Long before the MCU took over the box office, Tobe Hooperdirector classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacrealmost sent my own Spiderman movie. Really! The same director who envisioned Leatherface and his family of cannibals brutally murdering a group of teenagers as if they were farm animals almost had a hand in one of Marvel’s most iconic superheroes.
Of course, Hooper’s Spider-Man would have been a completely different animal than the one we know today (i.e. from comics, TV shows, movies, video games, multi-million dollar franchises, etc.). So far, we’ve seen close to a billion variations of Spidey, from animated series to multi-dimensional crossovers to delightfully quirky tokusatsu. Supaidaman. Plus, Through the universes of spiders is only going to give us countless versions of the web slinger. However, Tobe Hooper’s Spidey would undoubtedly be the craziest, most bizarre depiction of the character, and by a pretty wide margin.
Why wasn’t Tobe Hooper’s Spider-Man filmed?
Given the cultural pervasiveness of Marvel properties these days, it’s strange to think of a time when few other than comic book fans really cared about Spider-Man and company. For a time, widescreen adaptations of the web slinger were plagued with bugs, and moviegoers didn’t get a chance to see the character on the silver screen. A TV show in the 70s led to a made-for-television movie edited from its episodes, like the Japanese tokusatsu series, but for about two decades, movie studios and directors tried unsuccessfully to bring Peter Parker to theaters.
Around 1985, Cannon Films purchased the rights from Marvel and hired Tobe Hooper to direct the project. If an acclaimed horror director seems clumsy (Raimi, anyone?), then in most cases they were. Well the heads of Cannon Menachem Golan And Yoram Globus apparently had a severe misunderstanding of what Spider-Man really was, thinking of it as a horrific horror story in which a man (Peter Parker) unwittingly transforms into a hideous spider-man creature.
Hooper’s involvement now makes a lot more sense, and the director’s skill at creating truly terrifying images would provide a wonderful approach to the character. Problem in, Stan Lee offered to rewrite the script based on his plan, which, as expected, was more faithful to his comics and focused more on Spider-Man’s actual origins. Tobe Hooper soon left the project and the film went in a completely different direction before getting stuck in development hell again.
After all these years, we have dozens of different Spider-Man looks. Hooper’s vision, unfortunately, is not one of them and never will be.
Tobe Hooper’s Spider-Man would radically change the character
No potential Spider-Man project would take such an unabashedly misguided approach to the comic book hero as Tobe Hooper’s. Even James CameronX Tom CruiseA protagonist adaptation conceived and scrapped in the early ’90s, with all its profanity and gratuitous sex scenes, would have been a more traditionally faithful, albeit more adult-oriented, version of the stories.
Goran and Globus apparently never read a Spider-Man comic book in their fucking lives (or saw the cover of one), misinterpreting the character’s name as something far more literal: a horrific human-spider hybrid with eight mutant arms and an immortal disgust to your miserable existence. Yeah. In the Hooper film, Peter Parker would have been much more literally Spider-Man.
Screenplay written at Cannon’s request outer limits creator Leslie Stevens, followed photographer Peter Parker, who was turned into the titular arachnid (or at least a completely corrupted version) by the diabolical Dr. Zork. You see, crazy old Dr. Zork would form an army of mutants that Peter would lead in their quest for world domination. Peter, with a healthy body, mind and conscience, will reject Zork’s tyrannical dreams and instead fight the mutants to overthrow Zork and save the world.
Aside from the extra mutant hands, the main plot doesn’t sound on paper. too much far from what could like reminiscent of fragments of the story of Spider-Man. I mean, fighting supervillains, mutants and human/monster hybrids is basically his modus operandi - it’s one of those if you squint your eyes hard, you can vaguely see Similar things. Those involved in the project mistook Peter’s superhero origins for something downright monstrous. The details take the project into uncharted territory, while the tone and style drive it into a frenzy.
‘Texas Chainsaw’ director almost turned Spider-Man into a horror movie
Given the 100% delusional concept of Spider-Man being turned into an 8-limbed fucking abomination, it’s no wonder Tobe Hooper’s superhero movie would have a comparable insane tonal vision to match. All this would be grotesque bodily horror in the spirit David Cronenberg.
A plot based on a similar formula established in H. G. Wells novel Island of Doctor Moreau, had to draw heavily on the gruesome nature of Peter’s unwitting transformation into Spider-Man. Forget all the hyper-stylish web-slinging and high school antics: this Spider-Man would be an absolute villain, a Frankenstein monster, terrified of his own miserable existence. Think Cronenberg Fly, only with Marvel IP. On the one hand, it’s interesting to think of a group of producers with no fundamental idea of who Spider-Man really is. On the other hand, it’s perhaps even more exciting to speculate about the potential for a comic book movie to take such a dark direction.
Hooper’s Spider-Man bodily horror would probably be a disaster in the traditional sense (commercially at least). But there is something about it that would certainly be amazing. Watching Peter’s grotesque transformation into a bizarre mutant - with hideous ’80s practical effects, I suppose - would be a sight to behold. How rough can it be? How far will it go? The world may never know.
Spider-Man is the closest comic book series ever to body horror.
In a way, no comic book series is better suited to body horror than Spiderman, with special attention to Venom’s many appearances. Transformation via symbiote absorption is as horrific as it gets, even if no Spider-Man (or Venom) movie has yet had the guts to portray her as twisted and disturbing as she probably should be.
Decades later, it’s hard not to imagine what a ridiculous Spiderman the movie would look like. In the nearly twenty years after Hooper’s film flopped, various directors joined in possible variations on the project, most notably the previously mentioned James Cameron version. catastrophic failure Superman IV: In Search of Peace made superhero films especially unprofitable by forcing film cuts like Cameron’s Spider-Man. In this case, the cut budget led to the film being dropped again.
When Sam Raimi helped revive the superhero genre with his Spiderman The trilogy (the first official, original film adaptation of Spidey) soon followed suit. His films have proven that Spider-Man has a place in theaters all over the world and that a small web-catcher can indeed make huge profits. As iconic as Raimi Spiderman that is, the impression still persists that comic book films are being played too cautiously. Bye Christopher Nolan, James Gunn, Taika Wati, and a few others make sure their fingerprints are on every superhero movie they release, none of them feel as outrageously daring as Toba Hooper’s would-be Horror Spider-Man. Several superhero films have made a splash by breaking the rules of the genre, but this abandoned project could very well, for better or worse, break them all.
Hooper Spiderman would be one of the rare comic book movies that are willing to dive deep into another genre. Perhaps it was ludicrously unlike anything that had ever been done before or since, but May be that wouldn’t be bad at all. We get a handful of MCU movies every year, and comic book fans have a lot to think about as phase four of the Marvel movies is in full swing.
Disney and Marvel would certainly take the risk of allowing high-profile directors to pursue their unique vision for these well-protected intellectual rights. But they will also be doing something fantastic, allowing artists to turn tried and true stories into something completely new. It may sound pretentious to say that writers deserve their place in big-budget franchises, but it’s true. In the case of Tobe Hooper Spidermanit just wasn’t meant to be. Perhaps in another universe, but here we have only our assumptions about what could be and what would be. Yes it could be would was a beautiful disaster of the most beautiful kind: too terrible to look away from, too unique to ever forget.
Source: Collider
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