The Funhouse: Tobe Hooper's Carnival Nightmare

The Funhouse opens with a gloved hand selecting a mask, taking a knife, and moving through a house towards a girl in a shower. The camera is behind the eyeholes. It is Halloween’s prologue laid over Psycho’s bathroom, executed with enough precision that the audience of March 1981 knew exactly which film they had bought a ticket for.

Then the knife goes in, and it’s rubber, and the killer is a ten-year-old boy who thinks this is hilarious, and his sister Amy screams at him with the specific fury of an older sibling. Tobe Hooper has spent ninety seconds quoting the two most influential American horror films of the previous two decades in order to tell you that he is going to be doing something else.

Universal did not pass this information on to the public. The picture was sold as a stalk-and-slash — this was the spring after Friday the 13th had made a fortune — and audiences arriving for a body count found a slow, sad film about a carnival family, and left unimpressed. It has been quietly appreciating in value ever since.

Where Hooper was standing

By 1981 Hooper had made The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Eaten Alive, and the Salem’s Lot miniseries, and he was one year away from Poltergeist and the argument about who directed it that would follow him to the grave. The Funhouse is the last film in his run where the interest is unambiguously his own.

Larry Block’s script is thin by design: four teenagers — Amy (Elizabeth Berridge, in her first film), Buzz, Liz and Richie — decide to spend the night hidden inside a travelling carnival’s funhouse ride, and witness something they shouldn’t. That’s the whole plot. Hooper spends the entire first act refusing to start it.

The carnival sequence is what the film is actually for. Andrew Laszlo — who had shot The Warriors two years earlier and knew exactly how to photograph a lit environment at night — moves through the midway in long, unhurried takes: the rigged games, the cattle in the animal show, the strip tent, a magic act, the rides grinding round. Hooper’s camera keeps finding the labour behind the attraction. It is the most convincing carnival in American cinema because it is shot as a workplace, and because Hooper keeps letting the punters look cheap and the workers look tired.

Kevin Conway plays three of the barkers. Same actor, three separate pitches, no comment from the film. It’s a small, deliberate device that does an enormous amount: the midway starts to feel like a single organism wearing different hats, a business with one face working every entrance.

What it’s really descended from

Read as a slasher, the film is poor. The body count is low, the kills arrive late, the teenagers are drawn thinly and dispatched without ceremony. Every complaint the 1981 audience had was correct on its own terms.

The real ancestor is Freaks. Tod Browning’s 1932 film established the sideshow’s moral geometry once and permanently: the performers are the community, the visitors are the intruders, and the horror is triggered by an outsider’s contempt. The Funhouse runs that engine exactly. The four kids are trespassers who have hidden inside someone’s place of work in order to be titillated. What they see, they see because they broke in. And when the carnival closes ranks around its own, it is doing what Browning’s company did at the climax of Freaks — protecting a family member from people who came to gawp.

Hooper’s own Texas Chain Saw is the other half of the inheritance, and specifically the dinner scene: a monstrous son, a father who loves him, and a family economy built around the son’s condition. Gunther is Leatherface without the meat hooks. The barker who runs the funhouse is his father, and the film’s actual subject is a parent managing a child he cannot fix and will not surrender.

That’s the reading that makes the third act land. The pursuit through the ride’s machinery isn’t a monster hunting teenagers. It’s a father and son dealing with an intrusion, and one of them is very upset.

The mechanics

Rick Baker designed Gunther, and the design is the film’s best joke and its saddest idea in one object. Gunther wears a Frankenstein mask — a cheap novelty mask, the kind sold at the carnival, the kind Amy’s brother wears in the prologue. When it comes off, the face beneath is worse and, crucially, more human: a person with a severe congenital deformity, blinking in the light. Wayne Doba plays him almost entirely as a body — a lurching, twitchy, distressed physicality that reads as illness rather than menace.

So the film’s monster is a boy in a shop-bought monster mask, hiding a face nobody would let him show. Baker and Hooper stage the unmasking as a revelation of shame. It is the single most Browning-esque gesture in eighties horror.

The ride itself is the other piece of craft. Hooper shoots the funhouse’s guts — the catwalks, the drive chains, the animatronic tableaux jerking through their loops — as a genuine industrial space with people living in it. The mannequins are lit exactly like the actors. When something moves in the background you have no reliable way to sort prop from person, and Hooper exploits it patiently rather than for jumps. John Beal’s score does something similar, running fairground calliope against orchestral dread until the two become indistinguishable.

Andrew Laszlo’s photography is what holds the whole thing together, and it is the reason the film looks more expensive than it was. Laszlo had shot The Warriors two years earlier, and he brings the same instinct here: saturated practical light, sodium and neon doing the work, an American night built out of the sources already standing in the frame. The midway is lit by the midway. It gives the carnival a warmth that makes the cruelty underneath land harder when it finally arrives.

A collector’s footnote: the novelisation, written by Dean Koontz under the name Owen West, reached shops before the film reached cinemas and contains a substantial prologue with material that isn’t in the picture at all. Readers who came to the film from the book arrived expecting a different story, which is a small extra chapter in the long history of Universal not knowing what it had.

The verdict, argued

The Funhouse is a flawed, unhurried, genuinely strange film that Universal sold as the wrong genre and audiences judged accordingly. Its teenagers are functional at best, its plot could be written on a beer mat, and it takes forty minutes to reach a premise the trailer had already given away.

Set against that: the best-photographed carnival in the genre, a monster design that argues for its monster, a structural inheritance from Freaks that almost nobody in 1981 was interested in, and a director working at the top of his instinct on material beneath his reputation. It is Hooper’s most humane film. That’s an odd thing to say about a picture with a deformed killer in it, and it’s true.

Watch it directly after Freaks. The double bill costs you three hours and rewrites both films.

Spoilers below

The catalyst is a transaction. Gunther pays Madame Zena, the fortune teller played by Sylvia Miles, for sex; the encounter fails; she keeps the money and mocks him; he kills her. The kids, hidden above, watch the whole thing through the floorboards.

Everything about that scene is calibrated to deny you a clean position. Zena is contemptuous and cruel and she is also being killed for it. Gunther is a murderer and he is also a young man who has just been humiliated by someone he paid to be kind to him. Hooper stages it without a single cue telling you where to stand. The teenagers upstairs are not witnesses to a monster attack; they are witnesses to a private catastrophe they paid nothing to attend.

Then the father discovers them, and the film’s sympathies invert again. He is protecting his son from four intruders who could put him in an institution. Everything he does for the remainder of the running time is, on his own terms, parenting.

Amy survives, and Hooper gives her no triumph. The last stretch of the ride’s machinery is the film’s finest sustained sequence — a girl and a monster in a mechanism neither of them can stop, the tableaux clanking through their cycles indifferently on either side. When it ends, the funhouse simply resumes. The carnival will pack up and open somewhere else, minus a son, and Amy walks out into a morning that has no interest in what she has learnt. Nobody in this film gets to be the hero of it, which is precisely why the audience of 1981 went home annoyed and why it plays so well now.