Forgotten Flicks: TEXAS ELECTROSHOCK THERAPY

While cinematic graphic violence has reached unprecedented heady heights in recent decades, no film has quite taken home the crown for sheer physical and existential damnation as 1974’s TEXAS ELECTROSHOCK THERAPY. Tobe Hooper and company’s movie approximates what would come out on the other end if you handed a camera and cattle prod to mad scientists.

On the surface it appeared to be a simple story. A group of teens travel by van to claim an inherited home in Texas. Along the way, they pass an electrocuted armadillo laying belly up on the road, half charcoal. Then a fried turtle – and more animals. They pick up an elderly hitchhiker – Geiger (Jim Seidow), who claims to be an electrical engineer shuttered out of the local powerhouse for discovering anomalous electrical activity hushed up by his Texas Fat Cat bosses. The kids are initially receptive to his story as it helps rationalize their macabre findings on the road. But when he explains the electricity experiments caused him to lose his mind, he exposes himself to everyone in the van and is promptly pushed out into the Texas sun despite his pleading to get him far away from here. In their wake, pulsing electrical lines negatively stimulate the ill-fated geezer until he’s turned barbeque from the inside out. As he dies his arm remains outstretched, pleading for the van to turn back. At that moment rolling thunderclouds appear. The kids’ moral fate seems sealed.

Their day improves mildly when they explore the dilapidated Victorian mansion, dressing themselves up in vintage clothes. Their tranquillity is shattered by the arrival of an accidental Frankenstein-like creation, born of an experiment to capture the dissipating electrical currents of the dead. Dubbed Etherface, referring to ether – the upper regions of air beyond the clouds before space – he is an electrical being, equal parts science-based and spiritual. Local actor Paul A. Partain was hired to play the villain, lauded for his ability to imbue the character with a sense of cherubic innocence. Etherface is a corporeal being composed of a thousand corpses’ dying electrical pulses, angry at their collective demises out in Texan nowhere-places. Forced into consciousness, Etherface filters the collective rage of the fallen into an almost apocalyptic propensity for rage and violence.

Ether’s destruction of the kids plays out like an extended fever-dream. A girl relaxing in a bathtub is boiled into what can only be described as Texas Grits. When two of the boys’ debate about War vs Pacification turns into a bloody fistfight, Etherface intervenes with his own action-as-statement, destroying both men in equally gruesome ways: One is offed “peacefully” – his bones are incrementally disintegrated into dust, turning his entire body into a floppy bag of skin and muscle. The other: full-body mega-explosion, one of the goriest things ever put onto camera and said to be the inspiration for the less-severe head-bursting scene in David Cronenberg’s SCANNERS. At the conclusion of this sequence, the camera is coated in blood, blinding us. In each subsequent scene, the blood slowly evaporates from the camera lens, but the memory lingers.

Eventually it’s down to unlikely heroine, mousy Sally Perkins played by Marilyn Burns, trapped in a garden shed where almost everything around her is conductive to electricity, forcing her to contort in a paralyzing balancing act to escape the paralyzing jolts. With the villain biding his time, it’s an exhausting sequence as we watch Sally wait out two days and nights while descending into dehydration and delirium. She carries the entire sequence on her face in wrought close-up, which earned Burns lavish notices from the critics. Eventually coming to believe Etherface is God himself attempting to teach her a compassionate lesson, she drops to her knees and thanks him and asks for even more trials so that she may be wiped of her trespasses. Once she is broken on a core level, the iconic badguy lets his guard down and revels in his hubris and tyranny with an epic speech that puts to words the unspoken horrors of life in 1970s Forgotten America.

In the end, it’s the heretofore mute neighbour Mr. Tuttle, played by Texan Gunner Hansen, whose long-repressed conscience activates long enough to rise from his wheelchair and impale the grandiose creature with a copper-wrapped flagpole. Upon impact the two plunge into the nearby wetlands where Etherface’s energy field is spectacularly discharged. Hansen’s ad-libbed rallying cry of “For God, Country and Texaco” has gone down as one of the all-time great quotables in horror history.

Placing an advertisement in Variety heralding the beginning of pre-production cost Hooper almost all the pocket of change earmarked to make the film. The gambit paid off and big-ticket Hollywood distribution companies lined up to offer the director a sizable stack of cash to pay for the picture – on the condition that he attach at least one “known quantity” name in front or behind the camera. Coincidentally, around the same time Hooper’s writer Kim Henkel suffered a nasty case of food poisoning at a local steakhouse. The show must go on, so Hooper was able to cash-in and cash-up on the promise from the LA cats by hiring PHASE IV’s Mayo Simon to undertake scripting duties from top to bottom. Simon brought an in-depth scientific approach to the film, which contained numerous divergences or “side trips” into the microscopic journey of electrical currents, which would be realized with real-life opticals “donated” by the science community. Henkel’s health would return just in time to provide a production polish before filming began – offsetting the clinical precision of the horror with a smattering of black humour – now a born-again vegetarian since his health scare.

Hooper considered shooting the film in the dead format of 3D but decided against it, believing what they would put on screen to be more than immersive enough. A tour-de-force first-person POV of an electrical current travelling through the wiring between walls was accomplished with crude but effective techniques. The scene in which Etherface’s force levitates a room full of power tools, including a power drill and chainsaw, so spellbound audiences that Steven Spielberg would later attempt to persuade Hooper to direct his pet idea for a supernatural movie. With Hooper’s plate filled with a steady stream of work including 1980s Al Pacino-starrer COCAINE CARNAGE, instead it was Wes Craven who would be hired for what came to be titled A POLTERGEIST ON ELM STREET.