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|   What readers have said about Shock and Roll: Freaks in the Funhouse 9-06-04 Welcome back. Good to see you made it. Take a seat. Oh, but watch out you don’t step on anybody. You’re not alone, you know. The human dolls, Hans and Frieda, are here. And you just brushed by the Armless Girl. The Pinheads, too. But wait! I think Johnny the half  boy is trying to say something. What’s that, Johnny? What are you whispering? “One of us! One of us! ONE OF US!” That’s right, Johnny. We hear you. And you’re right, too. We are one of you. We are freaks. All of us. We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t. At least I know I wouldn’t. Otherwise, at 16, I would have been trying out for the football team rather than trying to sneak into the Edison Drive-In to see THE FUNHOUSE. And in college, I would have been getting high on weed rather than a midnight screening of Tod Browning’s FREAKS. That’s’ where I first met you, Johnny. And now we can hang out again and again, for the whole bunch of you finally made the big time. DVD. Yep. Uncut, pristine and topped with a retrospective documentary that tells all about you guys, the real life public side not seen in those brief 64 minutes that still shatters me. Not bad for something made in 1932. But then again, your  story is timeless. And now, those of you gathered here with me can relive the surreal legend that is FREAKS- or, if you are a virgin to the myth, experience it for the first time. I promise you’ll never forget it. Just ask my buddy Tobe. As in Tobe Hooper. He’s here with us now, too. By way of Texas and Salem, he made it to the FUNHOUSE in 1981, and that delicious Drive-In pleasure can now be experienced again in all its widescreen glory. These days, Tobe’s been busy playing with power tools again, dammit. And believe me, the results are vintage, back-to-true form Tobe Hooper. Soon, he’ll be heading off to the mortuary. But for now, fellow fright freaks, he is right here for a little chat. Truly, one of us... TIM: You’re on a roll, Tobe. FUNHOUSE is out on DVD. October will see TOOLBOX MUDERS out in theaters. And in three weeks, you begin filming your next one, MORTUARY! You’re baaaaack!!! TOBE: Gee, where have I heard that before. But, thanks, man. I got lost in television there for years, which was great, however, because the tight shooting schedules made me concentrate on what was really the valuable part of the story I was telling, and to go straight for that, quite important to focus on when you’re doing independent horror with only 21 days of shooting. And you know, there’s a lot of money in television, so…(laughs) TIM: Basically, now you can afford to do low budget horror movies for very little pay!  TOBE: Yeah, but I’m getting to make those movies my way. When you have a lot of money to make your movie, you usually don’t have a lot of creative control. But when the money isn’t really there, you are compensated in knowing, for sure, that it will be your vision up there on the screen. TIM: So what’s your vision for MORTUARY? TOBE: It’s about this beat up old mortuary that gets moved into by a guy going thru a midlife crisis who goes into a new business, kind of on a lark, a place that is so fucked up and run down that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Once he gets there, he hopes he’ll be able to get some business from the mental institution and the old folks home. And he certainly does. But it’s very weird and very scary and not quite what you think. It’s almost as if Larry Clark was doing a horror film. Kind of like BULLY. Except there will be redeeming characters. TIM: So it’s BULLY with remorse! TOBE: Remorse and redemption. It’s gonna be cool. Jace Anderson and Adam Gierasch wrote it, the guys who wrote TOOLBOX. In fact, I just took them out to the location today and now we’re having a writing session because that damn place tells you what to do. Originally, it was set back east and was very gothic. This is gothic, but it’s new gothic. Instead of kids sitting around on some New England porch with the birds chirping, our kids will be sitting around with trains and chemical plants.. TIM: Are you building the mortuary? TOBE: No, man, you wouldn’t believe these old buildings that the location guys found. Man, you’ve never seen anything like it. It was built in the early 1800’s. One of the houses will serve as the exterior, and then there is a house a couple of hundred yards behind it that will serve for the interiors, because it has this ratty façade, but inside it’s the PSYCHO house, you know, staircases that lead off into nowhere, a rotting graveyard out back. Man, parapsychologists once set oscilloscopes up there and just left them. They left motion sensor, too. TIM: Wait, there were real parapsychologists there? TOBE: Yeah, man. They were doing experiments because the big house is apparently profoundly haunted. For real. So I’m only gonna be using that one as the entrance and exit. I’m not going inside. TIM: That reminds of the supposedly haunted abandoned pier in Salt Lake City that the producers of CARNIVAL OF SOULS drove by and decided to write a movie around. Though low budget often dictates a confined inclusive location, I think some of the most effective horror movies actually derive their impact from their sense of place. The location itself becomes a character. TOBE: Now that you mention it, it’s interesting just how much that is a factor in my films. I guess that’s something deliberate in my choice making process, from CHAINSAW to even SALEM’S LOT. I mean, the Marsten house, that was a Steven King invention, but I was completely drawn to it. I think it stems from my love for David Lean movies, because Lean’s main character was always the place. In DR. ZHIVAGO, it was Russia during the winter. In LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, the desert. Mrs. Havershim’s house in GREAT EXPECTATIONS. I’ve also always felt strong about what’s called ‘pathetic fallacy’, where nature aligns with the theme. For instance, the thunder storm during the planning of Caesar’s murder in the Shakespearean JULIUS CAESAR.  TIM: Or the storm in POLTERGEIST. TOBE: Right, it’s the elements collaborating with what’s going on. TIM: There’s a lot of that in FUNHOUSE. I really like that film. TOBE: It was a really good time during the history of my making films, and then it was kind of colored. It wasn’t reported to be as successful at the box office as I had hoped it would be, and that’s the way things are measured for the immediate gratification. But then, later, as things do when they’re seen by more people and become appreciated for what they are, it really clicked with fans. It’s definitely in the top four or five of my favorite films that I made, and I am so happy it’s coming out on DVD. I must say, I didn’t get a call from Universal to supervise this one. I even had 8mm magnetic sync sound behind-the-scenes footage they could have had, but, I’m sure they did a great job. TIM: Now that DVD extras are such a huge selling point, are you more aware while making your films of creating extras? TOBE: Oh, definitely. Absolutely. On TOOLBOX MURDERS, there’s extensive behind the scenes, two camera stuff, too, Tim. You can see me watching the monitor and the camera dollying in, my reaction. And it really shows you how a movie is made, rather than those one camera EPK things, which are really more promo pieces than a film study piece. Also, there is another movie that I produced that was a two camera behind the scenes piece, but that also has a story built into it. It’s a feature of its own, a stand alone, 85 minute film with the backdrop of the making of TOOLBOX. TIM: That’s never been done before. Two movies for the price of one. Wow. Your financiers had to love that. This will be on the DVD?  TOBE: No, it’s called TOOLBOX MURDERS: THE WAY IT WAS, and it’s something that won’t come out for a while, after TOOLBOX is seen. This is really meant for IFC, or for festivals. TIM: I remember when THE FUNHOUSE came out in 1981; so many horror movies of that time were just rip-off slasher flicks. Guys with knives. FUNHOUSE really set itself apart for me because it actually had a good old fashioned monster. TOBE: That’s how it was sold to me and the reason I decided to do it. They came to me and said, you know, there’s this true anomaly, a creature, he wears a mask so he can’t be seen, and because this was a Universal picture, I could use the likeness of Frankenstein for that mask, so that really appealed to me. TIM: How symbolic that the creature wore a Frankenstein mask, one of the first and greatest movie monsters, and was also simply billed in the credits as “The Monster”, just like Karloff.  TOBE: It is very much like Frankenstein like in that there’s this sympathy for this beast, this deformity. Especially his demise at the end, trapped in the grinder just like Frankenstein in the windmill. TIM: And, yet, that character is also very similar to Leatherface. Both hide behind a mask, and both are basically overgrown kids who don’t really know that killing is bad because they both were brought up that way. TOBE: Exactly. In FUNHOUSE, there is some really great dysfunctional family stuff. The Monster’s father, played by Kevin Conway, is this warped, carnival character who really cares about his son and helps hide the boy’s little problem with killing. I remember this one scene where Kevin is in the sideshow tent, talking to his son, and he remorses with the boy, this sobbing creature who’s back is to us, facing the wall, and Kevin wanted to change his line to “These are freaks of God and not man”, and I said, “Yeah, man, go for it”. And then Kevin points out this little embryonic two headed, half cow creature and he says, “You’re little brother, Tad, trapped over there in the sideshow... I don’t want that for you. God knows I don’t want that for you. We’ll just dump Madame Zena’s body and we’ll blame it on the goddamn locals. That’s what we’ll do.” TIM: In FUNHOUSE, as in FREAKS, it’s the misfits who are the so-called monsters, and yet, especially in FREAKS, the “normal” human beings are actually the truly evil characters. TOBE: Exactly. TIM: That’s the underlying theme of SHE FREAK, a film I’m doing that pays homage to both FREAKS and FUNHOUSE. The idea that one may be a freak on the exterior, but that doesn’t necessarily make one a monster on the inside. That doesn’t make one evil. I think being evil is a choice.  TOBE: Right now I’m working on a project that explores the thing that we call “evil”. It’s so easy to call a physical monster “evil”. For me,”monster” and “evil” fall into the same category. I wish there was a scientific word for it. But only human beings seem to have that in them. That isn’t a part of the animal world. Monstrous and evil ides seem to be contained to human beings. So, yeah, I don’t know what that is. But I think there’s this balance of the dark side and light side that we carry with us just as there is day and night, and its all a part of nature, and one side can tip over and be predominant and cause all of these evil deeds, even linked to terrorism. I mean, that’s certainly a monstrous act. But, yeah when it comes down to it, maybe it is a choice. Maybe it’s environmental, or maybe it’s something else. I really don’t know. TIM: Did FREAKS influence FUNHOUSE?  TOBE: Oh, yeah. Well, God, that’s a film I saw on TV in black and white when I was a kid and it literally freaked me out! The guy with no legs that stood on the end of the bedpost like a crow? Man. And then what they did to Olga at the end, mutating her…All of that stuff. I gotta say, too, one of my favorite films when I was a little boy was NIGHTMARE ALLEY, and so I always wanted to do a carnival movie, because it was so dark, so unknown. Clowns were always just… You just knew they weren’t quite right, hiding under this grotesque imitation of happiness and joy. Just something very weird. You know, it’s a different society in the carnival. And so while making FUNHOUSE, I had my own carnival. It was amazing. Yet in a strange way, that’s what the movie business is, an extension of that carnival world. A movie will go thru a town, set up and shoot, and when it leaves, it will take a couple of people with it, maybe leave a couple behind. TIM: So who are the filmmakers? Are we the freaks? TOBE: I think we’re the barkers. The ringmasters. The actors are the attractions. But nonetheless, we don’t belong anyplace else. We don’t fit into what they call normal society. We just don’t fit that mold. We’re misfits. So, yeah… Maybe we are the freaks. Next time in Tim Sullivan’s SHOCK AND ROLL: “BAD GIRLS AND LOST BOYS” Click here to purchase FREAKS Click here to purchase FUNHOUSE |
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