Trailer of the Week: Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

 Happy 40th anniversary (holy cow!) to this groundbreaking Texas classic.

Trailer of the Week, Reboot Edition: Texas Chain Saw Massacre vs. Texas Chainsaw 3D

We were as surprised as anyone to see that the new Texas Chain Saw Massacre "sequel" debuted at #1 this weekend, bumping off both Django Unchained and The Hobbit. Designed as a direct sequel to Tobe Hooper's original, the film picks up with a local posse taking down the original Saw clan, then jumps to the present, with a young woman (Alexandra Daddario) heading to Texas to claim an inheritance and running into a still-spry Leatherface. Word is it's not very good, and plays pretty fast and loose with the timeline (for the plot to work, 26-year-old Daddario would need to be about 13 years old or so). On the upside, you get cameos by original Leatherface Gunnar Hansen and by Bill Moseley, here recreating the role of the "Gas Man" (Jim Siedow) from Hooper's original. (Moseley co-starred with Siedow in Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2).

So here, for comparison's sake, are the trailer's for the original, and both direct sequels.

Trailer of the Week: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

The one and only...

Tobe Hooper Meets Frankenstein

The archives here at The Dead Next Door are, to put it mildly, a bit disorganized, which is why I'm just now posting about another semi-lost regional horror nearly three years after I found out about -- and it was directed by one of the giants of the genre, to boot.

Back in 2008, Classic Horror Film Board member Paul Haight posted links to some interesting photos from the LIFE Magazine archive. According to the information on the site, the photos were from an amateur production of a Frankenstein film made in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, by a crew of teenagers in 1959.

As it turns out, the teen director was none other than Tobe Hooper (that's him in the picture above, pouring chocolate syrup on one of the monster's victims), who would go on to later acclaim for his Austin-lensed Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Hooper himself joined the conversation briefly (you can see his comments here), sharing that The Heir of Frankenstein was his first 16mm production -- unfortunately, he didn't say whether it was a full-length feature or a short.

I've posted a few of the photos below, but you can see the whole archive at the LIFE site. (All photos are, of course, properly of LIFE.)