SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2)

By: Dean Haspiel
October 5, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of favorite horror movies. Series edited by Heather Quinlan.

TOURIST TRAP | d. DAVID SCHMOELLER | 1979

It was the mid-1980s and I was channel-surfing the few available to us. As luck would have it, I turned to WPIX-TV—and stumbled upon a spooky scene halfway into Tourist Trap. A large man wearing a female face with a blonde wig chases a young woman in the woods taunting, “Wait, little girl. Be my friend!” He hurls a decapitated mannequin head at her. Suddenly, the head comes alive and starts to howl her name: “Molly!!!”

I was petrified yet elated. A large man wearing a face and wig? Had I found my new Leatherface?

Wait _ what does Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre have to do with Tourist Trap?

I first saw The Texas Chain Saw Massacre on VHS in 1985, and, like most horror fans, became obsessed with Tobe Hooper’s 1974 movie masterpiece. What’s not to love about a mentally challenged, cross-dressing, homicidal maniac who knows their way around a chainsaw? Sure, new psychopathic killers like Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger had emerged, but I wanted more shock and saw.

Tourist Trap, a supernatural slasher film that premiered in 1979, was directed and co-written by David Schmoeller. Starring Chuck Connors, Jocelyn Jones, Jon Van Ness, Robin Sherwood, and Tanya Roberts, the story follows a group of skinny-dipping adolescents who crash a roadside wax museum run by a lonely man named Mr. Slausen. A masked killer with psychokinetic powers haunts and tortures them. But rather than wear human skin, the killer wears masks and wigs of all genders. Like a fun-house mirror version of Leatherface.

Where Chainsaw was elevated by its found-footage style, Tourist Trap played like a cheap drive-in movie featuring sentient objects/murder weapons, animated waxwork figures, and dissociative identity disorder blues — aesthetics I’ve come to admire. But Tourist Trap is tough to recommend. Why? Because it’s corny. Not really scary. However, certain scenes start to loiter in your psyche like unwanted guests. What at first seems silly, slowly burns into something eerie and creepy.

I may not have gotten a proper Leatherface fix, but Tourist Trap left me with a lifelong aversion to mannequins. I can’t enter a clothing store without imagining plastic people coming alive to murder me. Inanimate objects with human attributes in close quarters may make my knees wobble, but my obsession with madmen has never waned.

In the 1990s I produced a bootleg Leatherface/Tourist Trap homage comic called Six Little Piggies. In the early 2000s, I started and abandoned a graphic novella called The Devil’s Muumuu, where my character Billy Dogma encounters suspected serial killer and body snatcher Ed Gein (the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) in Hell.

In 2005, Elisha Cuthbert and Paris Hilton co-starred in House of Wax, an unofficial remake of Tourist Trap. But word is that Re-Animator actress/scream-queen Barbara Crampton is currently co-producing a proper remake.

Just as a mannequin is a plastic imitation of a human and the Tourist Trap killer is a poor man’s Leatherface, sometimes you’re willing to endure inspired iterations, sequels, prequels, and reboots… because it reminds you of the source material, and why you came to love it in the first place.

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SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2)

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