BACKGROUND
Executive producer Charles Band thought he had a winning lottery ticket in his hand. The groundbreaking horror film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (which Band would distribute on VHS and turn into a famously unpopular Atari video game) had just been released a few years earlier, and now, here he was, making a new horror film with the participation of a few TCM crew members. Chain Saw editor J. Larry Carroll wrote the screenplay for the horror film Tourist Trap with director David Schmoeller, based on Schmoeller's University of Texas thesis film The Spider Will Kill You. Chain Saw sound recordist Ted Nicolaou was on board to edit the film. The two movies shared production designer Robert A. Burns. Plus, Pino Donaggio, who had provided the score for the hit Stephen King adaptation Carrie, was composing the score for this movie as well!
Best of all, Tourist Trap had legendary Western star Chuck Connors playing a complicated lead role, aiming to enter a horror phase in his career and become the new Boris Karloff... Band’s friend John Carpenter (who was considered for the Tourist Trap directing job before it was decided that Schmoeller should take the helm himself) was making a horror movie at the same time, a slasher movie called Halloween, and from what Band could tell, that project didn’t have anything going for it. A simple “maniac on the loose” set-up, a cast of unknowns. Sure, Donald Pleasence was in the cast, and he had been a Bond villain and part of the ensemble of The Great Escape the decade prior... But Tourist Trap had the star of The Rifleman!
The two movies had the same budget, $350,000 ($50,000 of that went to Connors on Tourist Trap), but it looked like Tourist Trap was going to be a runaway success while Halloween probably wouldn’t go anywhere. Of course, that’s not how it turned out. Halloween was a huge hit that spawned a massive franchise and Tourist Trap... wasn’t. But it has gathered a strong cult following over the decades, and a reputation for being a really good, creepy movie.
SETTING
Automatonophobia is the name for the fear of mannequins and other human-like dolls – and if you have that fear, Tourist Trap is here to creep you out like none other. The film is set in and around Slausen’s Lost Oasis, the tourist trap of the title, a wax figure museum that used to have twenty-five to thirty visitors every day, but has gone out of business since the nearby construction of a new highway. The wax figures are still on display, though, and these things are animatronics that can act out certain scenarios. The tourist trap sits on a nice piece of land that includes a forest, a watefall, a swimming hole (just watch out for the water moccasins) – and there’s a house out back behind the museum that also has mannequins set up throughout the rooms. Visitors aren’t supposed to see that, but things have taken a dark turn at Slausen’s Lost Oasis, so multiple people do see the mannequins set up in the house as the story plays out... People who are being tormented by a madman while surrounded by these figures.
KILLER
Everyone in the movie had to audition for their parts – except for Chuck Connors, who was directly offered the chance to play Mr. Slausen, the owner of Slausen’s Lost Oasis. He’s a nice guy who has hit a patch of bad luck. Not only did the new highway have a devastating impact on his business (Norman Bates had to deal with this same sort of nonsense in Psycho), but his beloved wife passed away from cancer just after they finished the highway. His wife had wanted to turn their property into a nice resort with a hotel, but it wasn’t to be. All he has left in life now is the junk he has collected and his memories. His brother made the wax figures in the museum, but his work was so good that city folk swooped in and hired him to make dummies for a wax museum in the city. So Mr. Slausen is on his own.
At least, that’s what he says. In the home behind the museum, there’s a masked man called Davy who claims to be Mr. Slausen’s brother. According to Davy, the kindly tourist trap owner makes him wear masks because he’s handsome, better looking than Mr. Slausen, who doesn’t like his wife to see him. Davy says he’s so good looking, Mr. Slausen is afraid his wife will be be attracted to him. Never mind that the wife is dead. Mr. Slausen thinks Davy stays in the cellar, but he sneaks out. He goes to the highway, particularly the gas station, looking for people he can attack and bring back home to torment in his cellar hideaway. Davy is a maniac... and more than that, he has dangerous telekinetic abilities. Mr. Slausen doesn’t like his brother’s telekinesis, but Davy feels that he shouldn’t have to hide it. Using the telekinesis feels good! Besides, he can control it. For the most part. Sometimes it does scare him...
Davy is played by Shailar Coby... but the truth is, there is no Shailar Coby. Chuck Connors pulled double duty, playing both of the Slausen brothers, and he did incredible work bringing both of these characters to life. Mr. Slausen is a nice guy with a warm screen presence. His performance as Davy, acted through masks while putting on a different voice, is deeply unnerving. Connors absolutely had what it took to become a new genre icon, as he was hoping to. It’s a shame he didn’t get more opportunities like this one.
FINAL GIRL
Just like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Tourist Trap starts off with a group of young people who are out for a drive. This group is travelling in two separate vehicles, and while they don’t run low on gas like the characters in TCM did, they do have trouble with their cars. One gets a flat tire, and the other vehicle just mysteriously dies... not far from Slausen’s Lost Oasis. If you can’t immediately pick the final girl out of the female members of the group, the biggest clue comes when the girls come across the swimming hole. Because when the idea of taking a swim comes up, it is, of course, the final girl who’s concerned about their lack of swimsuits. That’s Jocelyn Jones as Molly.
Molly is also the one who feels the most sorry for Mr. Slausen when she hears about the hard luck he’s had. She smiles at his stories, feels sympathy for him... and is interested enough in him that she goes snooping through his personal photo albums when he’s not around. Which is how she realizes that one of the mannequins in the museum is a tribute to his late wife.
Not long after she arrives at Slausen’s Lost Oasis, Molly finds herself fighting and running for her life. She’s never a particularly interesting person, but when she finds herself facing off with a masked maniac while holding a double-barrel shotgun, she makes the exact right choice: she empties both barrels into the creep. Unfortunately for her, it doesn’t have much of an effect on the villain. So she smashes him in the face with the empty shotgun.
That’s Molly at peak strength. She gets weaker from there, getting captured and strapped to a bed. She stays calm while interacting with her captor, asking to be let go... and she actually comes off as being too calm. She should have been fighting back more, even if that would have gotten her nowhere. But the lack of fight does make sense for how the character ends up.
VICTIMS
Molly was on a road trip with two other women and two men. Eileen (Robin Sherwood) was riding with Woody (Keith McDermott), and when Woody’s car got a flat tire, he found that his spare had no air in it and he had to go looking for help at a nearby gas station. That’s how he ends up being the opening kill. Eileen catches a ride with Molly and married couple Jerry (Jon Van Ness) and Becky (Tanya Roberts), and then they have engine trouble near Slausen’s Lost Oasis.
Eileen is the wilder one of the group, the one who puts no thought at all to the idea of swimsuits when she spots the swimming hole. She’s also the one who’s immediately suspicious of Mr. Slausen and thinks he’s hiding something, which is why she decides to go snooping around the house behind the museum. A very bad decision on her part.
None of these people make a strong impression as characters, but there are moments when Becky almost comes off like a secondary final girl. She’s in a committed relationship, she’s not curious about what’s going on at the Slausen property, and she finds herself in a bad situation that she eventually has an opportunity to try to escape from. She just can’t quite pull it off.
The road trippers aren’t the only characters in danger, as Davy has been keeping a woman named Tina (Dawn Jeffory) captive in his cellar for a while.
DEATHS
The opening kill scene with Woody makes it clear right up front that the death and terror sequences in this film are going to be something special. When he enters the gas station looking for help, the whole place goes crazy around him. Doors start opening and closing by themselves, items rattle, lights flicker, objects fly around the room, a mannequin seems to be laughing. Woody is able to bust through a door as he tries to escape – but then someone on the other side grabs him and holds him in place. As a pipe flies through the air and into his back. Death by telekinesis.
Eileen has a similar experience when she enters the house behind the museum. The masked Davy telekinetically closes windows, locks doors, shatters glass, and uses a scarf to end Eileen’s life.
Later, we’ll see someone taken out with a thrown knife. Another character is turned into a mannequin and taken apart. In one scene, a character is trapped in a room full of mannequins who manage to incapacitate her.
But the most troubling death comes when the killer murders Tina in front of Jerry and Becky by covering her face in plaster, narrating the whole experience as he does it. “Your world is dark. You’ll never see again.” That ranks up there as one of the most unnerving scenes in cinema history, as far as I’m concerned.
CLICHÉS
The set-up for Tourist Trap is quite cliché – people on a road trip run into trouble in the middle of nowhere. The fact that Eileen wants to go swimming as soon as she sees the swimming hole, lack of swimsuits be damned, is the sort of thing you see a lot in this sort of movie. So is her decision to go snooping around the isolated house... and the fact that her decision doesn’t work out very well for her. The phone at Slausen’s Lost Oasis doesn’t work, because of course, the phones never work. Mr. Slausen doesn’t mind; he doesn’t have anybody to call anyway. We have the “evil brother” cliché in play, followed by the twist that two separate characters are actually one person with multiple personalities. The fact that the killer is a backwoods-dwelling maniac who keeps people captive in his home isn’t unique and there are a good number of horror movies that deal with dummies and wax museums – but Davy does come off as a unique villain, thanks to his telekinetic abilities. Sure, they might have been added to the story at Band’s request, probably due to the success of Carrie a couple years earlier, but they work perfectly for the story and give the film an extra level of strangeness.
POSTMORTEM
Tourist Trap went into production in the Los Angeles area at the end of March 27, 1978 and wrapped up after 24 days of filming, heading into post-production just as John Carpenter started filming Halloween in the Los Angeles area. Halloween made it into theatres that fall, with Tourist Trap following in March of ‘79 – and while Halloween earned a R rating, this one just got a PG from the ratings board. Which may be part of why it didn’t become all that popular immediately; movie-goers who had just seen Halloween might have felt this PG flick would be too weak. That’s not the case. While it doesn’t have the nudity Halloween had, the moments of violence are quite disturbing and the movie has a great, unsettling, weird vibe throughout. Which is probably another reason why it wasn’t a huge success. It’s weird!
The lighter rating paid off in the long run, because it meant the movie could “receive significant broadcasting on syndicated television in the years following its theatrical release.” Allowing it to reach a wider audience and develop a cult following. One member of its cult is author Stephen King, who wrote in his book Danse Macabre that Tourist Trap “wields an eerie spooky power.” Another member is drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs, who hosted the film during his first special on the Shudder streaming service and named it as one of the most underrated films of all time.
Tourist Trap does have many fans, but it still deserves a lot more attention than it has gotten over the forty-five years since its release.
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