They Came. They Sawed.
(Page 8 of 8)
Friedkin was an admirer of Chainsaw and the driving force behind Universal’s support, helping the Texans get the development deal. “You really know how to make movies,” he told Hooper. “And that’s good. That’ll come in handy. But let’s talk about what’s important—the bullshit.” Hooper and Henkel were eager students. They soaked up everything Friedkin told them, but first they had to satisfy a deal made prior to the Universal contract. A distributorship owned by Roger Corman had hired them to do a Chainsaw-type horror story from an existing script (rewritten by Henkel) about an insane motel manager who feeds his guests to the alligators that live in the swamp out back. They shot it in three weeks at Raleigh Studios, in Hollywood, but even with Marilyn Burns as the lead, lightning did not strike twice. Mel Ferrer, Stuart Whitman, and Robert Englund rounded out the cast of Eaten Alive, also known as Legend of the Bayou, also known as Death Trap, also known as Horror Hotel, also known as Horror Hotel Massacre, also known as Murder on the Bayou, also known as Starlight Slaughter—it failed to make money regardless of how many times it was retitled and re-released.
Afterward, Hooper and Henkel slowly realized that the three-picture deal had become a zero-picture deal. The contract expired, and they were on their own. They would occasionally talk by phone through the years, usually to discuss Vortex business, but they haven’t worked together since. In the early eighties they each released movies that define the yin and the yang of the Chainsaw heritage.
Poltergeist was Hooper’s first big-budget picture and an unqualified commercial success. He pitched into the project joyfully with his new friend and executive producer Spielberg, and they jointly worked out the casting and the general shooting schedule. Like kids at play, they called each other several times a day, and when production began, Spielberg wanted to be there. On a particular day when a Los Angeles Times reporter visited the set, Spielberg was shooting second-unit work in front of the house while Hooper was in the backyard getting a scene in which a tree comes to life in a little girl’s dreams. The following week an article appeared in the Times implying that Hooper was not really directing Poltergeist and that Spielberg was not just the executive producer but was ghost-directing. The clear implication was that Hooper was not up to the job. When the movie came out, review after review took note of the rumor that Hooper hadn’t directed it at all.
To this day Hooper’s face falls if you ask him about it, and you have to wonder whether the basis of his reputation, Chainsaw, is what caused the critics to be skeptical. Afterward, Hooper was forced back into the independent film world. After he agreed to do the first sequel to Chainsaw, Cannon Films promised to finance two other pet projects of his. He got a $20 million budget for Lifeforce, which got mixed reviews but did poorly at the box office, and he followed that with a remake of the classic Invaders From Mars, which got a good critical reception but also underperformed. Then, to satisfy his obligation to Cannon, he reluctantly churned out The Chainsaw Massacre 2 for $4.5 million. Maybe it was ahead of its time, but the comedy treatment of the Chainsaw family—screenwriter Kit Carson, of Paris, Texas fame, envisioned it as “the horror version of The Breakfast Club”—just didn’t fly with serious fans of the original, and everyone who worked on part two thought Hooper seemed detached and unchallenged.
He struggled after that, taking television work (The Equalizer, Freddy’s Nightmares, Tales from the Crypt, movies of the week) and making the occasional low-budget feature, like The Funhouse or Spontaneous Combustion, financed by people hoping to repeat the Chainsaw success story. He’s ended up, at age 61, as a journeyman director and a specialist in horror and science fiction, and his last movie—The Toolbox Murders—was actually a big-budget remake of a low-budget horror classic from the seventies. Chainsaw did indeed become his ticket to L.A.
Henkel’s early-eighties release was Last Night at the Alamo. Written by Henkel and directed by Eagle Pennell, it may be the best of all the homegrown Texas movies. Rarely seen, because it’s in 16-millimeter black-and-white and is unavailable on video, it’s a dark, funny, acidly accurate screenplay. It takes place at a little bar called the Alamo, destined for demolition the following day to make way for a Houston skyscraper, and on its final night the regulars are forced to sort through their illusions and dreams.
Henkel wrote this mature screenplay almost immediately after his return to Texas, in 1981. “My son was born in L.A. around that time,” says Henkel, “and I didn’t want him to grow up there.” He bought a funky house on stilts a few hundred yards from the surf and settled into a life of freelance writing, part-time teaching, and full-time reading. Dining at the Port Aransas marina one afternoon a few years ago, Henkel looked remarkably unchanged from the young hippie who had starred in Eggshells. He had the same handlebar mustache, the same easy drawl, the same relaxed manner. I asked him if he regretted never making a go of it in Hollywood.
“Not really,” he said. “I saw enough of it. They’re all criminals. Michael Shamberg, who was a producer at Warner Bros., wanted to meet with us after Last Night at the Alamo, and they set up a big meeting in New York City for a project we were going to do called ‘King of Texas.’ I’d written the script, kind of a quirky project. But Eagle showed up at the meeting so wasted and obnoxious that it was obvious it would never happen after that. And Eagle’s never made anything else after Last Night at the Alamo. Alcohol got him.”
In 1994, twenty years after the original movie was made, Robert Kuhn convinced Henkel that he should write and direct another sequel—the first one to be done by the story’s original screenwriter. (“I had to do everything but put dynamite under Kim to get him to write that script, and I was convinced he was gonna have to direct it, but I thought we [could] do another one.”) The result was Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, easily the best-written, best-acted, and best-directed of all the sequels. (There was a second sequel, Leatherface, in 1990.) It had the star power of Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger, who were unknown Austin actors when Henkel cast them but had become “names” before the movie was released. But the theatrical release of the film was twice delayed to take advantage of publicity from other McConaughey and Zellweger releases, and then suddenly support from Columbia TriStar evaporated. The movie was seen by only a few people, and it was perceived by the press as just another cheap sequel.
These days, Henkel fields an occasional call from Hollywood or New York, and he’s written another horror script called “Exurbia” that has acquired that peculiar status of being much admired but never produced. Twice a week he drives across the barrier island to Corpus Christi, where he teaches classes in screenwriting, production, and editing at the fortresslike Texas A&M at Corpus. His eager students, like Tobe Hooper four decades ago, have to make do with very little actual film equipment.
“I don’t think anyone should be pissed off about Chainsaw,” he told me, out of the blue. “I know everyone was upset about it. I know everyone thought there should have been more money and more recognition and more everything. But it was a bunch of kids making a movie! How many times do kids making what is essentially a student film get that kind of notice? What’s so wrong with just having a film that really did get noticed? If we made ten dollars on it, it’s ten dollars more than we should have hoped for.”
R.I.P.
Of all the convoluted academic articles on Chainsaw—and there are many—one that caught my attention was written by a woman named Mikita Brottman, who teaches language and literature at the Maryland Institute College of Art, in Baltimore. One reason I took her seriously is that she is the only critic who understood Chainsaw as a version of Hansel and Gretel. Much of her analysis involves understanding Chainsaw as an inverted fairy tale, “an apocalyptic narrative of negativity and destruction, wholly unredeemed by any single element of plot, mood, or characterization.” (This is a good thing in what she calls the “cinéma vomitif.”) She then compares Leatherface to the Wise Old Man of legend, a Hindu ascetic known as Aghori, and concludes that this one movie comprises “perhaps one of the only stories of true horror that our culture has produced.” The power of it, and the problem of it, is that “in this fairy tale there is only evil: the good that exists is either defeated, annihilated, or driven away.”
And in that respect it was both courageous and ahead of its time. No wonder the metal bands love it. It was punk before punk existed. The script is courageous and the execution is courageous. And for that reason it might be admired, but it will never be loved.
The famous house on Quick Hill Road, despite the regular pilgrimages of horror fans to find it, is gone. Quick Hill Road itself has been rerouted, and the mesquite break where Leatherface chased Sally has been bulldozed. A sign on the nearest highway reads “La Frontera: 330 Acre Master-Planned Commercial Development.” But if you drive 81 miles to the northwest, to the little lake town of Kingsland, and you go to the historic Antlers Hotel, you might want to eat at the restaurant across the street, which is located in a quaint “Victorian 1890’s house” with a beautiful bay window where Bob Burns once built his “bone room” and a beautiful dining room where a cannibal family once feasted for 26 hours.
