Texas Chainsaw Director Tobe Hooper Dies Aged 74

In 1974 the world of horror changed for good when The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released, the genre never looked back since.Tobe Hooper the master of horror behind the cult classic created an icon of horror that year, Leatherface. The iconology will be forever bestowed in Horror and the sad news today that Hooper has sadly died aged 74.

It was announced he died Saturday with The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office announcing he died of natural causes.

Halloween sales worldwide will be forever grateful for those Leatherface masks. The movie that gave us a movie that had a group of young adults stalked by the deranged masked killer and his cannibal family. The movie was like a counter reaction to Vietnam War but also caused controversy here in the UK. Labelled ‘video nasty’ and a target of the right wing activist who targetted the British Media pushing for bans on anything with bad language, sex, violence in film and Television.

Texas Chainsaw was made on a budget of around $300,000 (about £200,000), an idea that started in a hardware store. where he imagined he chainsaw his way out of a busy store. He used real props, amateur actors giving the whole movie a real approach. Even today the legacy of the film still be felt with a couple of new versions soon to be released.

Tobe Hooper went onto to make many more independent movies including Eaten Alive, Funhouse, Invaders From Mars remake, Salem’s Lot TV Series based on the Stephen King book. Next, to Texas Chainsaw, he’ll always be ed for working on Poltergeist with Steven Spielberg in 1982. A classic horror in its own right.

After making the British based sci-fi horror Lifeforce he would return to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1986 for a sequel. His later work sadly didn’t inspire as much as his earlier films with 2013’s Djinn been his last directed movie.