Tobe Hooper Archives

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Rating: ★★★★

Apr 1, 2003Backwoods Brutality

An absolute horror classic, a film that has been conceived as a harrowing assault on one's nerves. This has become a landmark genre classic and led to numerous sequels and copies but rarely any that matched the original

Director: Tobe Hooper

Actors: Marilyn Burns, Gunnar Hansen, Jim Siedow, Paul A. Partain, …

Category: Horror

1 April 200314 June 2026 by Roog

Eaten Alive (1977)

Rating: ★★

Nov 21, 2008Psycho Backwoods Motelier

The first film that Tobe Hooper made immediately after The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a dementedly OTT Southern Gothic with Neville Brand as a backwoods motelier serving up his guests to the crocodiles

Director: Tobe Hooper

Actors: Neville Brand, Marilyn Burns, Jose Ferrer, Robert Englund, …

Category: Horror

21 November 200823 February 2026 by Roog

Salem’s Lot (1979)

Rating: ★★★★

Dec 2, 2000Town of Vampires/Stephen King Adaptation

One of the best Stephen King adaptations made as a tv mini-series concerning a town overrun by vampires. Director Tobe Hooper excels himself, staging the book in terms a series of captivating set-pieces

Director: Tobe Hooper

Actors: David Soul, James Mason, Lance Kerwin, Bonnie Bedelia, …

Category: Horror

2 December 200016 October 2024 by Roog

The Funhouse (1981)

Rating: ★★★½

Sep 14, 2002Carnival Horror House Slasher

Tobe Hooper makes a slasher film that is well above the average and one of his better films. Taking place in a carnival haunted house, Hooper shakes the slasher tropes up with undeniably freakish effect at times

Director: Tobe Hooper

Actors: Elizabeth Berridge, Kevin Conway, Sylvia Miles, Cooper Huckabee, …

Category: Horror

14 September 200215 February 2026 by Roog

Poltergeist (1982)

Rating: ★★★★½

Sep 5, 2002Haunting

Debate will always rage as to whether this was directed by Tobe Hooper or executive producer Steven Spielberg. It doesn't alter the fact that it is a superlative rollercoaster of a ghost story that doesn't always make sense but pulls its effects off flawlessly

Director: Tobe Hooper

Actors: JoBeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Zelda Rubinstein, Heather O'Rourke, …

Category: Horror

5 September 200226 May 2020 by Roog

Lifeforce (1985)

Rating: ★★★½

May 25, 2003Soul-Sucking Alien Vampires

Tobe Hooper's space vampires film wildly divides audiences and was a flop for Cannon Films. You have to applaud its ambitious conceptual grasp even if it bites off more wild ideas than it is ever capable of coherently presenting

Director: Tobe Hooper

Actors: Steve Railsback, Peter Firth, Frank Finlay, Mathilda May, …

Category: Science Fiction

25 May 200326 June 2026 by Roog

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

Rating: ★★★★

Oct 9, 2006Backwoods Brutality

The first sequel to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre where Tobe Hooper returns and pushes the series into an outrageously black sense of humour

Director: Tobe Hooper

Actors: Caroline Williams, Dennis Hopper, Bill Johnson, Jim Siedow, …

Category: Horror

9 October 200630 June 2019 by Roog

Invaders from Mars (1986)

Rating: ★★

Jun 9, 2003Alien Body Snatchers

Tobe Hooper's remake of the 1950s alien invaders classic for Cannon Films has much better effects and more technical proficient than the original but misses any of its paranoid, alienated mood

Director: Tobe Hooper

Actors: Hunter Carson, Karen Black, James Karen, Timothy Bottoms, …

Category: Science Fiction

9 June 200322 April 2026 by Roog

Spontaneous Combustion (1990)

Rating: ★

May 21, 1999Pyrokinesis

The start of Tobe Hooper's decline wherein he borrows the basics of Firestarter in a really bad film with a madly overacting Brad Dourif as a pyrokinetic

Director: Tobe Hooper

Actors: Brad Dourif, Jon Cypher, Melinda Dillon, Cynthia Bain, …

Category: Horror, Science Fiction

21 May 199926 November 2020 by Roog

Night Terrors (1993)

Rating: ★★

Aug 22, 1999Sado-Sexual Games/Marquis De Sade's Descendant

Another example of Tobe Hooper's slight into mediocrity in the 1990s, an erotic thriller that features a madly overacting Robert Englund as the Marquis de Sade and an innocent being corrupted by his descendant in the modern day

Director: Tobe Hooper

Actors: Robert Englund, Zoe Trilling, William Finley, Chandra West

Category: Horror

22 August 199916 November 2019 by Roog

Body Bags (1993)

Rating: ★★

Sep 7, 2013Horror Anthology

A pilot for a never sold horror anthology tv series featuring John Carpenter as a pun-cracking narrator. The two Carpenter directed episodes have some tension, while Tobe Hooper's third episode has a clumsy heavy-handedness

Director: John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper

Actors: Stacy Keach, Mark Hamill, Tom Arnold, Alex Datcher, …

Category: Horror

7 September 20137 December 2025 by Roog

The Mangler (1995)

Rating: ★

Mar 21, 2010Possessed Laundry Press/Stephen King Adaptation

The single worst Stephen King adaptation ever made. Director Tobe Hooper fails to approach the story of a possessed laundry press with the same drollness that King did and inflates it into something ridiculous

Director: Tobe Hooper

Actors: Ted Levine, Robert Englund

Category: Horror

21 March 201018 July 2025 by Roog

The Apartment Complex (1999)

Rating: ★

Jan 21, 2001Apartment Building of Weird Tenants

Tobe Hooper makes a film where Chad Lowe becomes the supervisor an apartment building filled with strange tenants. However, Hooper misses the intended black comedy tone by a mile

Director: Tobe Hooper

Actors: Chad Lowe, Fay Masterson, Amanda Plummer, Patrick Warburton, …

Category: Horror

21 January 200124 November 2025 by Roog

Crocodile (2000)

Rating: ★★

Mar 28, 2017Giant Killer Crocodile

Tobe Hooper delivers an entry amid the early-00s vogue for B-budget CGI monster movies, drawing clear inspiration from Lake Placid. Hooper had not made a good film since the 1980s and this does little to reverse the path of mediocrity

Director: Tobe Hooper

Category: Horror

28 March 20173 October 2025 by Roog

Taken (2002)

Rating: ★★★½

Aug 7, 2008UFOs and Alien Abductions

TV mini-series in ten two-hour parts that deals with UFOs, covering several generations from the 1940s to the present. An interesting take on UFO encounters with the benefit of some phenomenal performances

Director: Breck Eisner, Bryan Spicer, Felix Alcala, Jeff Woolnough, Jeremy Kagan, John Fawcett, Michael Katleman, Sergio Mimica-Gezzan, Tobe Hooper

Actors: Dakota Fanning, Joel Gretsch, Emily Bergl, Heather Donahue, …

Category: Science Fiction

7 August 20088 August 2026 by Roog

Toolbox Murders (2003)

Rating: ★★½

Jun 3, 2005Apartment Block Slasher

After a decade-long slump, Tobe Hooper started to show he still had what it took with this remake of the 1980 slasher film

Director: Tobe Hooper

Actors: Angela Bettis, Juliet Landau, Brent Roam, Greg Travis, …

Category: Horror

3 June 200514 March 2024 by Roog

Mortuary (2005)

Rating: ★

Nov 18, 2007Creature in the Crypt/Body Snatchers

Another effort in the sad slide into shabby amateurishness that marked that latter years of Tobe Hooper's career, a muddled effort set around a mortuary involving body-snatching fungus and deformed relatives in the crawlspaces

Director: Tobe Hooper

Actors: Denise Crosby, Dan Byrd, Rocky Marquette, Bug Hall, …

Category: Horror

18 November 20073 July 2024 by Roog

Djinn (2013)

Rating: ★

Feb 4, 2015Islamic Horror Film/Haunted Apartment Block

Tobe Hooper's career since 1990 felt like a slide down into talentless amateurism. In his last film, Hooper tries to create an Islamic horror film, shooting and casting in the Middle East but slips into hackwork

Director: Tobe Hooper

Category: Horror

4 February 201519 January 2026 by Roog