Adapted for the Screen by Kim Henkel
First Time on the Internet
Alvin Fast, Mardi Rustam, and Kim Henkel's (though really just Kim Henkel's) Eaten Alive is really a Southern-fried attempt at horror anti-formula. It is less an act of personal expression and more an act of felicitous inspiration, likely guided by the film's eventual director, Tobe Hooper. Given a prompt - the producers' exploitation proto-slasher idea based off serial killer lore of a Texas hotelier who fed his victims to a pond of alligators - Henkel would fashion another rambling Texas hang-out, but with murder and doom the final conclusions, a logical emanation of his oddball imagination, as seen in his other writing credits collaborating with Eagle Pennell on his barfly opus Last Night at the Alamo, and then with his own co-legacy for the needlessly inspired Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (or as its more hilarious original title, giving away its kitsch intentions, dubs it, The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Boasting colloquialisms to match Arthur Miller, this is a character study of one mad psychopath Judd lost amidst a famous ronde that has more than a little flavor of Maupassant and the French psychological tradition. Loosy-goosy Altman comparisons have been known to be made in regards to the final film, but Henkel's convicted writerly treatment of fateful doom is too weighty with predeterminism and is honestly closer to Shakespeare.
