Tobe Hooper set an impossible bar for himself, co-writing, producing, and directing the greatest of all horror movies with his second film at bat, 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. No one has topped that film’s unmooring mixture of gallows humor, raw expressionism, and docudramatic intensity, and not for lack of trying. Perhaps understanding that monumental power, Hooper never tried to approximate the film’s viscerally unhinged style again, not even when he came around to making The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Instead, he became a specialist in films that serve as the inverse of his classic: genre movies that are surprisingly lavish and gorgeous yet often with little in the way of a pulse.
The Funhouse, from 1981, epitomizes everything that’s right and wrong with Hooper’s ’80s period. It’s among the most atmospheric of films concerned with sleazy carnivals. After a pointless homage blending Psycho’s shower scene with Halloween’s POV-of-a-killer opening, and a brief bit of throat-clearing involving requisitely doomed horny teens, The Funhouse spends more than half of its 96 minutes savoring the rides and attractions of a carnival that’s said to have had some trouble a few towns back. This patience, this willingness to marinate in a vivid setting, is similar to the way Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s most potent shocks are reserved for its second half, fashioning a mounting sense of unease.
For a while, Hooper suggests that evil could be anywhere. The carnival barkers and other performers, three of whom played with menacing charisma by Kevin Conway, look at the teens with unadorned contempt and malice, which the protagonists are too self-concerned to notice. The rides look rusty and dangerous, and the “freak show” is, of course, a travesty.
You can almost smell the popcorn and candy apples, and the lights in the sky practically define autumn nostalgia. Hooper gets a lot of mileage out of mannequins and dummies, particularly of clowns and a fat lady that gaze upon the crowd with smiles that personify madness. One fake-out is much more effective than the opening, when a magician (William Finley) appears to be setting up a young girl to be impaled. His drinking and his blitheness with the possibility of violence are haunting, speaking succinctly of the exploitive air that has worn these carnival interlopers down. An episode with a fortune teller (Sylvia Miles) is similarly evocative, foreshadowing death—but not in the manner you expect.
The Funhouse is great on setup and rich in atmosphere yet short on follow through—in the tradition of most carnival rides, come to think of it. The film’s first hour prompts a game of guessing what the carnival’s true danger will be, as opposed to the menaces that are just for show. The thin line existing between real and simulated terror, between the underworld of the carnies and the surface world of their moneyed marks, is very much the film’s theme. It’s a problem, however, when the fake scares are more effective than the real ones. Hooper suggests a society of darkness, waiting to descend on the teens and a child and pull them down into its world. What the filmmaker delivers is a large and rather silly-looking monster, fathered by one of Conway’s barkers, who pursues the teens out of horny frustration.
As a nearly avant-garde survey of a carnival, The Funhouse is lush and poetic, qualities which cannot be taken for granted in the horror genre, especially these days. As a slasher movie, however, it’s the same-o, same-o. Rob Zombie has essentially fashioned a second career fusing Texas Chainsaw Massacre with The Funhouse ad infinitum, and in his best films he invests his derivative barbarity with a sleazy intimacy that can feel authentically dangerous. By contrast, Hooper directs his attention to the exquisite sets, to Andrew Laszlo’s immersive cinematography, and to the general nostalgic Universal-meets-E.C. Comics vibe of the thing.
The lurid, hallucinatory hues of The Funhouse might make Mario Bava blush, but Bava either brought the pain, so to speak, or plumbed deeper into free-associative psychological realms. Hooper skittishly keeps the characters at a distance. When Conway’s carnival barker argues with his monster son, we see the allusions to the family bickering of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but the daring sense of complicity is gone. Here, these scenes are just horror-movie vaudeville.
The Funhouse plods along as a thriller, then, though there’s subtext if you actively look for it. The creature terrorizing the randy teens is dressed like Frankenstein’s monster, and there are many references to Universal horror movies throughout, which may be inevitable given that Universal produced Hooper’s film. Underneath the mask, the creature is meant to be scarier than his disguise, suggesting that real terror embarrasses the simulations we consume. But given that its appearance is ridiculous to the point of unintentional poignancy, one has to take this thematic with an article of faith. The Funhouse’s tone is wishy-washy, because it’s difficult to sort the intentional parody from the inadvertent, and the punchlines from the shock scenes. Hooper discovered something that contemporary filmmakers are still learning the hard way: Nostalgia doesn’t work all that well for the horror movie.
Image/Sound
This 4K Shout! transfer of course offers a significant A/V upgrade on their prior 2012 Blu-ray disc, reminding audiences of the magnitude of The Funhouse’s beauty. The colors are feverishly lurid and far better differentiated than those of the previous transfer. There’s also a superior balance of shadows here, correcting the overexposure of the 2012 disc’s compositions, and skin textures are detailed. Importantly, the grit remains in the frames, lending The Funhouse a vitally scruffy texture. The transfer’s soundtrack options represent an even more impressive improvement. There are two tracks, a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and a 2.0, respectively, and both positively sing, offering soundstages that nimbly balance the vast carnival sounds with the dialogue. Purists will probably want to stick with the stereo option, though the 5.1 is more enveloping. The instrumentation of John Beal’s score, perhaps the film’s most haunting element, is accorded a deep and haunting materiality on both tracks.
Extras
The 4K disc includes new, respective interviews with special effects artist Craig Reardon and actors Wayne Doba, Miles Chapin, and Largo Woodruff, along with 2012 archive interviews with actor Kevin Conway, composer John Beale, and executive producer Mark L. Lester. There’s also another audio-only interview with actor William Finley. All these features are short, running 10 minutes or less, and they have a repetitive yet painless soundbite quality. Conway’s interview is probably the best, though Lester tells an amusing story of how screenwriter Larry Block eventually got a better paycheck after initially being, well, somewhat ripped off. An audio commentary with Tobe Hooper has been ported over from the 2012 disc, in which he talks with filmmaker and obvious fan Tim Sullivan. Hooper is friendly, though his commentaries have a sleepy matter-of-factness that’s rather easy to tune out; he’s almost unpretentious to a fault. Deleted scenes, a book advertisement, and trailers round out a ho-hum supplements collection.
Overall
The extras on Shout!’s 4K UHD release of Funhouse may be skimpy, but Tobe Hooper’s admirers will want to pick it up for the robust transfer alone.
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