American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper

Description

Tobe Hooper's productions, which often trespassed upon the safety of the family unit, cast a critical eye toward an America in crisis. Often dismissed by scholars and critics as a one-hit wonder thanks to his 1974 horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Hooper nevertheless was instrumental in the development of a robust and deeply political horror genre from the 1960s until his death in 2017. In American Twilight, the authors assert that the director was an auteur whose works featured complex monsters and disrupted America’s sacrosanct perceptions of prosperity and domestic security. American Twilight focuses on the skepticism toward American institutions and media and the articulation of uncanny spaces so integral to Hooper’s vast array of feature and documentary films, made-for-television movies, television episodes, and music videos. From Egg Shells (1969) to Poltergeist (1982), Djinn (2013), and even Billy Idol’s music video for “Dancing with Myself” (1985), Tobe Hooper provided a singular directorial vision that investigated masculine anxiety and subverted the idea of American exceptionalism. Acknowledgments Introduction. “No Pleasure in Killing”: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper (Kristopher Woofter and Will Dodson) Part I. Hooper’s Gothic Chapter 1. “It’s Better to Be Suggestive:” Gothic Intertextuality and Hybridity in the 1980s Films of Tobe Hooper (Brigid Cherry) Chapter 2. Poltergeist: TV People and Suburban Rage Monsters (Joan Hawkins) Chapter 3. Tobe Hooper’s Teenage Wasteland: Youth and Disillusionment in The Funhouse, Invaders from Mars, and Mortuary (Kristopher Woofter) Chapter 4. Salem’s Lot: Tobe Hooper’s Gothic Peyton Place (Tony Williams) Chapter 5. Feeding the Industrial Monster: A Critical Reconsideration of Tobe Hooper’s The Mangler (Carl H. Sederholm) Chapter 6. Unsettled Architecture and Avant-Garde Strategies in Tobe Hooper’s Down Friday Street, Toolbox Murders, and Djinn (Anne Golden and Kristopher Woofter) Part II. Embodiment Chapter 7. Nightmare Images: Tobe Hooper on Horror and Aging (Adam Lowenstein) Chapter 8. Experimental Sorcery in Tobe Hooper’s Eggshells (Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare) Chapter 9. Lizard Brain Ouroboros: Human Antiexceptionalism in Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive and Crocodile (Mike Thorn) Chapter 10. “Sex or the Saw, Boy, What’s It Gonna Be?”: Tobe Hooper’s Anxious Men (Will Dodson) Chapter 11. Bad Touches: Spontaneous Combustion in the Aftermath of the Nuclear Family (Alanna Thain) Part III. Production and Industry Chapter 12. Can(n)onical Hooper: A Reconsideration of Tobe Hooper’s Golan-Globus Films (Ian Olney) Chapter 13. Hooper’s Hollywood: Investigating Occult Spaces in Toolbox Murders (2004) (Nina K. Martin) Chapter 14. Songs in the Key of Death: Tobe Hooper’s “Dancing with Myself” and “Dance of the Dead” (Jerry D. Metz) Chapter 15. The Past Infects the Present: Abjection and Identity in Tobe Hooper's 1990s TV and Video Productions (John Taylor) Chapter 16. “Get Back to Work!”: Critiquing the Hollywood-Industrial Complex in The Mangler (Clayton Dillard) Part IV. The American Twilight Chapter 17. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Begins (J. Shea and Ned Schantz) Chapter 18. Tobe Hooper and the American Twilight (Christopher Sharrett) Appendix: Cross-Referenced Tobe Hooper Filmography References List of Contributors Index