Spooktacular Forever: The Funhouse (1981)

As Halloween approaches, I’m celebrating the movies that are essential viewing for my spooky season.

September isn’t too early to start the Halloween season, right? Whatever, people start putting up their Christmas decorations in November now. I’m going in. So in the lead-up to Halloween, I’m going to chat about the horror movies that, dare I say, are comfort watches. They capture the season, cultivate a mood, or perfect a sense of catharsis that makes them, dare I say, cozy. This won’t be a series of overintellectualized lefty thinkpieces. But hey, I make no promises.

To kick this off, I wanted to talk about a movie that I made the conscious decision to put in my Letterboxd Fave Four: Tobe Hooper’s The Funhouse. Released 45 years ago, The Funhouse was Universal Studios’ attempt to cash in on the Halloween craze. It follows four youngsters who decide to sneak into a carnival after hours, only to witness a gruesome murder that turns their night into a vicious cat-and-mouse.

As I mentioned, The Funhouse was directed by Tobe Hooper of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame. I have a lot of stupid ideas, and one of the stupidest is that I want to write a biography of Tobe Hooper. To some, he’s a one-hit wonder. To others, he’s a Master of Horror who fell off in the mid-80s. My affection for Tobe Hooper stretches beyond any single film, because I consider him the unofficial progenitor of the Texas outlaw scene of renegade filmmakers that culminated in the 90s Austin boom. Because of this, I have the same reverence for my fellow Texan as many do for John Carpenter or Wes Craven. I’ve been meaning to do a proper essay on the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but I feel far too intimidated. I’ll do a write-up of that movie at the same time I publish an essay on the Sistine Chapel.

In many ways, The Funhouse is a response to TCM for a post-Halloween marketplace. It embraces tropes that hadn’t even been introduced until after TCM, but carries similar themes and archetypes. But while TCM almost feels like a snuff film with its cinema verte camerawork and uncompromising realism, The Funhouse is a studio product. It was originally envisioned as another low-budget Grindhouse flick, but when Universal got involved, the budget was pumped up to $3,000,000, and Tobe Hooper was dropped into a filmmaker’s toy store, where he could play with all the cranes, FX, and pyrotechnics that he’d wanted.

Hooper was just coming off the Salem’s Lot miniseries, a fine production that was still hampered by a television budget and network censorship. With The Funhouse, he could finally stretch his legs. He shot on Panavision and worked with a true carnival-scale set. While The Funhouse wasn’t a commercial hit, grossing only $7.9 million against a $3.9 million budget, Hooper proved that he could work in the studio system. Critics even took to it, including Gene Siskel, who not only gave it a thumbs-up but included it in a segment of his favorite guilty pleasures. The fact that Gene Siskel, who doxxed Betsy Palmer’s address cause he hated Friday the 13th so much, tells you just how much atmosphere and craft went into The Funhouse. He got such positive notices that one Steven Spielberg came a’knocking, asking if Hooper would be interested in working on a little movie called Poltergeist.

Where I’m going with this is that The Funhouse is a great example of an indie, DIY filmmaker being given a real budget and actually putting that money on the screen. Hooper famously took influence from the noir classic Nightmare Alley and shot on anamorphic lenses to lend gravitas and suspense in equal parts. The titular Funhouse itself is more than an elaborate set. It’s a universe unto itself, one defined by shadows and danger. Ghoulish animatronics watch over, waiting to cackle at your demise. The Funhouse also reminds me of Todd Browning’s infamous Freaks, which featured real deformed performers, just as Tobe Hooper featured real “anomalies,” such as the two-headed cow.

The Funhouse also reminds me of Freaks because most movies have deceptive pacing. Freaks is more of a sideshow-themed drama until the last reel, when it becomes a white-knuckle horror show that traumatized audiences upon its release. The Funhouse isn’t as uneven, but has a curious story structure. The first half is a hangout movie where our teens bounce from tent to tent, seeing all the weird acts that this sleazy carnival has to offer. Only in the second half does the movie kick into high gear, and even then, it’s more about mood than a body count. This pacing has frustrated fans of the genre, and is why The Funhouse isn’t fondly remembered. You have to vibe with it. And I do.

That first half isn’t just about killing time before the action starts. It establishes the lurking threat that permeates the movie’s tone. In an interview, Hooper said that he wanted to capture the era of renegade carnivals, run by ex-convicts, sleazeballs, and misfits. Before Six Flags, carnivals and amusement parks were often suspicious affairs with X-rated attractions and shady characters. It feels like every character our doomed teens encounter could easily emerge as the villain, be it the witchy fortune-teller or macabre magician played by the one and only William Finley. His Vlad the Impaler-themed show was my favorite, personally. To me, The Funhouse is about delivering entertainment the old-fashioned way. It’s not only a thriller with mayhem and monsters, but you get free sideshows to boot.

Our cast of teens is played by Elizabeth Berridge (whom Hooper refers to as Beth Berridge), Buzz Cooper, Miles Chapin, and Largo Woodruff. Playing our Final Girl, Berridge is the most recognizable, as she went on to play Constanze Mozart in Amadeus. All the actors here are credible, particularly Woodruff when she faces off against Gunther in the air vents.

Who’s Gunther, you ask? Great question! He’s the deformed, almost alien-like killer who stalks and preys on our heroes. At first, Gunther dons a Frankenstein Monster mask, which Hooper could only get away with because this was a Universal production. Gunther emerges as our killer when the teens catch him murdering the Fortune Teller after he an, erm, premature encounter with her.

Gunther was designed by special effects artist Tony Reardon, who opted to make the killer look more like a creature than someone with a deformity. Though you can rarely accuse Tobe Hooper of operating in good taste, the production had the sensitivity to avoid demonizing those with deformities or disabilities, which Browning had been accused of decades later.

Despite his heinous actions, there’s still a sympathetic element to Gunther’s character that harkens more to the Universal Monsters and less to Michael Myers. This is mostly because he’s clearly the pawn of the Carnival Barker, played by Kevin Conway in a delicious performance.

Sorry, let me clarify: Conway plays not one, not two, but three barkers. A Tony Award-winning actor, Conway agreed to come on the project only if he could play all the barkers as distinct characters. That’s why I particularly recommend The Funhouse to anyone who loves a good cabal of character actors.

There’s a clear thematic throughline between Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Funhouse, with Hooper continuing to deconstruct the nuclear family. Leatherface had his family of backwards cannibals; Gunther has his traveling circus of freaks and criminals. The Funhouse doesn’t have the bite of TCM and isn’t politically charged. For those reasons, it’s not a statement the way TCM is, but it’s more accessible and still a showcase for Hooper’s craftsmanship. While I can’t call it a better movie, The Funhouse is my go-to Hooper movie for the spooky season and ranks up right up there among my favorite films. It’s strange, perverse, and unabashedly off-putting, but captures that adolescent curiosity for wicked things.