Dr Nessa Johnston (University of Liverpool) - Wed 5th Nov @2pm

31 Oct 2025

A 'Texan' Cinema? Archival perspectives on Tobe Hooper's Eggshells and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - Research Seminar by Dr Nessa Johnston (University of Liverpool).

To be Hooper’s second feature film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is a cult classic and a cultural landmark. In the 21st century, it has moved beyond its previous subaltern status in the US as a ‘midnight movie’ and in the UK as a ‘video nasty’, to being credited as pivotal in helping ferment screen production in Austin, Texas, and establishing it as a significant regional production hub, or even the US film industry’s ‘Third Coast’ (Macor 2010: 3). It is also a well- established part of the horror cinema canon, and has been the subject of repeated academic study, whereas Hooper’s relatively unknown countercultural debut feature Eggshells (1969) has had little attention. This paper will present archival research of the production and marketing of both films which I argue presents new insights into screen cultures and production contexts specific to their time and place.   

NESSA JOHNSTON is Lecturer in Screen Studies and Digital Media at University of Liverpool. She is the author of The Commitments: Youth, Music and Authenticity in 1990s Ireland (Routledge 2022), co- investigator on the Leverhulme funded project Anonymous Creativity, and co-editor with Jamie Sexton and Elodie Roy of the edited collection Anonymous Sounds: Library Music and Screen Cultures in the 1960s and 1970s (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025). She has published widely on film sound, low budget filmmaking, American independent cinema, Irish cinema and cult cinema, including in the journals Continuum; Music, Sound and the Moving Image; The Soundtrack; The New Soundtrack; The Velvet Light Trap; and Alphaville.

FILM & SCREEN MEDIA LAB 1, KANE BUILDING (BASEMENT)

WEDNESDAY 5 NOVEMBER 2025 AT 2 PM