I don’t think about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as much as many critics do. Tobe Hooper’s film has, since its sensational release, been influential in its influence on American cinema or, more accurately, cinema about America. I don’t disagree with the detailed analyses of the work—about its rusty autopsy of the 1970s, industrial decline, social stigmas—and I find it to be an effective work, but it’s always far from my mind. Perhaps it has to do with my own relationship to the horror genre, which I came to late (given that it did make my imagination run too wild as a child and genuinely terrify me), and only in my mid-20s did I start having a taste for it. I was way behind on franchises, let alone staples like TCM, which (according to Letterboxd) I logged in 2022, and I have to imagine that was the first time I’d seen the film end-to-end without missing bits and pieces on TV.
It took watching Hooper’s experimental short Down Friday Street for the director to really click. Seeing collaged images of decaying houses cross-fading over city streets at night was like learning that Nobuhiko Obayashi ran in the same a-g circles as Shuji Terayama, and suddenly this figure of mass culture made sense as one who split from the cutting edge of the medium.
Last month I watched Eggshell’s, Hooper’s first feature, and the revolutionary aspects of his filmmaking became all the more apparent. The film opens with recording of student demonstrations at UT Austin. From this documentary starting point, Hooper moves with his ultra-wide angle lens over to a house full of hippies nearby. And in this house, the Revolution isn’t brewing. Hooper’s youths are as idle as they are radical. Notably, one of the girls who’s bankrolling the house comes from a rich family, and she spends a lot of time talking to her boyfriend in the tub about her woes with her oppressive, conservative father and tries to differentiate the style of leftist she is from the chimeric communism her dad fears and the kind of communism she sees as bad and repressive in the Eastern Bloc. Her boyfriend points out that she understands communism as little as her dad does.
Meanwhile, out of the basement of the house, a strange force is coming to the surface, one that’s able to influence the behaviors of these listless twentysomethings. Interspersed between the semi-improvised narrative scenes and the emerging science fiction elements are more of Hooper’s experimental sequences, composed of fast-cut, overlaid footage which pulls apart the psychology of the spaces Hooper chooses to film. At times, these avant-garde interjections feel like they’re there to break up the monotony of the narrative scenes that meander too long or never worked that well to begin with. It helps make Eggshells an even more imprecise film. Moreover, it adds to the feeling that the movie isn’t just a curio (Eggshells was effectively a lost film for nearly 30 years, until Austin Film Society’s Louis Black pushed for a restoration), but is an essential document of a place in time, of a political milieu that was rapidly disappearing, of the early signs of the self-centeredness of the nascent Boomer generation, of even just how people lived then.
Unlike Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which leans into its rougher edges to make a perfect movie, Eggshells is so obviously far from perfection, with its lack of polish on full display. This makes Eggshells more alive, of its moment—as of the moment as the student demonstrations at the start of the film.