Eaten Alive

Part of the special series NACHTBLENDE

“The last few minutes of a Tobe Hooper movie are always the most chaotic shit you’ve ever seen, it rules.”
— Bryan Espitia on Letterboxd

EATEN ALIVE, by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper, is a small, grimy gem from the American filmmaker—somewhere between Hitchcock’s Psycho, the splatter cinema of Herschell Gordon Lewis, and the darkly colorful imagery of Italian genre films from the 1960s and ’70s.

Clara (Roberta Collins) tries her luck as a sex worker in a rundown brothel somewhere in Texas, but on her very first night she reaches her—entirely understandable—limits. Her first client is the locally notorious and deeply unsettling Buck (Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund). He is about to rape her when Clara manages to scream loudly enough for the madam, who immediately throws her out of the house.

That same night, Clara finds shelter in a nearby boarding house. The seedy hotel is run by the eccentric Judd (Neville Brand), the proud owner of a Nile crocodile—which, incidentally, was a gift from Buck. Clara soon realizes that this is not the place where she will finally be able to breathe a sigh of relief…