The Funhouse: Tobe Hooper's underrated slasher deserves another look

The director of Texas Chainsaw Massacre delivered plenty of scares with this follow-up film

Despite the fact that Tobe Hooper directed several films per decade throughout the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, he’s really only remembered for two of them. 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was his breakout hit, and it’s filled with such raw, gruesome visuals that it is widely credited with redefining what a horror movie could be. A few years later came Poltergeist, a blockbuster supernatural thriller that contains such a high level of directorial polish many believe it was really directed (or at least co-directed) by its producer/co-writer, Steven Spielberg.

Besides those two, most of Hooper’s films flopped and were quickly forgotten (although Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 remains a cult classic), but at least one of them is worth another look — and it just happened to come out in between his two best known films.

Released on March 13, 1981, The Funhouse follows four teens who visit a traveling carnival with an unsavory reputation after two young girls died in a previous town it visited. Being stupid, horny teenagers, they laugh off a warning from the father of the main character Amy (Elizabeth Berridge). Once the foursome arrives at the carnival, they do typical 1980s carnival things, like ride the rides, check out a tent of deformed animals, and peek into a burlesque show of near-naked women.

Then one of the teens gets the bright idea for the four of them to spend the night in the funhouse ride, and the others agree. While there, they’re witness to the murder of a fortune teller (Sylvia Miles) that takes place in the funhouse’s living quarters. The killer is a young, intellectually disabled man in a Frankenstein mask (Wayne Doba), and when his father (Kevin Conway) arrives, he scolds him for killing her. The masked man is revealed as a person with albinism who is ravaged with birth defects, including fanged teeth. That’s when the four spying teens are discovered and the movie becomes a race through the funhouse with the monstrous young man and his father in pursuit.

Now, there are all kinds of reasons why this movie ages terribly in 2026. The main antagonist being a monstrous handicapped person being the most obvious one as it treats none of his medical conditions with even the slightest bit of humanity or hint of nuance. There’s also gratuitous sex and nudity, including in the opening scene where Berridge, who was just 18 or 19 years old when she appeared in the film, is scared in the shower by her younger brother. Hooper even brought in real deformed animals that he got on loan from a traveling carnival, like a cow with two heads, which is hardly something that would be featured in a movie nowadays (at least without CGI).

Yet, despite the many issues going against The Funhouse 45 years after its release, this is still a solid, scary movie that delivers on the promise of its setting.

The carnival feels like a skeevy, dirty place with little regard for safety, and populated by unscrupulous carnies who really couldn't work anywhere else. It’s the kind of environment that will seem very familiar to anyone who spent any time at traveling carnivals as a kid. Hooper uses it all to its full potential. Nothing really happens for the entire first half of the film, but you’re never bored with the carnival’s visuals or unsettling characters (four of whom are played by Conway).

The funhouse itself is an automated ride populated with animatronic clowns, monsters, and all kinds of creepy faces. Each animatronic is poorly-lit with excellent use of shadow, and they each feature slow, unsettling, mechanical movements. The animatronics go for the same creepy aesthetic that made Five Nights at Freddy’s so successful, except they're far scarier and really do capture the kinds of things you’d find in a classic haunted house ride.

Hooper uses these props and settings to build tension, and when the teens are discovered, he pays it all off as they navigate the twists and turns of the funhouse, which they soon discover they are locked into. The villains are effectively scary, too. The main monster has some great old-school makeup effects, and his father, who chases the teens with a gun, is clearly unconcerned with taking a life if it means protecting his deformed son.

The father/son relationship in The Funhouse echoes the dynamics of Leatherface’s family in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Both feature tight-knit families of freaks who protect each other, no matter how horrible they are. In The Funhouse, once the father discovers the death of the fortune teller, he scolds his son, not for killing in general, but for killing a fellow carny. Locals however, are fair game. In the same way Hooper tapped into a believably scary world of backwoods killers in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, his carnival folk feel real too.

While none of The Funhouse is as good or as terrifying as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it’s still a creepy movie with some real scares that never dry up in its tight, 96-minute runtime. And while it’s easy to see how the same guy made both of those films, besides a scary clown appearing in both, there’s none of the clean, clear, highly-professional filmmaking that miraculously appeared in his next film, Poltergeist. If anything, The Funhouse only adds credence to the idea that maybe Hooper didn’t actually direct Poltergeist at all.