BAD VIBES

Two years before he would pass away, Tobe Hooper (1943 – 2017) came to the Offscreen Festival in Brussels to present the 4K restoration of his classic horror movie THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. Barend de Voogd had a long talk with him about the grueling shoot of that movie. He was still proud of it, and rightly so. “Psychologically, the idea behind THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE was that the movie would enter your mind the way music does.” This is part one of an interview double bill. On the same day, Phil van Tongeren also had a talk with Hooper, which focuses primarily on his life and career after the first Chainsaw. This will be published on a later date.

Were you involved in the restoration of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE?

Yes, I was involved in all of it. The color grading, the sound mix. And the uhm… Give me a couple of minutes here. I’m really jetlagged and I just went up these stairs.

Of course. It’s a lot of stairs.

Last time I was here I went up the tower in Bruges. And when I had climbed all those stairs I thought: why did I do that? Later on I saw that film IN BRUGES. Really cool film. But as I watched it I was thinking: there is no way Brendan Gleeson could have gotten up that staircase. [Laughs] And later on I met the production designer and he explained they built a whole set.

But back to the restoration: it had to be done because the emulsion was separating from the celluloid. I was told the cans were just sitting there in someone’s office, in a major studio, against the window. The cans were exposed to sunlight, so they would heat up. They would get cold in the wintertime. The film had been stored that way for, I don’t know, like ten years. Checking the A-B rolls, we discovered the splices were getting apart. It was turning magenta. So, the film would not even exist anymore if we didn’t do a restoration. Now the original is being stored by the Academy, in a salt mine. I don’t know how that’s going to help, because the emulsion is all gone.

Isn’t there also a print in the Congressional Library?

Yes, and also in the Museum of Modern Art. Their collection still consists of film prints, but it won’t be long before everything is DCP.

But it’s great that it’s done, because the film has never looked or sounded better.

Yes, I didn’t want to lose the original mono mix, because everything was kind of perfect. It was mixed by Buzz Knudson at Todd-AO. He was like a six or seven time Academy Award nominee. He had worked on a lot of great pictures outside of the horror genre.

But you also contributed a lot of creepy sounds and crazy instruments to the mix, right?

Yes, and I wanted all of that. All of it was beautifully mixed, in many layers of sound, without losing what was in the original mix. We were able to play with it, in a way that… It isn’t some faux surround sound, like when they just started making surround sound out of mono. It was duplicated many times and then spread apart. Selectively we moved moments that were already mixed around the theater, so that the sound is behind you, beside you, in your head. And then the modulation of it is different. At some moments the sound will get much louder than in the original setting. But in some projection booths they are so damn conservative when it comes to sound.

When you made the film, Hammer was still doing gothic period pieces. What made you want to make a contemporary horror movie?

As a kid I used to love those movies. The gothic horror stories. I loved Hammer. But at a certain point I became aware of a separation. I couldn’t get as affected by those movies anymore. It was like this: could I put myself in that situation on the screen and react? That seemed a lot easier with contemporary horror movies. That whole realization, that whole idea, was like a gift. I didn’t sit down to sketch it out, but the entire way the movie loops around and around and kind of falls back into itself, that came to me in a matter of seconds.

It wasn’t called THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE at that point, right?

No, that title came later. The working title came to me when I was living in Austin and I would go do my shopping late at night. I was in the store and I saw head cheese, which is common enough. But it was the first time I had ever seen it. It looked like it had eyeballs in it and other nasty things. So that’s where the working title HEAD CHEESE came from.

And there was another thing. Our family doctor treated everything from a skull fracture to immunization. He told me that when he was in pre-med school, he skinned a cadaver’s face, cured and dried it, and then wore it to the school’s Halloween party. That image stuck.

So we can thank your doctor for Leatherface?

Yes, you can. Actually, he tended to my mother when she was in labor.

He helped with the birth of you and your film?

Yes. He was a cool guy.

THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE is almost like at attack on the senses. Was that your intention?

Yes, because when that energy is coming off the screen in large quantities you will become affected. I wanted the sound to be aggressive, so that you’d respond.

I read that you still went after a PG-rating.

Yes, but only because I was trying to avoid an X-rating. Back then they would talk to you a little bit more. So I asked: How can I get a PG-rating and still hang people on a meat hook? They said: You can’t. So I said: But what if I made you think you saw someone being hanged on a meat hook, but you actually saw nothing? So they told me to try it. I didn’t even want to make a film that gory, because it would downgrade it to a B-movie or something. Then it would be lumped in with Herschell Gordon Lewis’s TWO-THOUSAND MANIACS. Artistically it wouldn’t satisfy me.

There’s a lot classic suspense in the movie.

Yes, we did a lot of psychology and studying what it was that made genre films work. One of the things that always work, one of the creepiest things a horror film can have, is the ambiance of death. Like the way Frankenstein’s monster is put together by pieces of dead bodies. That’s why I opened the film in a graveyard. You’re immediately repelled by this stuff. Like the sight of a coffin. It’s classic Freudian. Freud wrote that he would hold his breath whenever he passed a cemetery.

A lot of people have phobias about death. I used to have them as a child, because our family was rather large and there was always someone dying. They would always take me to the funeral parlor and everyone was looking towards the end of the room, at this big box. So I asked why everyone was looking at the box. And all they told me was: You remember Aunt so-and-so. Well, she’s in that box, asleep. That was all the information I got, until one relative of mine told me that everyone dies and the world will end.

So you tried to impregnate the movie with death and decay.

Yes, in the house we had all these carcasses and feathers and other remains of animals. Whatever we could find. Have you heard the story about the dead animals?

Yes, but I’d like to hear it anyway.

We needed stuffed animals to decorate the set. You know, domestic animals that the family members would have been working on. So I asked [art director] Bob Burns to find some, but he couldn’t find any stuffed domestic animals. I said to Bob: Just figure this out, please. So on the day of shooting the dinner scene, a big dump truck pulls up at the house. It had one of these hydraulic beds and they dump all of these animal cadavers at the back of the house. A hundred at least. Dogs, cats, everything. They came from the city pound and had just been euthanized. It totally freaked everyone out, including me. Well, the truck drove away. So Dottie Pearl, who did make up, was shooting formaldehyde into these dead animals. She had a dead dog laying in her lap and she shot the dog with the needle, but the needle went through the dog’s leg and into her leg. She shot herself with formaldehyde. She said: This isn’t working. And I said: You’re right, this isn’t working. For God’s sake, can someone make this go away? And someone tried to make it go away.

We had about a thousand pounds of dead animals there. And in the movies, when you see someone getting rid of something like this… Well, that’s what the guy tried. A crew member took five or ten gallons of gasoline and poured it onto this mound of dead animals. It was at least four feet tall and maybe ten or twelve feet in diameter. He threw a match. Now, how in the hell is a couple of gallons of gas and a match going to get rid of such an enormous heap of dead animals? Where do you get your brains from, man?

That must have smelled terrible.

Ah, man! The black oily smoke and the smell of smoldering animals would drift into the house, according to the way the wind blew.

It was already an intense shoot.

Yeah, at the end everybody hated me. It broke up into camps. The reason they hated me was because I wasn’t new to this. I had made about sixty documentaries for television. About ninety percent of the time I knew exactly what I wanted. Normally, I’m a really calm guy, but when I’m making a film I really have to assert myself, because if I don’t and things go sideways, it will all come back on me and be my fault. So I had to be aggressive. I screamed a lot. That created tension. But the more they hated me for my screaming, the more bad vibes came up, out of the ground and from the air, and that all got into the film somehow.

And didn’t you also separate the victims from Leatherface and his family?

Yes, I did. I kept them apart at lunch and dinner. I asked them not to bathe, so it became difficult to be around each other with all the odors. It was already over a hundred degrees in that house, but we had to shoot some of the dinner scene in daylight. So we put a big black tent over the house. With the tent it would get up to a hundred and seventeen degrees. And all the bones and skeletons in the house started cooking and putting out these noxious odors. People were running to the windows and throwing up.

There was also a lot of running around with a chainsaw and a heavy hammer. Was set safety a thing?

Well, that hammer was switched. Right before Bill Vail, the actor who plays Kirk, gets hit with it, we switched it to a rubber hammer. But Gunnar hit him so hard with it, he really knocked him down. Bill had a big welt on his eye.

And the broomstick that Jim Siedow uses to poke Marilyn Burns, that was fake also. I told Bob Burns to make a fake one, so as not to hurt Marilyn. When Jim was whacking her with it, I didn’t think anything of it. I didn’t know that it was a rubber stick with a steel rod inside it. It was safer to use a real broom handle! But Marilyn gave her all to that movie. She would really do almost anything to project the energy that we needed toward the end of the film. She was really into it from the beginning. I’m very fond of Marilyn.

In the end her hysteria doesn’t even seemed to be acted. It’s a complete freak-out.

Oh yeah. She had that ability to wind herself up. And I helped her too, you know. After we filmed most of that last scene, she thought she was finished shooting the movie. Someone screwed up and sent her to wardrobe. So she got herself all cleaned up. That last scene took a very long time to film, because it all takes place during sunrise – which was actually a sunset. In order to get all the pieces I needed, we shot all through the day, for a couple of days, but we had to wait for a cloud to cover the sun, so I could color grade it and make it appear as though it’s all taking place at sunrise. Sometimes we would stand there and wait for two hours for a cloud that was maybe a hundred miles away to pass over the sun. And then it would just miss. It took days. Finally, the ending, with the chainsaw dance, was filmed at sundown. At that moment I needed Marilyn in the truck, and I needed her quickly before the sun went down. When she learned she had to get all bloodied up again in a hurry, she became practically hysterical, yeah.

So, how did you help to wind her up?

Oh, just by screaming. By making things worse when they were already pretty bad. Like I said, she could wind herself up. She could go from zero to a hundred and twenty. Like that! Her knees were all cut up, because I did seventeen takes of her breaking through the door to where Jim Siedow is. Now, the reason I had to do it seventeen times, is that she had gotten herself so hysterical on the first take that she couldn’t say her lines. I wanted it all in one take, I didn’t want to cut. I think I finally had to cut, if I remember correctly.

All that physical stuff and fighting and everything, that was real. It looked real, it sounded real, so you knew it was real. That’s why the movie is such an assault on your nervous system. It has the sound of truth. In APOCALYPSE NOW Francis Ford Coppola recorded the squealing of a pig getting its throat cut. It’s the sound of death. He put that in the sound mix, subliminally. And your nervous system reacts to it. Later on that sound got bootlegged and a lot of filmmakers have used it in a similar way. I have used it myself.

Psychologically, the idea behind THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE was that the movie would enter your mind the way music does. Sounds and music, more so than visual storytelling, can open up a larger aperture to receive emotions of what you are experiencing.

I think that is exactly the way your movie works. Watching it you are not concerned with the plot, but only with what you are experiencing.

Yes, but you still need to give all the characters a back story, so as not make them hand puppets or something. Otherwise you are just waiting for them to be killed. They have to be human.

I was always intrigued by the character of the cook, the way he comforts his victims.

Yeah, at the dinner table he skitters back and forth. But when Sally wakes up and starts screaming, and the hitch-hiker starts mocking her and Leatherface starts howling, also to mock her, it is the cook who is concerned about the morality of it. He is concerned about what grandpa would think about all this. So when he starts mocking her, he is suddenly really self-conscious about it. He looks over his shoulder at grandpa. It is only then that he tries to calm her. To the point where he actually tells her: Well, it’s time to kill you now. We are going to smash your brain in with a hammer. But don’t you worry about it, because you won’t feel a thing. Old grandpa was the best killer there ever was!

And the most menacing figure of the movie, Leatherface, is also scared. There are all these people invading his house.

Oh yeah. He’s terrified. After he has hit the third person he runs to the window just to see where the hell all these people keep coming from. He hits the birdcage with the chicken inside it. And he sits down, wondering what trouble he will be in when the cook gets home.

You just told the story about the family doctor inspiring you with the story of skinning a cadaver. But didn’t you also take some inspiration from the Ed Gein case?

I can’t remove that from the equation, because I had relatives from Wisconsin and they would pay us a visit when I was about four or five years old. They told us the story about this man who lived in the next town from them, about twenty seven miles or so, who was digging up graves and using the bones and skin in his house. That was all I knew about it. They didn’t mention his name. But to me he was like a real boogeyman. That stayed in my mind. When the doctor told his story, I was a teenager and all that stuff about Wisconsin came back to me.

And the chainsaw? How did you come up with that?

That came from holiday shopping. I was in a department store. There were always such high expectations put on me when it was seasonally the time to go buy the presents. I had this real phobia of going shopping and getting into a crowd of people. So I found myself thinking: I have to get out of this store. I was at the hardware department. I was sweating. I wanted to leave. So I look up and see this rack of chainsaws and the thought hits me: if I start up this saw, these people will move and I can walk right out of here. Obviously, I didn’t. But I got out of there and in the car on my way back I kept thinking about it and the ideas started coming to me. When I got home, I put Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road on and started writing down ideas. Because, you know, there are some dark things on that record as well as some beautiful things.

You already talked a bit about the atmosphere on set. Is it true that the actor who played Franklin was as obnoxious in real life as he was in the movie?

Yes, because I told him to be. I encouraged him to make himself as unlikeable to the others as possible. He’s a very good actor, so he did it, and slowly but surely a reality started to emerge from his character.

And Jim Siedow, who played the cook, was a classically trained actor. He did Shakespeare. He came from the Alley Theatre in Houston, which was a renowned theatre, and he played a really wicked King Lear. He understood this, what we were doing.

But still, due to this animosity there were three wrap parties.

[Chuckles] Yeah. I was sitting on the porch of the house and I panned to the left and saw  a wrap party going on. It was the crew and some of the cast. I panned in the other direction, and about twenty meters away there was the second party. And I was sitting by myself. I thought: thank God we’ve gotten through this. All these people, one way or another, have gotten affected by this. Not only do they hate me, because I’m sitting by myself, but they’ve gotten hit with a hammer, they fell down, they hurt themselves. Daniel Pearl, my cameraman, hit a tree during a fast dolly shot. Everyone got injured in some way or another, except me! And as soon as I thought that, a floorboard of the porch broke and my chair fell backwards. I landed in a pile of two-by-fours with nails in them, which were part of the set construction. So, I got punctured by nails at the wrap party. I knew that something magical had just occurred.

And did they applaud?

Yeah, they did. [Laughs]

After all this, did you expect it to be as good as it is? And that it would be successful?

I knew I liked it and the people who worked at the lab, who saw it first, said: this is going to be a big hit. And then Bryanston, the first distributor, who also had the Paul Morrissey Frankenstein film, they said it was going to be a tremendous cult film. It came down to the first screening on Hollywood Boulevard. They went crazy! People threw up. There were fights in the street, in front of the theater. I think it was because of the disturbing energy we spoke of earlier. But when they showed it again, last year, the audience just loved it. [The movie] seems to change over time, like wine. It continues to grow and mature.

I also like the sequel that you did, but why did it take you more than ten years to do it?

Well, at first I just didn’t want to do it, because I didn’t find it interesting artistically. But that was foolish of me. A little later, John Milius and I got to talking about a possible sequel. We envisioned a movie that would take place immediately after the first. We needed a million dollars, but for some reason we couldn’t raise the money. Then I started to hear these rumors that I was riding a Harley Davidson hog and that I had a gang of bikers that would go to film sets around town and cause trouble. I mean: I’ve gained weight, but I don’t look like the kind of guy… I’ve never even been on a Harley! It wasn’t me. Because of the film, people in LA must have thought that the quirky madness of the film was me! Then again, when I had a meeting at a studio, I probably wasn’t as polite as I could have been. Or that I learned that I should have been.

How did you learn?

Well, I stopped at a 7-Eleven store to buy a Dr. Pepper and I was looking through the magazines and there was a picture of William Friedkin and Dino De Laurentiss. At the bottom it said that Friedkin had taken Dino De Laurentiis to see THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. So I got in touch with him and I went out to LA. His advice to me was: Kid, it’s good that you know how to make movies. This will help your career. Now let’s start working on the thing that’s really important, and that’s the bullshit. I know that’s some kind of metaphor. But he said: You have to get the bullshit right! He’s a dear friend of mine, has been for forty years.

You made the sequel for Cannon Films. That was not a happy experience?

Oh, I was happy with the final result. I was unhappy during the making of the film, but I was never unhappy with Yoram [Globus] or Menahem [Golan], because they had really brought me into their family. I know it’s a show business kind of thing to say, that you’re part of a family. But this was quite real. Our worlds became very connected. We spent a lot of time together.

But was this the version you wanted to make? I heard a story about a longer version, a director’s cut…

No. There was a cut made that I took apart. I took stuff out of it. There was a lot of second unit stuff that interrupted the flow of the movie. There were sequences that slowed the film down. What you see now is mostly my cut, because everything that they added, I got rid of. My version is a red comedy.

Did you watch all the other sequels and reboots? What do you think of them?

I think the 3D one was done with a lot of respect for the original. The producer is a friend of mine. He really did his best to pull things from the original – in spirit at least. It was the only one of those films that didn’t try to re-invent the film. It tried to be a part of the original. The others tried to… my God, they brought the Illuminati into it! The Marcus Nispel film didn’t… If Marcus reads this I don’t want him to think… Well, it is what it is. It’s the way I feel. One thing he did I thought was really cool, it was a shot that was really great, and it was over Jessica Biel’s ass as she was approaching the house.

And the POLTERGEIST remake is coming up also. Are you looking forward to that?

I can’t really say. I know nothing about it. I hear the director’s a real nice guy. But remakes and reboots will keep happening and one can only hope that they’re entertaining.

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This interview was originally done for the Dutch magazine Nieuwe Revu, in which only a small portion was eventually published. Above is the full version of this talk, edited only for clarity.