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Director Tobe Hooper is simultaneously one of horror’s most celebrated filmmakers and one of its most underrated — celebrated thanks to his direction of one of the most influential and accomplished horror movies of all time, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” but underrated given the overall lack of appreciation for most of what came after. Credit for Hooper’s biggest hit, “Poltergeist,” is generally (and erroneously) attributed to producer Steven Spielberg. Elsewhere, though Hooper’s TV adaptation of “Salem’s Lot” has gained stature in recent years, he’s generally discussed as a director whose work lives in the shadow of “Chainsaw” — when he’s discussed at all.
Yet among the more than a dozen features Hooper made after “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” are several truly distinctive works that often — as in the case of the profoundly melancholy and unsettling 1981 slasher film “The Funhouse” — rank among the best in their horror subgenres. Some of these movies are not only forgotten but were barely known to begin with, given Hooper’s termite-like existence in the 1990s and 2000s, decades spent toiling in low-budget straight-to-DVD indies, and anonymous cable television assignments.
Thankfully, boutique physical media labels like Arrow, Shout! Factory, and Vinegar Syndrome have spent the last several years giving the director’s work the respect it deserves, with supplement-laden 4K UHD and Blu-ray releases of essential Hooper films like “Eaten Alive,” “The Funhouse,” and “The Mangler.” Now, Vinegar Syndrome has produced an exquisite special edition of Hooper’s 1993 riff on the Marquis de Sade, “Night Terrors,” a film that ranks among the filmmaker’s most maligned movies. It’s also one of his best.
That “Night Terrors” is so interesting and so aligned with Hooper’s preoccupations and stylistic motifs is a little surprising, given that it was a for-hire assignment the director came to relatively late in the proceedings. The movie originated with Harry Alan Towers, a producer with, to put it mildly, a colorful past — in the 1960s he was a reputed Soviet spy who operated a vice ring tasked with luring and blackmailing prominent U.S. officials, including President John F. Kennedy.
By the time “Night Terrors” came around, Towers was a producer with dozens of features on his resume, including several Marquis de Sade adaptations. “Night Terrors” began as a reworking of one of these, 1969’s “Eugenie…The Story of Her Journey into Perversion,” but it evolved into something fairly different by the time Towers partnered with Israeli producer Yoram Globus in the early 1990s. The idea was that the Cannon Films impresario, whose long-time partnership with Menahem Golan had recently ended, would join forces with Towers to remake “Eugenie” as a horror picture.
Globus had a past with Hooper, Cannon having financed three of the director’s most well-resourced — and financially unsuccessful — features in the 1980s. After Hooper hit big with “Poltergeist” in 1982, he signed a deal with Cannon that yielded “Lifeforce,” “Invaders From Mars,” and “Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2,” three artistic triumphs but economic disasters that accelerated Cannon’s demise and essentially put an end to Hooper’s career working with generous budgets.
Hooper and Golan-Globus were happy with each other despite the movies’ box-office failures and a bit of executive meddling on the extremely expensive “Lifeforce.” Cannon was, in fact, an extremely filmmaker-friendly outfit despite its reputation as exploitation schlockmeisters. Alongside bread-and-butter lowest common denominator fare like “Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo” and “Death Wish III,” they financed auteur projects by John Cassavetes (“Love Streams”), Robert Altman (“Fool For Love”), and Jean-Luc Godard (“King Lear”), and granted those directors almost total creative control.
Hooper was no exception, smuggling his usual critique of American culture and values that began with “Chainsaw” into the big-budget “Lifeforce” and “Invaders of Mars” (and the slightly more reasonably budgeted “Chainsaw 2”), without compromising the ferocity of his point of view. In spite of Hooper’s rapport with Globus, however, he was not the original director of “Night Terrors” — that distinction would go to British journeyman Gerry O’Hara.
‘Night Terrors’Vinegar SyndromeO’Hara came on board to direct a script by Daniel Matmor that drew on elements from de Sade’s “Philosophy in the Boudoir” and synthesized them into a very 1990s cocktail of horror, softcore pornography, and philosophical inquiry. The movie is framed by material depicting the Marquis de Sade (played by Freddy Krueger himself, Robert Englund) ranting from his prison cell; this is intercut with a present-day story in which Genie (Zoe Trilling), a young American woman visiting Egypt, is indoctrinated into a sex cult led by one of de Sade’s descendants (also played by Englund).
Conflicting reports surround O’Hara’s departure from the project, but one factor seems to be the switch from Egypt to Israel as a shooting location. This change, driven by financial considerations, also troubled Englund, since his primary motivation for signing on was his desire to see Egypt. When they decided to change locations, Globus and Towers had an unhappy star and no director.
They brought on Hooper largely to appease Englund, who had worked with the director on “Eaten Alive” and the pilot episode of “Freddy’s Nightmares” (and would work with him again on “The Mangler”). He was probably happy for the job, given that whatever commercial capital he had accumulated at Cannon after the success of “Poltergeist” was long gone. Hooper had spent the years since 1986’s “Chainsaw 2” largely in television, with only 1990’s “Spontaneous Combustion” appearing in theaters since.
The director’s late arrival to “Night Terrors” doesn’t show anywhere in the film, which feels like pure, undiluted Hooper; it’s a glorious showcase for his gifts, from the abundantly horrific imagery in de Sade’s imprisonment and torture to the dark, ironic sense of humor that characterizes the scenes depicting the sex cult (scenes that are both funnier and more disturbing in the age of Jeffrey Epstein). Coming in to save the day in the late innings rather than having labored over the project for months or years, Hooper feels liberated in “Night Terrors,” and lets his imagination run wild.
‘Night Terrors’Vinegar SyndromeThe erotic elements of “Night Terrors” in particular are really something to behold, from a snake-fellating belly dancer and naked horseback riding to the sex party whose guests arrive dressed as children. Hooper has always been marked by his transgressive side, whether in violence, sex, or politics. His films are provocations, and “Night Terrors” is no exception. He’s also always been marked by his sly and aggressive sense of humor, which is put to good use here — in fact, the line between erotic, offensive, and hilarious is often blurred to extremely entertaining effect, as Hooper pushes the outrageousness of Matmor’s script to its limit and beyond.
He also takes his usual sense of intertextual commentary in new directions thanks to the movie’s sexual component. Hooper was always the kind of director, like many of his peers, who was comfortable with referencing other movies and using those references in conversation with his own work to create new meanings. The kids in “Salem’s Lot,” “Poltergeist,” and “Invaders From Mars” all live in shrines to pop culture that inform and reflect their own lives, and even the killer in “The Funhouse” has a special relationship with Frankenstein’s monster.
In “Night Terrors,” Hooper creates a dialogue not only with other horror movies, but with the erotic films and TV shows that proliferated in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The story of Genie’s sexual awakening has more than a little in common with Zalman King-scripted soft-core fare like “9 1/2 Weeks,” “Two Moon Junction,” and “Red Shoe Diaries,” and Hooper borrows the highly diffused neon lighting and ad agency-inspired aesthetic of those works for his own sex scenes. Yet he also constantly undercuts or plays against them with satire, gore, and just out-and-out weirdness — it’s hard for a soft-core movie to enter the nervous system unimpeded when it’s punctuated with eyeball-gouging and Robert Englund theatrically pontificating while hanging from a cross.
In spite of — or perhaps because of — the everything and the kitchen sink maximalism of Hooper’s approach, “Night Terrors” remains one of his most poorly received films, with a lower IMDb ranking even than 2000’s excoriated “Crocodile” and barely any mention at all in “American Twilight,” the definitive and indispensable text on Hooper’s work. This makes Vinegar Syndrome’s Blu-ray release invaluable, as they’ve meticulously restored the film from an archival print and loaded it with respectful, informative extras. It’s a great way to discover Hooper’s most unfairly neglected film, and to ponder the breadth and depth of his work in general.
The limited edition Blu-ray of Tobe Hooper‘s “Night Terrors” is now available from Vinegar Syndrome.
English (US) ·