Editorials
Remembering Tobe Hooper: The Cannon Years
It’s difficult to deal with the loss of our Masters. The passing of Romero was a massive gut punch, and now here we are again. Only a little over a month later, Tobe Hooper has passed away at the age of 74. It’s safe to say without his first feature, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the shape of American horror would not appear the same it does today. That original low budget slice of sun drenched terror has been massively influential to a number of directors working today. Despite this great loss, Hooper has a legacy in TCM that will live on forever, always provoking and inspiring those brave souls willing to venture into its abyss.
I’m not here to talk about TCM, however. As much as I adore the original for its shrill terror, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 has always been more to my personal taste. It’s a vibrant, darkly comedic film, coming at the end of a bizarre run of flicks made in partnership with Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. The heads of the now infamous Cannon Film Group were hungry for a franchise they could exploit. Paramount had Friday the 13th. Newline had Freddy. Riding high off the success of the Spielberg collab Poltergeist, Hooper was a hot name in Hollywood, and Golan and Globus snapped the director up for a three picture deal. Before they got the Chainsaw sequel they wanted, Hooper wisely tackled two other films that tickled his fancy first.
Lifeforce (1985)
Lifeforce is a film that evaded me for many years. On a whim one night I rented a copy and sat down for two hours of pure sci-fi/horror insanity. With Lifeforce, you’re really getting four films in one: Alien-esque space horror, a body jumping procedural, zombie hordes (technically “vampires”), and large scale destructive action. Hooper was given the keys to the kingdom and ran wild with what was the largest budgeted film Cannon had produced at the time. Based on a book titled The Space Vampires, Hooper’s intent was to craft a colorful popcorn flick reminiscent of the Hammer films he loved so much.
While the title changed, the spirit remained. Hooper was clearly having a blast and throwing everything at the screen. No resource was left untapped from practical gore and creature design, optical effects, sweeping crane shots, classic British thespians, and the alluring Mathilda May as the lead space vamp. While this writer enjoys the film for its bonkers narrative shifts and Grand Canyon sized leaps of logic, May remains the centerpiece that seems to draw in many viewers. She’s an alluring presence without uttering but a few lines. She also happens to be completely naked for a majority of the runtime. Hooper shoots the nudity in a clinical, matter of fact manner. It’s a natural state for this alien being and is presented as such to the audience.
With Lifeforce, Hooper showed he could handle a large scale production. Lead actor Steve Railsback spoke highly of his talent, “As a director, he knew what the hell he was doing. He knew.” Unfortunately, Lifeforce failed to perform at the box office, losing in a head to head battle with that summer’s other sci-fi flick, Cocoon. It’s unclear if the wonky script was the culprit or the poor marketing, but the film failed to regain even half of its budget. No worries, Hooper still had two more films to tackle in that three picture deal.
Invaders from Mars (1986)
A family friendly remake of a 50s B-movie might not seem like a perfect fit for Hooper’s second film at Cannon, but it was actually a passion project the director chased down for years. The goal was to craft a horror story fit for kids. With a surprisingly subdued Karen Black and her real life son Hunter Carson (also the son of TCM 2 screenwriter L. M. Kit Carson) in the lead roles, amazing creature effects from master Stan Winston, and some grand scale set design – it’s puzzling to me why Invaders from Mars gets as much hate as it does. From moment one, Hooper presents us with a typical Leave it to Beaver facade that slowly gets chipped away as the Body Snatchers-lite plot unravels. The film is presented through the eyes of young David (Carson) as he tries to convince the adults around him that something just isn’t right since he witnessed a possible UFO crash land in his backyard.
Another financial failure for Cannon, Invaders still hasn’t managed to build a cult following similar to the other two films on this list. I think its time will come, however. It’s clear Hooper intended to play everything a bit more for camp than terror. The film becomes increasingly colorful as the story progresses and we move further away from “reality”. For those who’ve never checked this one out (or the original), I won’t give away the ending, but vague-ish spoilers follow. Nonetheless, maintaining the same stinger as the original was a major point of contention among audience members in 1986. Sure, it can be seen as a cheap cop-out, but Hooper truly earns that ending through his visual style and some of the more eye-roll worthy plotting.
To some, Tobe Hooper’s Invaders from Mars is amateur garbage heap of misguided decisions. To others, misunderstood art. It’s the perfect film to show a kid who is just dipping their toes into the genre waters. In fact, having just recently revisited the film, if I had been shown this when I was 8 or so, it most certainly would have been my favorite flick ever. Just watching the genuinely unique alien design would have provided countless Crayola adventures. In that, I believe, is exactly the response Hooper was aiming for.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)
Finally, Golan and Globus were getting what they paid for, a sequel to the seminal backwoods survival horror, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. While the three picture deal hadn’t been very lucrative, Canon still showed confidence in Hooper by allowing him a lot of creative freedom to make the films he wanted as he wanted. That said, the budget for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 was significantly less than the director’s previous outings. Mere days before production began, a producer swung by set just to inform everyone they were pulling a million dollars from the already tight budget. Coming in at around $4.7 million, Hooper still managed to pull together a team of incredibly talented artists who brought his demented carnival world to life.
From barbequing hippies in the original to lampooning yuppies, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is a far cry from the stark, fever pitched survival horror of the original. It wasn’t exactly what Cannon had anticipated, despite the obvious humor built into Kit Carson’s screenplay, the execs were surprised the finished film was as much comedy as horror. The short turnaround time of the shoot thankfully left little time to fight with the MPAA over the rating, so the film went out to theaters unrated. What we were left with is one of my all time favorite films (as well as Stephen Spielberg apparently).
There’s a clear progression from the unhinged insanity of Lifeforce and the candy colored production design of Invaders that all flows straight into TCM 2. An obvious level of freedom is present within these three films that few directors are given the chance to experience. While there may have been some disagreements and post-production tweaking, ultimately Hooper was given multi-million dollar sandboxes to play around in. For that, thank you, Cannon, for allowing one of our Masters of Horror the chance to exorcise his neon colored nightmares onto theater screens across America.
Tobe Hooper will be missed, but his legacy will last forever. From the big hitters like the original TCM and Poltergeist to this oddball trilogy, I know I’ll think of him whenever I hear the revving of a chainsaw.
The Saw is Family. The Saw is Forever.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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