Why Tobe Hooper Was Fired From A 1979 Alien Rip-Off
Tobe Hooper was fired from 1979's The Dark—a film restructured during post-production to take advantage of the advance publicity for Alien.
Director Tobe Hooper was fired from a 1979 film that was restructured during post-production to take advantage of the buzz surrounding the sci-fi horror juggernaut, Alien. The filmmaker, best known for the 1974 horror classic, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, instead went on to direct the TV movie version of Stephen King's Salem’s Lot the same year.
Hooper’s long career in film featured a number of projects that he either left or was fired from, including his follow-up to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Eaten Alive. The director left that film just days before production was completed after a contentious disagreement with producers. In 1981, during the first week into production of Venom, a killer snake movie with Klaus Kinski, Hooper also left, though the official reason has never been ascertained. While it is not unusual for a filmmaker to leave a project before filming begins, it is notable—and often costly—for one to leave during production.
After the acrimonious split from the set of Eaten Alive, Hooper found solace in a project called The Dark that, on paper, sounded promising. Production company Film Ventures International, which had been very successful in the 70’s for distributing and sometimes financing low budget genre films, was behind the project. FVI was coming off a string of successful releases including the surprise hit Grizzly (1976) and the profitable Beyond the Door (1974), an Italian rip-off of The Exorcist. They had lined up a strong cast including William Devane, Cathy Lee Crosby, Richard Jaeckel and American Top 40's Casey Kasem. The script, by television scribe Stanford Whitmore, focused on a series of decapitation murders in Los Angeles where the bodies have been partially eaten. It was perfect material for the director and co-writer of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
While plot specifics are vague, the movie tie-in by Max Franklin (a.k.a. Richard Deming) offers a better idea of why the original script may have intrigued Hooper. In the novel, the killer is never fully explored, but the cannibal angle is used as a major plot thread. At one point, the grave of a cannibal killer, lynched by a mob in 1879, is dug up to little effect. It’s easy to see why the producers, including music mogul Dick Clark, would want the participation of Hooper as well. Three days into shooting principal photography, Hooper was already behind schedule, and was abruptly fired from the project. He was replaced by John ‘Bud’ Cardos, whose Kingdom of the Spiders, which starred Star Trek's William Shatner, had been a big hit a few years prior.
Additional rumors surfaced around Hooper’s dismissal, including a story about Cardos—who was supposedly the original A.D.—conspiring to get him fired. But Hooper, who was notoriously tight-lipped regarding professional problems, spoke very little about his time on the production. His ousting was probably for the best, as the film was changed drastically during post-production. In an effort to cash in on the pre-release publicity for Ridley Scott's Alien, producers decided to retrofit the cannibal killer into an alien being. This created a fragmented and often confusing narrative that did not translate into a hit for FVI. The Dark was released on Blu-ray from Ronin Flix in a 2k scan of the original negative.