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Meet Grandpa from THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE at FUBAR HORROR FEST July 8th in St. Louis

By Tom Stockman | July 3, 2017

THE FUBAR HORROR FEST (aka THE FUBAR CHAINSAW MASSACRE) is this Saturday, July 8th at Fubar Saint Louis (3108 Locust St, St. Louis 63103). This show consists of a screening of the original 1974 version of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, a Q&A with John Dugan, who played ‘Grandpa’ in that film, live music, and vendors selling rare movies, t-shirts, books, poster prints, and original artwork.

The screening of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE starts at 9pm followed by a Q&A with the one and only John Dugan, then music by We Bite – The Misfits Tribute Band, and Candy Coated Evil The special guest M.C. for the evening will be the amazing Mr. Hamilton!

Doors open at 3pm, so get there early to check out all of the vendors. Bring plenty of cash!

Gary from Red Death Studios will be there. You know those cool horror movie workshirts I wear? I get those from Red Death! I never leave the house without one on!

Also – Bob from Cult Fiction will be there. Bob sells rare DVDs of movie that you can not find anywhere else.

And watch out for author/filmmaker Kevin Strange. He’ll be there selling his books and movies.

Need some scary dolls? The Dollmaster Clown will be on hand.

There will be many other vendors there as well!

If you’ve never seen THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, what better way to pop your chainsaw cherry than to view it with an actual cast member! Tobe Hooper’s 1974 masterpiece may or may not be the scariest horror movie ever made (I think it is) but it’s certainly one of the most referenced, imitated, ripped off, and influential. It opened in October of 1974 when I was 12 and I read about it in a few monster mags, but could not initially talk my dad into taking me to see it (hew was usually pretty cool about that kind of thing – he’d already taken me to FRENCH CONNECTION and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE). About 6 months later, in April of 1975, the Italian horror film TORSO opened at the Four Seasons Cinema at Olive and Woods Mill road and it was double feature with THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE! This time, dad must have got sick of my begging because he drove me and a couple of buddies there and dropped us off. CHAINSAW was the first and it’s still the most terrifying moviegoing experience of my life (TORSO wasn’t nearly a scary but at least it had some nudity, something I wasn’t used to!).

Hooper claims THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE was his reaction to Vietnam and Watergate and he shot it with a gritty, in-your-face realism. For a first-timer, Hooper directed with a solid sense of composition and attention to detail and forced some amazing performances from his cast. Audiences and critics at the time responded to it’s high level of gore, but they were wrong. It’s actually a masterpiece of restraint that Hooper made and much of its magic lies in the fact that the audience thinks they saw a no-holds-barred gorefest when they didn’t (the scene of the Hitchhiker (Ed Neal) slicing his own hand with a knife is the only actual bloodletting in the entire film).

What happened to Tobe Hooper? His follow-up, EATEN ALIVE, was a decent horror films but one no one would talk about if another director had made it. POLTERGEIST was a hit but legend has it that it was mostly directed by Steven Spielberg and it certainly plays that way. The less said about SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION, INVADERS FROM MARS and MORTUARY the better. Though FUNHOUSE, LIFEFORCE and TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2 have their followings, it’s safe to say that Hooper never again captured the magic that was THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and many rightfully view him as a one-hit wonder. The iconic concluding shot of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE lingers on the wounded and frustrated Leatherface, spinning in the sunlight as his chainsaw roars and his terrified prey eludes him. It’s one of the most famous final images in cinema and could be seen as a metaphor for Tobe Hooper’s career.