Before The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, long before Poltergeist, master of horror Tobe Hooper first forayed into weird and haunted houses in his very first feature, Eggshells (1969).

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Eggshells finds a group of young hippies shacking up in a sprawling house in the Austin, Texas summer of '69, talking about their lives and setting about various delinquencies. All the while, a strange presence is bubbling up in the basement, causing possible hallucinations, hiccups in space-time, and occasional disappearances.

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Considered lost until uncovered and restored in 2009, this sci-fi/fantasy hangout film announces much of what Hooper would concern himself with throughout his career, including the political undercurrents running through much of his iconic horror.

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Hooper here is at his most kaleidoscopic, fashioning a series of vignettes that oscillate between documentary-style realism and abstract experimentation, with an unbridled amateur spirit giving the film a cinematic laboratory quality.

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Eggshells will be preceded by a 16mm print of Holographic Will (2023) by Mike Stoltz, a whirling, experimental domestic portrait of destabilization during the struggle to stay in a rent-controlled apartment amidst the sale of a building and an affordable housing crisis.

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A pre-show VHS tape will show from 7:30 to 8.

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EGGSHELLS
dir. Tobe Hooper, 1969
United States, digital projection
89 min

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Holographic Will
dir. Mike Stoltz, 2023
United States, 16mm projection
6 mins

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Total Runtime: 95 mins

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7:30 DOORS
8:00 SCREENING

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Presented on the summer solstice by Parallax Cinema

http://www.parallaxcinema.org

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