Spontaneous Combustion
NOT BY LYNCH continues this Friday, June 12th at The Cinema Museum with Tobe Hooper’s Spontaneous Combustion (1990)
Below, Sam Warren Miell finds a dance of influence between the parallel careers of Hooper and Lynch. Sam is on the editorial board of the magazine Narrow Margin.
Tickets are available here, and come with a print booklet which includes the essay.
Two in the shadows
In the summer of 1973, aged thirty, Tobe Hooper shot The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). In the spring of 1976, also aged thirty, David Lynch finished Eraserhead (1977), which he had begun shooting around four years earlier. The influence of these two quintessential midnight movies is by now so deeply ingrained that it would be near impossible to map, forming part of the bedrock of whole continents of cinema. Lynch died a filmmaker of enormous renown, a cult hero who was also a Palme d’Or winner, his work the subject of countless academic works and two Simpsons references. Hooper’s obituaries, meanwhile, relay the narrative of a wunderkind whose promise dissipated somewhere along the way; his ‘later work for the cinema and television was said to lack the impact of his early films’, the BBC drily reported.
