BEFORE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE
HERE IS TOBE HOOPER'S FIRST MOVIE!

    

original title: AN AMERICAN FREAK ILLUMINATION

director: Tobe Hooper
starring: Mahlon Foreman · Ron Barnhart · Amy Lester · Kim Henkel (as Boris Schnurr) · Pamela Craig

      

Tobe Hooper's first movie, which he co-wrote with Kim Henkel [the two also wrote TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE together], is a story of a foreboding [yet alluring] house in Texas. This is home for a group of hippies. They are 'influenced' by a strange presence in the basement that seems to be the basis for rumors of the house being haunted. But, importantly, this Tobe Hooper film is not a horror movie. Rather, it is a counterculture slice-of-life story with supernatural overtones. The characters wander through the landscape with a detached sense of reality, motivated by basic 'primal' desires of eating, sleeping, fucking, punctuated by vapid drug-induced attempts at 'communication.'

The film is essentially about two hippie couples, living in a remote house. One couple, long together, for all the right and wrong reasons, while the other is newly formed, consisting of a writer (played by Kim Henkel, always pounding on a typewriter) and a young woman newly arrived in Austin from a small Texas town. Among the other characters is a mute boy [perhaps a ghost] who is obsessed with an entity in the basement.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about this film is Tobe Hooper's own cinematography, a constant barrage of fast edits and visual snippets. The unusual title, EGGSHELLS, come from an explanation within the movie as a stoned Amy says "People need to be treated tenderly, like eggshells."