Saturday, October 09, 2010

Cotton Candy Clouds

The Funhouse (1981)
directed by Tobe Hooper
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

At this point, isn't it safe to say that Tobe Hooper's run of horror films from 1974 to 1982 deserves to be compared to John Carpenter's partnership with Dean Cundey as one of the great genre accomplishments in movie history? Hooper's movies are more vicious than Carpenter's, but they share a formal elegance that I miss so much in horror today. The Funhouse begins with an homage to Halloween, unstable enough to set the tone with little more to go on than a brother, a sister, and a bedroom.

The traveling carnival to which both siblings are inevitably attracted isn't frightful right off. Hooper was born in Austin in 1943, and understands the glamor of any novelty from out of town. Dates mingle on a ferris wheel lit up as pretty as the kiss from Before Sunrise. The seediness of the enterprise, inevitable as it is, seeps in slowly. Characters encountered briefly in crowds wander back into scenes, and the camera takes notice. The younger brother gets lost, and his sister doesn't even know he's there. The last we see of the boy, his parents take him home in a catatonic state. What happened in the trailer with the kind man who found him?

Kevin Conway appears as three different barkers; instead of novelty, the repetition imparts an eerie sense of memory and anticipation mingling. The teenagers smoke pot, but is that what accounts for the strangeness of the things around them? Kids can accept more at face value before they really need to find the man behind the curtain, and it isn't until an hour into the movie that any of the teenagers is really in danger. By then it's too late, of course.

Hooper's biggest mistake is relying on a Rick Baker monstrosity for his principal antagonist, when Conway and the creaking chains around him are far more terrifying. Stay away from those Florida state fairs.