Movies - TV
Tobe Hooper Believed Hollywood Had 'Let Down' Its Most Important Horror Directors
By DREW TINNIN
Tobe Hooper began his career as more of a surrealist filmmaker with the hallucinatory hippie romance "Eggshells" back in 1969. It was Hooper's decision to become a horror director, a choice that would later wind up trapping him in a Hollywood system that never gave him and other masters of the genre a chance to branch out.
Looking back at the late '60s and early '70s, there was a sizable dearth of visceral horror until "Rosemary's Baby" and George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" changed everything. Unknowingly, Romero became the first member of a horror collective that would later include Hooper, Wes Craven, John Carpenter, and David Cronenberg.
In a past interview with The Flashback Files back in 2015, Hooper spoke about his peers and his frustrations with the studio system, saying, "Not only do they understand the genre, they understand how the Hollywood establishment perceives us. And the way the industry has let us down. They keep us in a corner. In the States they are making films to sell toys."