Tobe Hooper, Engineer of Our Childhood Nightmares, to Screen First Film at SXSW

We don't know what they were thinking, but our parents let us watch any movie that we wanted to when we were young. We distinctly remember seeing certain films (*cough* - Fast Times at Ridgemont High - *cough*) when we were basically zygotes. Sure, we had absolutely no idea what anything meant in the more racy films, but we certainly knew terror when we saw it, and nothing says terror more to us than the freakin' demon-under-the-bed clown in Poltergeist.

Well the man who directed that bed-wetter of a film, as well as the classic horror-genre-game-changer The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, will be resurrecting his very first filmmkaing effort on Tuesday March 17th, at 7:30pm during SXSW 2009. Tobe Hooper, a legendary Austin native, began his cinematic career in 1969 with a quiet little experimental film called Eggshells. The story follows a group of University of Texas undergrads who live together in a house (we think in Hyde Park, more specifically on Avenue F), who later discover that one of the beings they are living with is a ghost, or more accurately, a “crypto-embryonic-hyper-electric entity" living in the basement.

Sounds psychedelic, right? Hooper himself has described the film as "hippie" and we cannot wait to see what our hometown looked like in the late 60's, complete with a wedding scene in good ole' Wooldridge Square Park, next to the courthouse. Eggshells was thought to be a lost film, but word on the streets is that Louis Black himself dug up a copy of the print, so this will truly be a once-in-a-lifetime event. Check the SXSW site for more info.