled copse geographically and structurally coherent, and Hooper does this because he has established the old Franklin house, he's established the Sawyer house - Sally's journey within it, itself, is an up-down-up structured movement - he establishes the gas station (using incredible tracking shots), and he never introduced that branch. I also noted the "humor" of the scene where Sally is finally brought into the Sawyer house as a captive, of which Hooper has often expressed feeling disappointed when audiences would be too terrified to catch on to that humor. It is less outright humor, though, than it is the sharpness of his editing and the rhythm he finds in the three cannibals' interactions, and I think Hooper knew this. He was not making a comedy, but he was making a hyper-observant portrait of inter-social behavior. The dinner scene is the apex of all of Hooper's ideas of the death-image, but he also shows remarkable dramatic continuity even amidst the chaos. I like how Leatherface is often quite peripheral in the scene, and it is only when Sally is not explicitly facing off with the Hitch-Hiker, who engages her the most directly and the most cruelly, providing the bulk of the drama in the scene, that Leatherface finally gets his moment with a repeat motion, silently creeping toward Sally, a curious hulk seen only through Sally's craning POV. 

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2

Feels rushed in the making, but if L.G.’s holy-coded denouement and Jesus arc doesn’t suggest simply another Tobe Hooper passion play, then I’m moved for nothing.

POLTERGEIST

100% Hooper. Spielberg would never make this awkward, slow, imagistic, and bogged-down-by-images (and pauses, and rhythmic digressions) of a film. The story and script are nonsense, this is merely an experiment in narrative storytelling. Spielberg's pretense of narrative through an emotive frivolity is undone by Hooper's seriousness with everything that juxtaposes unnaturalness in supposedly prescribed relationships. Alternately, Spielberg allows Hooper to divest himself of all his worries about the make-up of the family. Imagine Poltergeist without the kidnapping, its inciting, heroism-precipitating incident, and you would be close to Hooper's original conception of Poltergeist: a family lives next to a cemetery, small nuisance-like poltergeist activity occurs, and it ends in a chaotic finale in which a hidden history reveals itself in wagon wheels emerging from the mud. In the first act you feel the traces of this film. The story is told through magic tricks with the camera, not the coherence of the plot - the chair stacking is something you would see right out of Hooper’s Eggshells. Even after the imposition of narrative stakes, the film is a structureless procession of narrative stoppages, filled with pauses and performative silences (just think of the final shot). Hooper makes a set-piece even of a parents’ joint session, Hooper being the only one who can stage believably the rambling of two high individuals and in this realism, create a unified set piece out of a duet of performances. This is filled with visually-stimulated nothing-stretches; shorthand narrative; long form situationism. Hooper’s capacity for reframing is something he shares with Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a form of storytelling that is not in the content on the surface, not the telling of story (no matter how much they protest that idea), but framing and then subtle reframing, mining an always-drama, an always-characterization, in the very manner in which a story is told, or more accurately, an existence is circumscribed. Every Spielberg trope - the foreground-background placement, the one take, even the camera push into faces of awe - is noticeably different from Spielberg’s usage in the inseparable context of Hooper’s creation of imagist set-pieces, divorcing these techniques from narrative, embedding it in Hooper’s awkward handcraft, his naturalist set-piecing. It is most satisfying as a Frankenstein creature, a film not to have a soul of its own, but to mock the idea of life by the brazen networking of its parts. As a narrative, it is an ungainly creature, but as Hooper’s dissociated networking of parts, it is a comment on the acute sentience of his creation nevertheless. Tangina’s very long debriefing on "the Beast" is not in the original script. What neuronal mishap of elongating this film’s anti-plot was it that provoked that rewrite? 

TOOLBOX MURDERS

It might be cliche for me to reevaluate a Hooper film and inevitably give it a higher rating, but Toolbox Murders is as pure and uncluttered, unproblematic, an expression of Hooper's long, novelistic game as anything. The screening was preceded by outpourings of fondness, gratefulness, and admiration for the infinitely disarming, idiosyncratic, and eccentric Hooper: I heard Danny Pearl express his gratefulness for being given his career, Amanda Plummer in awe of a man she had cherished (telling the story of Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Tobe Hooper deep in an exchange upon meeting - as he was loved by all the Japanese genre filmmakers - and realizing the two men looked identical), Toolbox AD Andrew Zimmerman speak of Hooper's down-home sagacity shooting in the tricky Ambassador Hotel and the "magic" inevitable on a Hooper set. Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Dickerson, his dearest confidantes, who looked on him like a child, Tom Holland bloviating endearingly about his quirks in their Autumn friendship and his coming over with a copy of Djinn and pouring over every frame with them, Mick Garris bowing out on a brief Poltergeist flare-up when overcome with feelings, but recommending everyone just listen to the podcast episode he did that broached the subject as he was there and saw it all. Toolbox Murders in 35mm and theatrical sound (who knew the score was so meticulous and constant?) is definitely giving it the respect it deserves. It may move like an Argento or Polanski film, give or take, but in 35mm it looks and feels more like Hooper's Tsai Ming-Liang film. I report this in a journalistic capacity, not as an impinging on the personal stories of those closest to him. This is for posterity and the record. 

EATEN ALIVE

"As I heard the story in the paper the next day... my tears came tumbling down." 

"What do you want me to do? Throw myself to the alligators?" 

Yes, this movie answers, that is what most men want women to do, as embodied by William Finley's emotionally erratic pater familias. 

"I said git and git. I made the signal. I told ya and I told ya and I told ya. You come in here and you go in there, ruttin' and ruttin'. You think I don't know?" 

Blistering. Also, contrary to how it may come off at first, carefully considered (as "adapted for the screen" by Kim Henkel), despite the limitations of its making. The events of the film ensue because the monkey (and all its primate functions) dies, and only the reptile Id is left. This may not reach the intensity and razor intelligence of Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but this is because it is an entirely different animal: a studio picture, a work of fantasy, a lush piece of theater and a melodrama filled with emotions and sentiment (to the degree such a compromised work of grindhouse filmmaking can) - not a cunningly pointed piece of faux-guerilla filmmaking. Yet these are two films united by the ferocity and vision of their artist (and their shared look at madness), two very different projects finding overlap simply in the youthful inspiration and joie de vivre of their hard-working creator: works put together by an artisanal hand, as if by the skin of their teeth, for each cut and each moment of dramatic montage is welded into the thing as if its life depended on it. Hooper's hybridizing of studio-set artifice and the expressionistic run-and-gun inspiration of his previous film is truly something to marvel at, for we get the expressive cynicism of 'Chain Saw' tied to the mournful, non-cynical gestures of melodrama. Melodrama, at least in its most sophisticated form, has always been a genre of intense detail, and Eaten Alive provides it in gently preponderant ways: a preponderance of arresting subplots, for instance Libby Wood's lovelorn projection onto Stuart Whitman's sheriff no clearer than today with Crystin Sinclair's performance writ large in 35mm; the blood-smudged side of the veranda where Judd's mopping would be less effective, lying just below a clueless Buck's line of sight before he becomes croc bait; the evolution of victims, from Roy to Harvey Wood to Buck, all a lineage of masculinity, but Harvey's stoicism and Buck's belligerence and sexual odiousness alleviated by their growing rational awareness of the imperiled child underneath, each acting more humanly just as Judd ratchets up in villainy and madness. Quoted above is Judd's menacing exhortations to a distracted Buck, as he tries to locate the sounds of the little girl below, and it is a collection of phrases Judd has said at various prior points in the film. This moment is the condensation of Judd's mania, the novel serial killer who has no motivation but to reflect the victim's status right back at them, as refracted through an opaque glass (that is Judd) of PTSD, sexual neurosis, an unchecked sort of libertarianism (distrust of authority), and retrograde barbarity. He circles behind Buck in three paces, spouting these toxic Tantra, warnings to Buck and self-pity for himself. All of it results in anger. The film's details go on, and accumulate, combined in a film that is almost as immersive and in control as Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and that is the sign of a filmmaker who would never stop crafting his work (until it was taken away from him). Even the cramped chase sequences with Angie under the floorboards are more than meets the eye, slyly crafted bravura bouts of impressionist suspense. I love how it ends its playlist of radio songs - up to that point pure American Countrypolitan - with a Spanish Mariachi song. Suffering is a universal language. Vixen Lynette saves the day. Judd's demise is a triumphant end to a work of clear structure. 

POLTERGEIST

This kind of sucks in supersized 35mm. The film is returned back to its commercial purposes, its sensory overload context, every shot no longer a rarefied decision but simply what needed to be shot to get a film up on the screen at all. The film's theology is so populist and middling. It's just like Gremlins and The Goonies, serious (to varying degrees) filmmakers trying their best to cohere (or, better yet, "incohere") committee-written pop nonsense. The goth nonsense here curdles when mysterious strings accompany the reveal that you are, in fact, living on top of a cemetery. The mechanics of the production show their extreme laboriousness, every close-up surely its own hurdle while Goldsmith’s score is simply used to cover-up Hooper’s quick work and inattention to detail. It's a testament to Hooper's wayward train, which this certainly is - read the script, look at the preliminary storyboards, and see a film barely going by plan - that the experience of going to see the "new Spielberg production" feels less like a visit to the toy store and more like getting trapped in a toy store elevator for two hours with one genuine mystic and one ad man. Saying Spielberg was entirely happy with what ended up on the screen is akin to Hollywood revisionism, where Spielberg-hype fantasy overtakes a grim, frankly sloppy reality ("Can't we 'zazz this up a bit, Tobe?" "No Steven, just shoot it in wide shots, your energy tires me.")... Viewed in 35mm right in the center of Tinsel Town, call the experience, and it was kind of like traveling back in time, ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOOPERWOOD. 

EATEN ALIVE

"It's much more complex than it seems. I tried to establish some kind of motif that carries throughout the show - sometimes that's actually more important than what you're actually showing. This has a lot to do with lights and shadows: it takes place in a single night, from dusk to dawn. And all the characters bring with them some sort of history, they're not just cardboard characters walking into a slaughterhouse." - Tobe Hooper

I'm no longer convinced of its formal elements, a little too diluted by cinematographer Caramico's hastiness, a little too unfixed on Hooper's fixation on lamps as indifferent beacons of our everyday living, and on decoration (his interest hardly allowed to let flourish until Poltergeist); a little too, dare I venture the idea, slick in its horrific and atmospheric affects - the roiling fog, the canted Freudian insert-shots that glimpse the gator, and so on and so forth. There is a cohesive design and digestible shape here that gets in the way of the film of pure suggestion I have touted. But the film has ceased to become a rational object of evaluation for me, instead it has become a series of accidents and incremental details, and a spirit that defies my increased scrutiny with every revisit (Why didn't he center this shot better? Why didn't he move on this one? Why didn't he hold on this shot longer? It is the peril of being the aficionado), defies the bourgeoisie comfort blanket of hard "decisions" being always, constantly, made. This is a film of suggestion, because I am no longer in charge of the effect it has on me, even as I criticize it. The affective discharge I get in my synapses when I hear the mariachi song that closes the film is ten times greater than the lack of a point in certain prior shots, or the mechanics it may indulge in. This is a film of melancholy, even as it never makes a point of its melancholy. Remember that film Babel? This has the effect that that film desperately wants to achieve (about melancholy and interconnectivity) through constant making a point of it. I'd rather not know what I'm heading into, and this is the magic of Hooper's sense of cinema.

POLTERGEIST

No discernible thematic center, but still a strange, untangled object made of so much hobbled-together uncanny parts, set in a house that doesn't look like a house but a studio set and may be the last hold-out of studio soundstage artifice in a film that wasn't outwardly trying to create such the effect (such as One From the Heart). The ghostly woman descending the stairs is a leading example of a scene that was forced into cohesion, filmed without an idea of what was actually coming down the stairs. Hooper filmed it any which way and may have removed all purpose from the scene. The characters stare at it and it disappears (no one screams like in the script); a true scene that defies sense. Hooper only cared about the image (a wide shot of the living room, characters dispersed into all four corners, the top of the stairs and a hanging lamplight) and it was hobbled into cohesion at a later date with the filming of the ghost (and its equally unhelpful video capture). Defying pragmatic usage, it is not suspenseful, nor consequential, nor particularly elaborate or impressive a set-piece - those things are the domain of Spielberg - but it is emblematic of Poltergeist as a film of parts, schizophrenic and hobbled and rickety and two voices battling it out, Spielberg's sensibleness and Hooper's curiousness and openness, for the way things may not come together as a whole.

DOWN FRIDAY STREET

I try not to be too hyperbolic about a short documentary that is as shaggy, messy, thematically undefined, and unassiduously untempered aesthetically as all of Hooper’s other work, but if you are looking for that connecting thread between the curiously precise classicalist concerns of Hooper’s slapstick period piece The Heisters and the New Wave, timely-concerned vérité phase begun with Eggshells, this is the film for you. Houses Also Die, you can call it, and if it’s not in Hooper’s vocabulary to mount a discourse on race and anthropology, then we can at least expect the same introverted, phobic interests in mood, zones, the ghostly aspects of change and time; experimental techniques melded with his governing interest in the grounded aspects of a story to be told (here, of stately old WASP houses being razed for parking lots). A sharp dip into an almost-refined antiquity for a filmmaker who usually concerns himself with ardent, corrupted civilization (not “society,” as Hooper is either concerned with individuals themselves or the structure at large, at a nominal scale rather than a precise one - his observations on specific social groups often weaker than what is gathered when these subcultures merely stand in for larger issues). This is Hooper’s most withdrawn, well-bred film, into an interior world of objects; his truest occult film (a subject he would subsequently show interest in), for the objects are left to exist throughout divorced from human hands and presence (which Hooper's films of object-space idée fixe naturally betray, with characters). This is Tobe Hooper’s The Haunting of Hill House. It’s Hooper’s closest to a structuralist film, and he’s come close due to his miraculous instincts even in his narrative features. Rustic, region-specific Profit Motives and the Whispering Wind (Gianvito, 2007), give way to Michael Snow, give way to Kurosawa’s Pulse and, as mentioned, Shirley Jackson (and her antisocial libertarian, quasi-satirical takes on the commercialism running roughshod over a bygone, gothic hominess), and the seeds of hints are planted for borrowings - straight-on reiteration of techniques, a kingly lineage of fated self-plagiarism - in Eggshells, Poltergeist, and Djinn.