and there were ghosts. but they were in our heads.

Like a psychedelic trip to purgatory then back to Hell, anthropomorphism as the primary means of understanding the experimental, certainly the most purely polar of Hooper's work.

Among the most accomplished debut features, Eggshells is one of the Definitive Tobe Hooper films (i.e. one he got to make with absolutely zero interference from exterior forces like studios and audiences and pressure to franchise his art), a hippie counter-culture partially avant-garde foray into the idealistic psyche of the sixties American youth. Fascinating to watch Hooper play with the positivity of Being An American when in the space of five years and one film he'd come back with one of the most…

I tend to only like movies about hippies that are either a) critiques of hippies, b) accidental critiques of hippies (PUNISHMENT PARK), or c) about Manson cult hippies that get rabies (I DRINK YOUR BLOOD). This early Tobe Hooper effort, therefore, had a long way to go to win me over. It did so by interspersing cool abstract/experimental sections in between the somewhat tedious scenes of hippie kids having conversations about nothing (like Seinfeld, but with a lot more weed, acid, kazoo, and poetry). Actually, one of my favorite sequences focused solely on this one hallway and stairwell in a house as cuts show the passage of people throughout the day and at a party. Viewed in 2014 in the…

I was going to call this one of those filmographic footnotes but a career footnote means nothing when your name is Tobe Hooper, and most certainly this doesn't change how remarkable it is for Hooper to have burst onto the scene with a formalism already so firmly intact, exploring career-defining themes even within his first feature, but the predicted statement doesn't work knowing the context of just how good Eggshells happens to be - it is instead a filmographic essential in the context of Hooper's career - and indeed in the context of what his later career would be, this is of even more interest: Eggshells is an exercise in anti-atmosphere, whereas much of his later work relies entirely on…

Hooptober 4.0 - Watch #40 - Hooper

This marks the end of my first Hooptober, with the debut feature of the man himself. I'll be totally frank with you. This movie only really deserves 3.5 of these stars, if even that. But I'm so endlessly fascinated by it- my gut says nothing but this'd be right. The non-narrative doesn't usually work in the film's favor, because more often then not, dialogue scenes (which ostensibly move the "plot" forward) lack the visual flair that the... digressions have. But oh, those digressions! The tagline promises "an American freak illumination", the poster promises "a time and spaced film fantasy", and oh boy, does it deliver. Stop motion animation, experimental editing, and bizarre camera tricks…

I couldn't help but smile the whole time, I loved it. I have to hope that this is the type of work most young filmmakers dream of shooting, something so free that it could never be shown in a theater today. Too independent for "indie cinema", if this was made in 2020 it would be put on Vimeo and that would be beautiful. Jack made the comparison to Brakhage, I agree but would throw in Ito, Frampton, and Snow as well. What's so great is that Hooper, like them, was in tune with the camera as a machine and the film as a material. He understands the house as a physical space and makes its architecture foundational to the entire…

Tobe Hoopers completely wacked out debut that puts Goddard into late 60s hippie cinema. I never thought of Hooper as the type of guy who could have pulled off the aesthetic of late 60s trippy cinema, but not only does he, but he makes it obvious how integral this vibe is to his cinematic identity. While it may not seem it at first, there's alot of Texas Chainsaw dna, and you can see alot of him as a horror director in utero. The first thirty minutes of this are fucking perfect, through it kind of meanders bit too much for me after the first half, but the form perfectly matches the material. Some of the most naturalistic dialogue you will…

Es natural que Hooper comenzase su brillante carrera con este largometraje mitad retrato de una época mitad experimento no narrativo que lejos de ser una película de terror presenta el germen de algunas de las ideas visuales e inquietudes temáticas que más tarde extendería y perfeccionaría en la que sería directamente su siguiente película y su mayor logro estilístico, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

La imagen granulosa y brillante, la utilización de ángulos bajos y amenazantes, el empleo del espacio y la iluminación, el montaje agresivo de cortes secos y rápidos y el uso expresivo de los primeros planos ya estaba aquí, al igual que daba muestras de su talento único para crear expectación y construir estados de ánimo muy específicos…