Full article here. New York Times.com

https://www.nytimes.com/2...ml?mcubz=0


First George Romero, and now Tobe Hooper...?


Two or the greats are now gone.





Tobe Hooper, who realized just how terrifying a chain saw in the wrong hands could be and used the insight to make one of the most influential horror movies of the last century, “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 74.

The Los Angeles County coroner’s office said Sunday that he died of natural causes, The Associated Press reported.

Mr. Hooper’s other directing credits included “Poltergeist,” the 1982 ghost story he made with Steven Spielberg, and episodes of television shows like “Tales From the Crypt,” but his most enduring contribution was certainly the “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” a low-budget 1974 sleeper that became a cult hit, helped establish horror conventions that are still widely used and influenced countless other directors.

Mr. Hooper said that as a young man he loved the horror genre, but found that the films in it had become boring.

“I figured I was paying two bucks a ticket, a dollar and a half a ticket, and I was getting about 10 cents’ worth of scare,” he said in “Masters of Horror,” a 2002 documentary. Then a friend steered him to “Night of the Living Dead,” the 1968 film by George A. Romero (who died last month).

“I walked out thinking, ‘O.K., that’s the way to do it,’” Mr. Hooper said.

Mr. Romero’s film was an inspiration for the would-be director, but he still needed an idea. It came to him, he said, in the hardware department of a Sears-like store during a busy Christmas season, with his low tolerance for crowds as a catalyst.

“I was kind of freaking, just wanted to get out of there, get out of the crowd,” he said in the documentary. “And so I found myself in front of a chain-saw display in the hardware department, and that’s where the idea came from — ‘Well, if I pick this damn thing up and start it, they’ll part like the Red Sea and I can get out of here.’”

The result was his breakthrough film, shot in Texas in 100-degree heat with a cast of unknowns and Mr. Hooper, also an unknown, in the director’s chair. (With Kim Henkel, he also wrote the story and screenplay.)

The tale involves two siblings and their friends, a family of cannibals, and a chain-saw-wielding madman named Leatherface (played by Gunnar Hansen) who wears a mask made of human skin. Drawing some elements from the real-life story of Ed Gein, the movie shocked with its propulsive violence. Mr. Hooper, though, maintained that it wasn’t as gory as many people assumed.