Golly – where do I even start with this? When approaching a film this big, this significant, it can be daunting. Books have been written about it – it has been discussed ad nauseam by academics and bloggers and youtubers and horror fans for half a century – it was banned in many countries and is in the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art – what could I possibly have to add to the conversation? And yet, I know that as it’s hitting this big anniversary, countless other bloggers, podcasters, and journalists will be praising it, analyzing it, dissecting it, and discussing its importance for the genre, and possibly for the art of cinema writ large, and hey – if all of those people get to do it, I can too. I pay my hosting fees here – I can do what I please.
So yeah – this month we’re digging into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) on the advent of its 50th anniversary (which will come about two weeks from today). I wouldn’t exactly call it one of my favorite horror films, but in a strange fashion, that’s only because it is so damn good. It is disturbing and awful in all the right ways, such that it hasn’t fallen into a kind of comfort food rotation for me. I like to preserve its power with rare viewings, lest it be merely appreciated for its significant value rather than recoiled from as the nightmare it is. But that said, I do think it is one of the very best works of horror committed to celluloid – rankings are pretty futile and silly, but I can’t imagine a Top Five that didn’t include it.
One caveat here, though – besides the inevitable fact that this text will include significant spoilers (if you somehow are the kind of person who would read this blog and you haven’t seen this movie, go watch it right now – it’s a classic for a reason – it’s also a quick (if exhausting) watch and it’s streaming all over the place), as mentioned above, this is a piece that has been broadly discussed, and often by writers or presenters who have done far more original research than I (by which I mean ‘at least some’). I know that over the years, I have been exposed to so many other people’s interpretations – and I do not know from whence my own readings come. I intend no plagiarism, and will try to base my words primarily on my personal viewing experience, but I simply can’t guarantee that seeds planted during my last roughly 25 years of being a horror fan and reading about movies haven’t grown to fruition in the form of accidentally recycled notions. But hey, I’ll do my best… so here we go…
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Tobe Hooper’s second film marks the high point of his career. He went on to make plenty of other works that were enjoyable and worthwhile (at least one of which I wrote about here), but nothing could approach the queasy, awful power of this early entry. It only runs a tight 83 minutes, but feels so much longer. In most cases, that would be a harsh criticism, but I mean it as high praise. The events of its story span one full day, from dawn to dawn, taking its sole survivor on a harrowing descent into terror and madness, and I think it can feel that way for the audience as well. I remember the first time I watched it, just wanting the screaming to stop, wanting to catch my breath – it was a trial to endure – not a fun movie, but really effectively horrific.
Oddly, having just watched it twice in rapid succession for this post, I find it gets less jarring and more enjoyable on each subsequent viewing – so much of it just works so very, very well – and that is exciting and fun, when taken with a certain critical distance. Daniel Pearl’s grainy 16mm cinematography is frequently gorgeous, as well as smart and effective. The editing and discordant score likewise. It is lean and mean when it needs to be, but it will also stretch things out beyond any remnant of comfort when it chooses, yielding sickly, disturbing fruit. Its structure is perfect – easing us from something approaching real naturalistic cinema vérité at the outset, down a long dark rabbit hole of terror and insanity, surreal and maddening, over the course of its three clear acts, at some points feeling far more like a hellish, nigh abstract art film – but it does this all so unpretentiously, and therefore, all the more succesfully. It might have the best five minutes to be found in any horror film ever (which of course we’ll get into). And for something so earthbound (entirely human killers picking off some nice young people in rural Texas), it comes closer to presenting true “Lovecraftian-mind-shattering-horror-at-the-revelation-of-unbearable-reality” than any flick I’ve ever seen that features slimy tentacles (with much of the credit for that, beyond the filmmaking, going to Marilyn Burns – whose Sally really goes through Hell – and whose eyes express so much).
It is a film of contradictions that achieve a captivating internal tension: It is gritty, sweaty, disgusting, and all around unpleasant to endure – but it is also beautiful. It is truly horrific – but sometimes also genuinely funny, even if you don’t actually laugh cause it would feel wrong. It is naturalistic – but it is also surreal, absurd, and over-the-top. It feels gory and cruel and awful – but there is barely any blood or explicit violence in the whole film. As a viewer, it feels like you are not in safe hands, like the filmmakers themselves are dangerous, irresponsible, crazy – but it is also so expertly crafted at every level of production – and that is rather a joy to watch.
But the fact that it is growing more enjoyable as I dig into everything that works so well in it means that once I’m done writing this, I probably shouldn’t let myself watch it again for at least another ten years. It deserves to retain its shocking horror, and I fear that can be lost in familiarity…
From the very beginning, with its corpse art at sunrise, mechanical whirring sounds that could be chainsaws or cameras, John Larroquette’s clearly fraudulent ‘based on true events’ voiceover, and its opening credits in searing red and black (what is it? sunspot photography? I don’t know – but it feels ugly and hot and foreboding), before cutting to the 5 young people in a van, driving to the cemetery where Sally’s grampa was buried to make sure that his corpse hasn’t been tampered with in the recent wave of grave robberies and desecrations that local law enforcement claim are the work of elements from “outside the state,” absolutely everything is hot, sweaty, gross, and doom laden. As they head down the road, Pam reads from a horoscope book about how Saturn is having an evil influence on the world. You don’t get the sense that any of them buy into this, but it is a part of the shared mood. They are just a group of normal kids out for a trip together, and they want to have a good time, but in this sweltering heat, and given the state of things (analysis of the film often cites Watergate and Vietnam as big influences – trust in American order and even ‘goodness’ having been well eroded at the time), it’s hard to imagine that their state, their country, their world isn’t an entirely evil place, and it’s hard to relax and enjoy yourself under such conditions, though they do their best.
At the cemetery, given the ruckus raised by the grotesque reports of corpses being stolen and fashioned into macabre, decaying statuary, the place is crowded with drunk locals out to enjoy the carnival atmosphere. One old man who can’t hold his head up goes on about how he sees the things that happen around here that no one talks about, that they all laugh at him. This is not a good place, but presenting as typical “small town America,” the rot at its heart goes undiscussed. It’s hard to feel that this isn’t a stand-in for every small town across the country – just ‘normal’ folk going about their lives, being “neighborly,” but underneath it all, something is sick, wrong, menacing. Sally’s grampa’s grave may be undisturbed, but a disturbing miasma suffuses the air and poisons the land.
Not to go scene by scene, eventually Sally, her wheelchair bound brother Franklin, and their friends, Jerry, Pam, and Kirk, end up going to visit Sally’s grampa’s house, long abandoned. She and Franklin used to visit and play there as kids, and this is familiar, nostalgic territory for them. I think this is an important element. Often in this sort of horror, you get the sense that the young people are somehow trespassing in a world that is not their own – invading a rural or wooded space that they are wrong to venture into. But in this instance, when they all stop at a gas station that has no gas and the barbeque cook (hereinafter, “the Cook”) who runs the place tells them that they shouldn’t go messing around in other people’s houses (does he originate the trope of the “Harbinger”? Probably not – I expect that should go to the villagers in Nosferatu – but the Cook does embody it perfectly), Franklin can answer that his daddy owns this homestead. They’ve been away, but they are locals too.
I think this is partly key to how scary this movie feels. It turns out that it is a neighboring house to grampa’s old place that houses the family of Ed Gein inspired cannibals/artists. Franklin and Sally swam in the watering hole down past the shed as kids. Sally slept in her room decorated with zebras right across from the house where she will soon undergo untold torment. This isn’t the suburban comfort of Haddonfield, but though remote, isolated – somewhere you can run through the woods screaming all night, being chased by a madman with a live chainsaw, and no one will hear you, there is still a presumption of familiarity, of safety, of normalcy – which hides unfathomable darkness. These killers are a just a nearby family, neighbors – and they could be yours.
Also, watching with 2024 eyes, following endless think pieces since 2016 about the disenfranchised, post-industrial, white, non-urban, working class rage which has metastasized in America with resoundingly destructive socio-political results, it’s hard not to see echoes of that in this family who ‘has always been in meat,’ former slaughterhouse employees put out of work and abandoned by the economy and society thanks to advances in automated meat production. This clan of insane weirdos is monstrous, terrifying, and dangerous – but in their way, they are also pitiable, lost, just barely getting by, doing their best. Back when their Grampa worked at the slaughterhouse, a veritable star with the sledgehammer, were they cannibals and madmen, or did that happen to them when the work dried up and the world moved on? I don’t know. They film doesn’t tell us, but I feel there is something there. Being lost and forgotten breeds resentment, and resentment and bitterness breed monsters.
And that sense of resentment, of things not being fair and carrying a toxic anger in response, goes beyond the killers. We saw that with the locals at the graveyard. We felt that with the guy at the gas station staring into the sun, wasting away. And we get such a strong example of it in Franklin. Sally’s brother gets a bad rap – often described as one of the most irritating characters in horror, someone that fans love to hate. But honestly, he has a really rough time of it. He’s been dragged along on this trip by his sister only to be stuck with a bunch of her friends who have no patience for him and don’t say it, but would rather not have to deal with him and his disability, not to mention his anger and trolling. He is not well cared for and frequently gets hurt – his chair rolling down into a ditch while he’s trying to pee, the Hitchhiker targeting him, being subjected to various bumps and scrapes along the way (and of course, in the end, getting eviscerated by a chainsaw – he has a really bad day).
Now, to be fair, he’s not not incredibly irritating, blowing raspberries and whining all the time, but I can also really sympathize – left behind, mocked, only nominally put up with. You can see all of that result in his bracing personality, and at the same time, there is a kind of kinship between him and the killers. When the kids pick up the Hitchhiker early on, whom we later learn to be part of the crazy family next door, Franklin alone shows a legitimate interest in his story of family history at the local slaughterhouse. Franklin doesn’t immediately look down on him and mock him – he even makes respectful conversation – until things go way too far, the guy creeps them all out and slices Franklin with a straight razor, and they kick him out of the van.
So, of course, eventually, after about 35 minutes of the vague sense that things are not going to end well for them, the kids start dying, kicked off with what I described above as one of the very best five minutes in all of horror. I am not the first to describe this scene in minute detail, but both times that I watched it for this post, I had to pause afterwards and just sit in mind-blown appreciation of its perfection. So it’s worth describing one more time. Bear with me:
Kirk and Pam, having found the promised swimming hole to have dried up (just one more way that the film allows no relief for anyone), notice a nearby house with a generator, and go over to see if they can buy some gasoline as their van is running low. Approaching the house, Kirk notices cars hidden under a camouflaged canopy – which feels like a flag, but not enough to rise to the level of concern (one can only assume these to be the vehicles of previous victims – but the couple knows nothing of any past violence – so why worry?). After some horsing around, Pam sits on a swing out in the front yard as Kirk bangs on the door, trying to get the attention of someone within.
He opens the screen door to knock and doing so causes the main door to swing inward, the shot reversing to within the house, seeing the light and the young man appearing at the beginning of a dark hallway. We reverse the shot again and see what he sees – at the end of the dimly lit corridor, beyond a doorway, there is a red wall decorated with animal skulls. There’s an odd sound from within, something like the squealing of a pig and the film cuts twice, each time getting closer and closer to the skulls, to the sound. We reverse again to see Kirk intrigued, debating entrance, calling out ‘hello’ again and again to no response, and then eventually, kind of running into the place, to get to the end of the hall and find the source of sound. Reverse shot again so we see him from behind as he jogs forward, trips a bit and suddenly the doorway is filled with a hulking figure wearing a strange mask. Closeup on Leatherface – disturbing and grotesque – his mask a dead man’s face. The figure whacks him on the head with a sledgehammer and Kirk goes down twitching.
Multiple cuts to see his body in spasm before the sledge comes down again and his body is still (exactly as deaths at the slaughterhouse were described earlier). Leatherface yanks Kirk’s body in and slams a heavy metal door shut, leaving us in a dark, silent hallway once more. From first hearing the odd noises to seeing the door slam, only 35 seconds have passed. There was no music at all, either of ominous building threat, or a stinger on the jump scare – it is absolutely shocking, and startling in its oddness, simplicity, almost silence.
But then, with Kirk locked within, a low rumble of danger begins in the score and we cut to Pam outside on the swing, calling after her boyfriend. First we see her face in closeup and consternation, and then we cut to the shot – the most famous in the film, and for good reason. (I couldn’t find a Youtube clip for the whole scene, but here, at least, is this shot.) The camera starts behind the white wooden bench swing that she’s sitting on, but as she rises to walk towards the house, the lens glides beneath the seat to follow her low from behind. We now know what she’s walking towards, and she looks so soft and fleshy – she’s wearing short shorts and a backless swimsuit, and feels uncovered, unprotected, and filmed from this angle, the house looms above her like a hungry thing. She walks forward, up the stairs and towards the door, seeming to be consumed in the frame by the building, an otherwise normal house.
We view her from inside, her face distorted by the screen door. Low, scary tones in the soundtrack accompany her into the bad place, shots alternating between closeups on her worried face that don’t let us see what might be coming and her POV as she scans the hall ahead. Coming around a corner in the dark, she trips over something and falls into a room filled with feathers and bones. A chicken is suspended in a too-small cage, clucking. Her point of view, intercut with horrified reaction shots, slowly scans from one disturbing bone-art-installation to the next – and these are clearly human bones – femurs, jaws, rib cages. Slowly the camera pans from a skeleton’s foot, up a bit of wood, to a hand, past a shoulder blade, to a skull, and we cut to a wide view of a skeletal sofa.
After a few moments of stunned revulsion, she scrambles to get up and flee, but as she turns into the hallway again, the metal door bangs open and the massive, lumbering figure runs out to grab her – she barely makes it out the front door of the house before he catches her around the waist and pulls her back in, screaming and kicking and fighting for her life. Down the hall and into the next room.
We cut to a view within the kitchen, the camera placed behind a meathook, and we see Leatherface carry in the shrieking, struggling girl. Cut to behind Leatherface as he lifts Pam and approaches the hook. Quick cut to the hook view with her uncovered back nearing the point, and cut again to behind him as we see him give up her weight. One more cut to Pam’s face as she is pierced, her arms feebly rising to try to pull her body up and off of the hook, but it’s impossible.
We see Kirk’s body lying on the table in the foreground and Leatherface in the middle as he examines his work. He meanders slowly over to pick up a chainsaw. There is a bucket beneath Pam’s feet to catch her blood when it is drained, as one would do with a butchered pig. We have a couple of shots of Leatherface carefully, if clumsily, handling his chainsaw to go about the project of segmenting Kirk’s body as Pam screams in the background, before the film cuts outside to a weather vane spinning, backlit by the cloud obscured sun – a moment of peace after this terror, but with the faint sounds of the chainsaw running in the background. A sound that, heard from afar, would raise no alarm.
In these last five minutes, we barely saw any blood – we don’t see the meathook break the skin. We don’t see the chainsaw blades touch Kirk’s body. And much of this is accomplished with a series of pretty simple reverse shots – this side, that side, this side, that side, but ye gods is it effective – startling, terrifying, brutal, and weird and so, so real. Every choice is perfectly calibrated to shock – to tell the story, to batter us with horror, down to that spinning vane in the end. I am hard pressed to think of another scene in any other horror film so flawless. It exhausts and thrills in equal measure.
In the next 15 minutes, the rest of Sally’s friends will die, and she will be thrust into a final act that is pure, mad nightmare. But first, on those other deaths, I think there is at least one important element which I am far from the first to note. Ok – terrible things are happening to these youths, but the impression is also that Leatherface is having a terrible day. It’s even a little funny and pitiable how, after he kills his next victim, Jerry (who has come into the house looking for the others, having seen Kirk’s towel outside), he runs to the window to look outside, before collapsing into a chair in terror and frustration himself. He is wordless, but you imagine him feeling “where are they coming from? How do they keep getting in?” like he’s fighting a losing battle with some infestation.
He’s been left responsible for his home and it keeps getting invaded, and he seems out of his depths, and so upset to be failing. Sure, he is strange, off putting, and genuinely scary, but in this moment, he is both pitiful and pitiable, though we’ve just seen him, in his power, destroy these three young lives. This ordeal is happening to him too. This is also not to mention his clear developmental disabilities. He has a hard time of it.
A striking difference between this film and many slashers to follow is that, in Sally, we have a survivor – a final girl – one who goes through such torments and comes out the other side, but, unlike most from Laurie Strode onwards, Sally doesn’t really get to fight. She is a victim, one who runs and screams and escapes and lives, but she’s not a ‘hero.’ She doesn’t have enough agency for that. Things happen to her and she simply struggles to stay alive. But on the flip side of that, while Leatherface is a kind of human monster, he also lacks a kind of agency as a villain – he’s not going out hunting these kids – they come to him, invade his home, and he is just trying to get through this terrible, meaningless day as well. Thus, on both sides, everyone is stuck reacting to a world that doesn’t make sense and that doesn’t afford them choice in their own destiny. It is bleak as all get out, and in that, it is all the more chilling (if something this hot and rancid can chill – I don’t know – it chills like the chills you get from food poisoning).
And so, in the third act, we are off to the races, and the nightmare explodes around us. Sally is chased, screaming at the top of her lungs through the woods for what feels like hours (it’s only 8 minutes), Leatherface in hot pursuit, getting so close with those spinning blades. Finally, she finds momentary respite back at the gas station with the Cook, before discovering that he is also part of this demented family (and what was in that barbecue they’d eaten earlier?), and he ties her up to bring her back to the house. It’s also at this point that a wild, manic, shocking absurdity comes into the proceedings. As she struggles against her bindings on the floor of his truck, he keeps poking her with a broomstick, only barely keeping her under his control, as he laughs, saying, “I hope you’re not too uncomfortable down there.” Strangely, it even feels like he means it, and that somehow makes it worse – he can sympathize, but that doesn’t mean he won’t bring her to her doom – he says he’s never liked killing, but that doesn’t mean he’ll help her to live. People just can’t be trusted or depended on.
He picks up the Hitchhiker on the way, who, soon, back at the homestead, along with Leatherface, now in a matronly role, working in the kitchen, wearing a dress and a woman’s face and hair, carry their grandfather downstairs. Grampa is so old as to appear mummified, and at first doesn’t seem to even be alive – until Sally’s finger is cut and he is given to suck like a baby, her blood reviving him like a vampire.
Carroll’s tea party has nothing on Tobe Hooper for a scene of madness around a table. Sally awakens and starts to scream – and the men howl and laugh and bray in response. They are certainly going to murder her, but first, they are apparently playing with their food, torturing the poor girl, but not physically – rather, they abuse her with their own weirdness. It is disgusting, and disturbing, and it feels like reality has come unmoored. Along the way, the camera spends so much time with her, focusing on the moments in which her mind seems to snap – as she struggles and cries out, her eyes roll in her head and the camera gets closer than one might think possible – here a face, here an eye, here just the white of an eye, here a capillary. They are great shots, and Marilyn Burns gives so much that her shattered psyche becomes our own. We have all gone off the deep end.
It is horrific, but watched from a certain angle, it’s weirdly funny as well – which doesn’t make it any better – rather than offering comic relief, the farce only makes the grotesque scarier, more incomprehensible, more unhinged and threatening. The Cook, The Hitchhiker, Grampa, even Leatherface are all ridiculous, oafish figures – they could be laughable if they weren’t so sad, scary, and murderous. There is a pathetic, wretched comedy of errors in the boys trying to help Grampa relive his glory days at the slaughterhouse by holding Sally’s head over a bucket and trying to put the sledgehammer in his hand for him to finish her off – he can’t even support its weight and keeps dropping it. This comedy elicits few laughs, and those are uncomfortable. The zany silliness of the boys and their patriarch only serves to sap Sally’s plight of any respect – if they at least were taking this seriously, that would be one thing, but she isn’t enough of a person to them to even warrant the dignity of menace. She is, at worst, an inconvenience – in the wrong place at the wrong time – that needs to be taken care of, and at best, she is a gift to Grampa, a cow for the slaughter. But in their wild hooting and hollering, she is not a person. They even seem to be having a kind of wholesome good time together as a family. It is upsetting.
But, in the end, she struggles out of their chaotic grasp, jumps through her second window in a few hours, and escapes to the road where she manages to get into a pickup truck speeding away, covered in blood, laughing, crying, mad, and utterly broken (as the tagline on the poster famously read, “Who will survive and what will be left of them?” The answer is “not much”), while Leatherhead dances with his chainsaw in impotent rage on the road behind her as the sun rises on a new terrible day. It is another beautiful shot and then, as abruptly as anything else in this non-stop nightmare, it is over. The credits roll.
It is quite the film.
And it is even a bit strange to me how great I think it is. Since its release, it has had myriad imitators, and their ilk do not represent my favorite kinds of horror movies. Gritty, gross, sweaty, depressing, hopeless – that all has a place and I can appreciate it, but it’s not exactly my go to vibe. Still, I’m sure that beyond the films that have clearly riffed on this masterpiece (e.g., The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Wrong Turn (2003), or much of Rob Zombie’s oeuvre, among many, many others), so much of the genre writ large was advanced by the new depths that Hooper et al. managed to plumb. But while much that came after Texas Chainsaw was indebted to it, I think very little could hold a candle to this wholly original piece, which at once feels as insane and sloppy as its killers and also, paradoxically, is just perfectly orchestrated, artfully crafted, exquisitely built to achieve its horrific, bleak, shocking effect. This movie is really something special – a horrid delight, a flawless abomination. It was honestly a great pleasure to re-watch it a couple of times for this post.
Now, let’s not do that again for a while.