Director Tobe Hooper Dies At 74

Hmmm. Trying to think of something nice to say about the man.

I guess that Chainsaw *is* an important film, but... it was in the post anyway, you know? I can't help but feel that if Hooper didn't make it, then someone else would have come along and made it anyway.

He was a dude famous for doing the right thing in the right place at the right time. Artistically, I'd argue he was pretty bankrupt; he had one big idea, blew his load, never got another stiffy again.

At the very least, we can thank Hooper for inspiring a generation of film makers better than himself. And you can thank him for the legion of X-rated video nasty bollocks that flooded through the hole that Chainsaw blew wide open, if that's your thing.

I guess I view him as one of the founding fathers of crap cult gore movies. Huzzah.

I'll agree with that. Chainsaw's reputation for being a 'slasher' film is... misguided. Hooper's big innovation was his camera work, which was intimate and handheld for the most part, and that's what gave the film that atmosphere.

You can see Spielberg copying the style during the ocean sequences of Jaws. Same goes for Ridley Scott, who took the handheld idea even further in Alien by using fucking VHS footage for the shit-your-pants spacewalk across the alien planetoid.

Again, handheld cameras had only just reached the 'we could actually make a fucking movie using these' stage of their evolution. Hooper just happened to be the first one to do so.

Also, I just checked something that had been niggling at me; turns out that The Last House on the Left was released two years before Chainsaw. So, yeah, not even the Massacre part of Chainsaw is even all that original.

/so endeth the darknation Buzzkill Massacre.