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Texas Chain Saw Massacre Director Tobe Hooper Has Died at 74

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Tobe Hooper in Tokyo in 2006.

Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images

Tobe Hooper, the director of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Poltergeist, died Saturday at the age of 74, Variety reports.

Hooper, who hailed from Austin, Texas, began his career in film with The Heisters, a 1964 comedy short that was the first film produced in Austin to get national distribution. He rose to national fame a decade later with 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a low-budget masterpiece that was one of the most profitable independent films of the decade and one of the most influential horror films of all time.  Every 16 mm frame, from the opening shots of a gruesome sculpture made from the contents of recently-robbed graves to the haunting closing image of Hooper’s Ed Gein stand-in Leatherface maniacally dancing with his chainsaw, seemed like documentary footage from some other, crueler planet. The film was an immediate sensation, although not exactly a critical success—critics called it “a despicable film,” “ugly and obscene,” and “a degrading, senseless misuse of film and time”—and that was just the Los Angeles Times review!—but it made a killing, revolutionized horror, and helped give birth to the entire slasher genre. (It’s also a powerful argument for becoming vegetarian.) Critics eventually caught up with the public: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre screened at Cannes as part of the Directors’ Fortnight program in 1975 and returned to Cannes in 2014 for a special screening on its 40th anniversary.

While Hooper’s sequel, 1986’s dark comedy The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, was less well-received, the CBS miniseries of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot he made in 1979 was a success, and 1981’s The Funhouse achieved cult status. But Hooper never got full credit for his biggest box office hit, 1982’s Poltergeist, thanks in part to a Los Angeles Times article headlined “Poltergeist: Whose Film Is It?” that suggested producer and screenwriter Steven Spielberg did most of the directing. Reading the article today, it seems like auteur theory may have collided with the producers’ desire to cash in on the hunger for all things Spielberg: in remarkably similar language, producer Frank Marshall told the reporter that “the creative force on this movie was Steven’s,” while Willie Hunt, who supervised production for MGM, said “Steven was the creative force in my opinion; his stamp is on the film, even though there was a good, solid, competent director there.”

But if there was a marketing imperative to use Spielberg to sell the movie, nobody told Hooper, as his comments at the time made clear:

I don’t understand why any of these questions have to be raised. I always saw this film as a collaborative situation between my producer, my writer, and myself. Two of those people were Steven Spielberg, but I directed the film and I did fully half of the storyboards. … I can’t understand why I’m being slighted. I love the changes that were made from my cut. I worked for a very good producer who is also a great showman.

Spielberg, for his part, did everything he could to play up his own contributions, telling the Los Angeles Times, “Tobe isn’t what you’d call a take-charge sort of guy. He’s just not a strong presence on a movie set,” and pitching Poltergeist and his then-forthcoming E.T. as companion pieces—“one is my dark side, and one is my bright side.” (Other sources, from actors to composer Jerry Goldsmith, also reported minimal involvement from Hooper, especially after he turned in his first cut.) The fracas lead to a Directors Guild of America investigation, a full-page apology letter from Spielberg in Variety, and a lifetime of questions for Hooper about what really happened with Poltergeist.

After his adventures with Spielberg, Hooper landed at Cannon Films, where he made Lifeforce and Invaders From Mars, then transitioned to mostly working in television throughout the 1980s and 1990s. (Spielberg hired him again for an episode of Amazing Stories.) In his later years, Hooper directed two episodes of Masters of Horror, his final feature, the United Arab Emites–set Djinn, and published his first novel, Midnight Movie. In a 2014 interview, Hooper reflected on what brought him to cinema:

When I was watching a film as a young man, there would be a second or two when I drifted outside of myself. I noticed how for a moment, in the image and music and train of information, I was traveling through the film, leaving myself. And I knew that was something I wanted to do. I wanted to see how long I could make that feeling go on—if I could take someone outside themselves, outside their body for a minute, five minutes, maybe even 80 minutes, 90 minutes.