Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [66]
TOBE HOOPER didn’t know much about business, and he didn’t care. He just wanted to make a movie. And he knew it ever since his transient childhood, much of which was spent traveling to different hotels in Texas and Louisiana since his mother was in the business. He understood the lonely roads of Texas and remembered the constant bickering inside a car between his parents, who got divorced when he turned eight. “Those family dinners can go very wrong,” he later recalled vaguely. “I saw some things growing up that were bizarre and weird.”
He spent most of his time by himself, reading comic books and dreaming about monsters. The stories of domestic turmoil in EC Comics spoke to him. So did the misunderstood creatures of classic Universal horror. When not at the theater, Hooper corralled a group of three friends to help him re-create the Hammer versions of Frankenstein and Dracula on an 8mm camera. On the weekends, he headed to the library, where he looked up old issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland. The principal at his school expressed concern, telling Hooper to stop making films and concentrate on his studies. He responded by leaving home to live with his dad and attend a new school. After graduating from high school, Hooper attended the University of Texas in Austin, but he spent more time making movies than in class. He dropped out early and started making a name for himself locally directing trailers, commercials, and industrial films. During this early stage of his career, Hooper first saw someone die.
He was shooting footage in an emergency room for a documentary for premed students, focusing on a prominent Texas doctor. What he saw was a sweaty, injured victim struggling to stay alive after a bullet shot leveled him right above his eyes. The man squirmed and struggled. As he seemed to be nearing the end, Hooper did something that he would later come to believe was quite remarkable. He zoomed in on the action.
As a team of doctors worked, swirling around the table in a frenzy of activity, the director did not flinch, keeping focus documenting the tragedy as clearly as he could. And he did so, calmly, in one take. The sound of the wounded man in pain got softer until it finally faded away altogether. Hooper turned the camera off, left the hospital, and went to dinner with a few friends, where he discussed the experience from a remove, almost as though he hadn’t been there.
The next day, he took a look at the footage, and it made him sick. He vomited suddenly. Hooper learned that the impact of violence depends completely on where you sit. What disturbed—and fascinated—him was that he had a much stronger reaction to seeing death as a viewer the next day than to watching it happen right in front of his eyes. That was strange. “There’s something about looking through that plate of glass that separated me in a way that was clinical,” Hooper says. What he saw while filming was an interesting subject, something dramatic, exciting.
Hooper, who spoke with a laid-back stoner’s affect, was a pacifist and hated the Vietnam War, but would much rather document a war protest than participate in it. His first feature, Eggshells, was a 1969 psychedelic trip about a commune that aimed to capture the drugged-out ethos of the time. Aimless and dedicated to capturing what it was really like to be young, it was billed as “An American Freak Illumination: A Time and Spaced Film Fantasy.” But instead of making the Texas version of Easy Rider, Hooper dug deep into his roots as a young horror fan, adding a ghost to haunt the young hippies. In one scene, a nude man sets fire