Tobe Hooper’s bloody Texas Chainsaw Massacre debut is still shocking 40 years later, but maybe not for the obvious reasons.
In celebration of Halloween, we are counting down the days with 13 of the scariest, creepiest, or simply unforgettably grim horror movies that ever crawled under our skin and never left. Join us each day as we look back on 13 horror movies that still know how to trick and treat viewers to their nightmares. Enter The Texas Chainsaw Massacre…
By combining the legends of Ed Gein and Sawney Bean, giving the whole gruesome mix a Southern-fried twist so popular with drive-in audiences of the early ‘70s, and tossing in a chainsaw and a meat hook, Tobe Hooper boiled up a horror classic with Texas Chain Saw Massacre that seared its way quite literally into the public consciousness almost immediately.
While audiences on the whole always remember the more blatantly shocking scenes—the first appearance of Leatherface followed in a blink by Pam (Teri McMinn) going up on that meat hook, the dinner scene, the chase through the woods—what has always stuck with me even after all these viewings are the smaller moments, the details and the images that together create such an atmosphere of deep dread that the shock scenes only become that much more, well, shocking.
The opening sequence itself, for instance, with the intense flashbulbs illuminating extreme close-ups of what are revealed to be recently unearthed corpses is both a masterstroke of horror and a cruel joke all at the same time. In a trick that would later be copied by hundreds of other filmmakers, the intense flashes of light from the screen in a darkened theater burned the images of those decayed corpses onto the retinas of the viewers, so even if they closed their eyes and turned away in disgust, they wouldn’t be able to escape.
Then there’s Edwin Neal’s crazed and mealy-mouthed hitchhiker. The entire sequence in the van, from Neals fond memories of the good old days at the slaughterhouse and his recipe for head cheese to the Polaroid burned in and the unexplained bit of black magic to the straight razor slicing open Franklin’s hand, remains the most disturbing and frightening scene in the film. Maybe because once they stumble into the house, we can always believe there is some possible escape, but they’re trapped in the van. Or maybe it’s the sheer unpredictability of what Neal might do next. Or maybe it’s just because he obviously smells really, really bad.
The creaking porch swing outside the house always gave me the willies, too. Now, creaking swings and rocking chairs are a standard trope in horror movies of all stripes. Here, though, for no reason at all, Hooper swoops the camera beneath the swing. It’s an absolutely meaningless shot, a simple Leone homage, but here with the flies and the wind and the established atmosphere, it takes on a palpable creepiness that I could never put my finger on. Works like a charm, though.
In the moment before things really get underway, when Pam stumbles into the room with the feathers and the bones, there is a single shot—a cluster of small bones and a mummified chicken’s foot tied together and hanging from the ceiling like, well, a magic totem or something a cannibal would make in arts and crafts. That single image, again with the buzzing flies, tells you how miserably hot and humid it is in there, as well as exactly what that room smells like. It’s not every movie you can smell, but you can sure smell Chainsaw.
Finally, there’s the last shot in the film. After all the screaming and running and false escapes, and banging, and buckets, and sledgehammers, and more screaming and more running, and chainsaws, our heroine finally gets away. But then Hooper cuts back to Leatherface, dancing in wild circles in the middle of the road, swinging the chainsaw. I’m not going to try to interpret this, try to guess what his intent was here, but after a traditionally happy ending this final image, quite unlike anything I’ve seen before or since, still manages to close the film with an overwhelming sense of desperate, lonely despair…and scary.
By using a pocketful of stylistic film school tricks rarely seen in grindhouse movies, Hooper created a film more sinister and effective than anything he’s done since, and certainly more effective than any of the thousands of films it’s inspired.
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