Tobe Hooper and the chainsaw that outran its maker

Tobe Hooper

Photo: Dark Attsios / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 25, 1943 Austin, Texas, United States
Died	August 26, 2017 (74)
Occupation	Film director
Known for	The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Poltergeist, Lifeforce
Awards	Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival Critics · Sitges Film Festival Time-Machine (lifetime achievement) · Fantasia Film Festival (lifetime achievement) · Texas Film Hall of Fame

Few directors have been eclipsed by their own first great film as thoroughly as Tobe Hooper. He shot it with near-unknown actors in the heat of a Texas summer, and it handed a whole genre its grammar: the hulking masked killer, the power tool as weapon, the young woman who survives. For the rest of his working life, almost every new Hooper picture was reviewed as a footnote to that one, and his biggest commercial hit was credited, in the popular imagination, to the man who produced it. The career he actually had is stranger than either story allows.

Hooper grew up with cameras before he grew up with genre. A native of Austin, Texas, Willard Tobe Hooper first used his father’s home-movie camera at the age of nine. He went on to the University of Texas at Austin and was on campus the day Charles Whitman opened fire from the university tower; a police officer was shot dead close to where Hooper was standing. In those same years he taught at college level and worked as a documentary cameraman.

His first feature, Eggshells, made in 1969 for about $40,000, was co-written with Kim Henkel, and it was with Henkel that he built The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The two drew on the crimes of Ed Gein and Elmer Wayne Henley and on Hooper’s conviction that people, not monsters, were the true horror. The shoot ran seven days a week, sometimes sixteen hours a day, in brutal heat. Hooper kept the on-screen gore deliberately sparse in the hope of a PG rating. The ratings board gave it an R.

Bryanston released it in October 1974, and it grossed more than $30 million in the United States and Canada, one of the most profitable independent releases of the decade. Critics were divided and censors were not: the film was banned in several countries, and in Britain it was refused on the advice of the British Board of Film Censors. The Museum of Modern Art in New York later took it into its permanent collection, and in 2024 the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry.

Hollywood kept him inside the genre and tested whether he could work at scale. Eaten Alive, in 1976, reunited him with Henkel on another story drawn from a real killer, the Texas murderer Joe Ball. The CBS miniseries Salem’s Lot, adapted from Stephen King’s novel in 1979 with David Soul and James Mason, gave him his biggest budget yet, around $4 million, and obliged him to frighten by suggestion because broadcast standards ruled out the explicit. Universal’s The Funhouse followed in 1981, a carnival slasher made inside the studio system.

Then came Poltergeist, and the question that has followed his name ever since. Steven Spielberg co-wrote and produced the 1982 film, and his contract with Universal to deliver E.T. reportedly barred him from directing for a rival studio, so the MGM film needed another director. Spielberg chose Hooper on the strength of his earlier work, and Hooper helped steer what had begun as a science-fiction idea toward a haunted-house film. In May 1982 the Directors Guild of America opened a formal investigation into whether Spielberg’s publicity was diminishing the director’s credit; in June, Spielberg published a letter to Hooper in The Hollywood Reporter saying that some of the press had “misunderstood the rather unique, creative relationship which you and I shared throughout the making of Poltergeist.” MGM paid Hooper $15,000 in damages over trailers that billed Spielberg’s name at twice the size of his. Hooper’s own position was short: “I directed the motion picture, and he wrote the screenplay and he produced.”

The credits agree with him. The reputation mostly does not, and that gap is the unfair part of the Hooper story. The figurehead version of Poltergeist survives because it is a better anecdote, and it has done more to shape how he is remembered than anything he shot afterward. The fairer criticism is a different one: after his first decade, the work rarely matched the force of the beginning, and several later films look like what they were, low-budget jobs for a director no longer given the benefit of the doubt.

He did not respond by shrinking. A three-picture deal with Cannon Films produced Lifeforce in 1985, a British space-vampire epic scored by Henry Mancini; it failed at the box office and has since become a cult film. Invaders from Mars remade a 1950s science-fiction picture, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, with Dennis Hopper, turned his own nightmare into black comedy.

The following decades were steadier and smaller. Spontaneous Combustion came in 1990, a segment of the anthology Body Bags alongside John Carpenter in 1993, and another Stephen King adaptation, The Mangler, in 1995. Then came Crocodile, Toolbox Murders and two episodes of Masters of Horror. In 2011 he published a novel, Midnight Movie. His last feature, Djinn, a supernatural thriller produced by Image Nation in the United Arab Emirates, premiered at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival in 2013.

Recognition came late and mostly from the festival circuit: the Texas Film Hall of Fame and an honorary Time-Machine award at Sitges in 2003, and a lifetime achievement award at Fantasia in 2014. That year a restored print of the 1974 film screened at Cannes for its fortieth anniversary. He was married three times and had one son, William Tony Hooper. He died of natural causes in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, on August 26, 2017, at the age of 74; he had been born in Austin on January 25, 1943.

The influence is easier to measure than the reputation. Ridley Scott said his work on Alien owed more to Hooper’s film than to any other genre picture, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takashi Miike and Nicolas Winding Refn have been counted among those it shaped. Alexandre O. Philippe’s documentary Chain Reactions, which premiered in Venice in 2024, gathered Stephen King, Miike and Karyn Kusama to explain what it did to them.

The inheritance is now changing hands again. In February 2026, A24 announced a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre series to be directed by JT Mollner, with Glen Powell producing and Kim Henkel, Hooper’s co-writer, as an executive producer, plus a feature in early development. Mollner has promised something other than a remake, saying he is “not interested in remaking perfect films.” Half a century on, the people taking over Leatherface talk about Hooper’s debut as the industry rarely let him talk about anything else: as the standard everyone else has to answer to.

Featured Films

Tags: Steven Spielberg, horror films, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Tobe Hooper, Kim Henkel, Poltergeist

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