They Came. They Sawed.
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Then 29 years old, Hooper was already the “old man” of Austin’s minuscule filmmaking community. Appropriately, his mother had been sitting in the Paramount Theatre when she went into labor, giving birth a few hours later at Seton Hospital to only son Tobe (pronounced “Toby”). Hooper’s father owned the Capitol Hotel, on Congress Avenue between Sixth Street and Seventh Street, and the old man loved sneaking out to a movie in the afternoon, often taking his wife and young son with him. There were four theaters in downtown Austin—the Paramount, the Capitol, the Queens, and the State—and Hooper grew up inside their walls. “I saw a movie every day,” he recalls. “I think I learned cinematic language before I learned language. I think I was a camera.” Like his friend Spielberg, Hooper retains a latent counterculture shabbiness, with his unruly beard, mop haircut, and professorial wire rims. He still rivals Dennis Hopper for the number of times he uses the word “man.”
At age three Hooper appropriated his father’s Bell & Howell 8-millimeter home movie camera and started making his own films: “They were little stories. ‘Here’s my cousin and her boyfriend. She’s tied on the railroad track. Here comes the tricycle train with a beer-can smokestack.’” Then, throughout his childhood and adolescence, Hooper used every available family member and classmate as an actor, impressing his teachers by turning in class projects in celluloid form. “I did a vignette version of the Frankenstein story using kids from the school,” he says. “Later I heard kids talking about my movie in the lunch line, and that’s what made me know this is what I wanted to do.”
In 1962 he enrolled at the University of Texas and checked in at the brand-new film school—or, more precisely, the Department of Radio-Television-Film, which had no real film equipment and only two film students. He lasted two years, never spending a day without a camera in his hand, but the most valuable contact he made was Robert Schenkkan, the general manager of public TV station KLRN. Hooper would visit Schenkkan three or four times a week, often borrowing the station’s 16-millimeter camera, and eventually Schenkkan gave him small jobs shooting footage for the station.
In the mid-sixties his good reputation with Schenkkan led to his first major directing job. Producer Fred Miller had persuaded the folk singers Peter, Paul, and Mary to participate in a feature documentary, and Miller hired Hooper to go on tour with them as the principal shooter and director. “It was the Vietnam era,” Hooper says, “and I remember at the end of every concert, Peter, Paul, and Mary would separate and go to different parts of the venue, and their fans would gather around and talk about the war. It was interesting, but I was kind of a nonpolitical hippie. I had the long hair, and I walked around with a movie camera in my hand, which was kind of a hippie thing to do. But in fact it made me a suspicious character. I was FBI. I was a narc. I was with the feds. Why else would I be taking everyone’s picture all the time?”
In 1970 a Houston businessman named David Ford put together a group that invested $40,000 in Hooper’s first feature, Eggshells. At a time when heavy-handed youth pictures like The Strawberry Statement were attempting to “explain” the counterculture, Hooper’s idea was “to show the end of the Vietnam War, with the troops coming home, but tell it through the eyes of a commune.” Shooting with a hand-held camera, aping the style of his idols Fellini and Antonioni, Hooper used real people who lived in a real communal house just north of the UT campus. Most of the script was either improvised or scribbled on napkins. Trying to flesh out a plot in a movie that had none, Hooper invented a ghostly presence that dwelled in the basement of the house, a mysterious force that Hooper's friend and future Chainsaw art director Bob Burns eventually dubbed the “cryptoembryonic hyperelectric presence.”
Alas, the only place Eggshells was ever seen was on a few college campuses, where, Hooper laments, “as soon as the lights went down, the Bic lighters would all go on.” Billed on the poster as “An American Freak Illumination: A Time and Spaced Film Fantasy,” the movie failed to return a single dime. “It really kind of bummed me out,” says Hooper. “I didn’t want to make a drug movie. I wanted to make art movies, European-style movies. I was really discouraged. I had no money to hire real actors to legitimize my film, so some of the acting was totally improv. I would sneak into the commune house, turn on the lights and wake them up, and just film whatever happened.”
The most memorable actor in the film—partly because he appears in a wild full-frontal-nude sequence, setting fire to his car and his clothes before frolicking through a meadow—was none other than Kim Henkel (working under the pseudonym Boris Schnurr). “You saw that?” Henkel says, panic in his voice, when I call him at his home in Port Aransas. “I thought they burned every copy. They should burn every copy. It was a cinema verité piece that evolved into a lamebrain psychedelic hippie thing. After that Tobe and I became casual friends. He wanted me to develop a script with him.” The two started working on a modern version of “Hansel and Gretel.” “We had no budget, we had no cast, and the last picture had not been successful,” says Henkel. “What do you do? Horror films is about it.”
Hooper had come to the same conclusion when a friend suggested he see Night of the Living Dead, which was causing a big commotion at the student union at the time. Made by George Romero, a regional director of commercials in Pittsburgh, the 1968 zombie classic had become the first genuine cult film. “They were lined up to see it,” recalls Hooper. “And I thought, ‘This is it. This is the way to get attention two thousand miles from L.A. and get noticed. If I could only raise the money.’” It was shortly thereafter that Hooper had his epiphany at Montgomery Ward. He immediately called Henkel.
“I got this call from Tobe,” says Henkel, “and he said he wanted to get together. I started going over to his house every evening and figuring out the story structure. Mainly we were working out a feel.” They kept the original idea of an updated Hansel and Gretel story, “only instead of being lured to a gingerbread cottage with gumdrops, it was a little more sinister.” To create the modern version of a witch who likes to cook and eat children, they studied the then-scant literature on real-life cannibals and serial killers.
One of them was Edward Gein, a handyman in Plainfield, Wisconsin, who liked to dig up fresh graves, cut the skin off corpses, wear it on various parts of his own body. When the authorities finally caught him, in 1957, he was implicated in the murders of two women in his quest for “fresh” body parts, and in his house they found skulls on the bedposts, a human heart in a frying pan, and a woman in his barn who’d been field-dressed like a deer. All the members of his family had died, and he was suspected of never burying his mother and possibly killing his brother. He showed clear signs of being a transsexual—he always dressed in female body parts, especially breasts, vaginas, nipples, and the faces of women—and would spend the rest of his life at the Central State Hospital and the Mendota Mental Health Institute. He died in 1984, but not before he had inspired characters in Psycho, Deranged, Maniac, and most notably, The Silence of the Lambs.
“I definitely studied Gein,” says Henkel, “but I also noticed a murder case in Houston at the time, a serial murderer you probably remember named Elmer Wayne Henley. He was a young man who recruited victims for an older homosexual man. I saw some news report where Elmer Wayne was identifying bodies and their locations, and he was this skinny little ol’ seventeen-year-old, and he kind of puffed out his chest and said, ‘I did these crimes, and I’m gonna stand up and take it like a man.’ Well, that struck me as interesting, that he had this conventional morality at that point. He wanted it known that, now that he was caught, he would do the right thing. So this kind of moral schizophrenia is something I tried to build into the characters.”
With Hooper refining the outline and Henkel writing furiously, the two had a draft for their project in six weeks. Then they settled on a name: “Head Cheese.” “Before I came up with the chain saw,” says Hooper, “the story had trolls under a bridge. We changed that to the character who eventually became Leatherface. The idea actually came from a doctor I knew. I remembered that he’d once told me this story about how, when he was a premed student, the class was studying cadavers. And he went into the morgue and skinned a cadaver and made a mask for Halloween. We decided Leatherface would have a different human-skin mask to fit each of his moods.”
