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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Directed by Tobe Hooper
Reviewed by Nick Burton
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The early ‘70s horror films – particularly the drive-in horror films – started taking a turn towards a dark and disturbingly violent corner. This shift is perhaps best represented by films such as Wes Craven’s 1972 film The Last House on the Left, a viciously unpleasant revenge tale that was a re-working of Ingmar Bergman’ The Virgin Spring (bearer of the immortal tag line, "To avoid fainting, keep repeating…it’s only a movie...it’s only a movie…"). But it was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, directed by then newcomer Tobe Hooper, that took the darkest turn of all. A sweat-inducing, claustrophobic film of unrelenting terror, it takes the viewer to the absolute ground zero of redneck freak Hell with a capital H and barely offers any respite from the horrors of the said (heretofore unexplored) milieu.
Inspired by real-life stories of Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein (also the source of Psycho’s Norman Bates), the film begins as a group of five college age friends, led by Sally (Marilyn Burns) and her wheelchair-bound brother Franklin (Paul A. Partain) pick up a hitchhiker in the stifling Texas heat. Unfortunately, the hitcher (played by Edwin Neal with believably manic zeal) turns out to be the very personification of the kind of brain-damaged redneck nut you never what to see in your vehicle. He tells stories about how they make headcheese down at the slaughterhouse where he works, passes around snapshots of slaughtered cattle and cuts himself gleefully with Franklin’s pocket knife. When Franklin refuses to pay him for a snapshot he takes of him, he ignites the photo with a flash of gunpowder before slicing Franklin’s arm with a straight razor, leaping out of the kids’ van and smearing its exterior with his blood. |
 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Tobe Hooper VHS Tape - $16.99 Rated - R |
Freaked out but undaunted, the group presses on to visit Sally and Franklin’s childhood home. Jerry (Allen Danzinger) and Pam (Teri McMinn) go off to find a swimmin’ hole and notice the neighboring farm is running on a generator. Figuring they’ll get some much needed gas for the van from the farmers, Jerry goes inside the seemingly empty house while Pam waits outside. Jerry gets hammered by the lumbering Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen), a cannibal wearing a human skin mask (and a tie!). Pam goes in to look for Jerry, only to see a nightmarish house, ankle deep in chicken feathers and littered with piles of human and animal bones before Leatherface puts her on a meathook. Next up is Kirk (William Vail), looking a bit like John Fogerty wearing the groovy threads of Greg Brady’s Johnny Bravo period, who manages to find Pam’s body in a freezer before he, too, is dispatched by cranial hammering.
Sally and Franklin, increasingly unnerved in the impending darkness, decide to take a look-see, and Franklin is killed by Leatherface’s growling chainsaw. This leaves Sally, wearing the widest bell-bottoms in cinema history and sporting nipples that seem to perpetually threaten to puncture her tank top, to fend for herself. Sally finds her way to the house, not knowing whose house it is, only to find the semi-mummified Grandpa (John Dugan) and a corpse of a woman in a tableau that looks uncannily like an Edward Keinholz pop-art instillation.
Sally outruns the pursuing Leatherface to a gas station where a seemingly kind old man (Jim Siedow) offers to help her before knocking her out, putting her in a large sack, and taking her right back to the house. Here, the crazed slaughterhouse workers stage a disturbingly bizarre and cruel parody of the American Nuclear family sitting down for dinner – the old man as dad, Leatherface now in a female wig as mom, the hitchhiker as Junior, and Grampa as the patriarch. (Sally is the main course.)
This is supremely feral stuff, and unpleasant in a way few horror films ever manage to be. Hooper puts Burns through so much non-stop terror in the last half hour that it eventually tests even the strongest tolerance for women in peril scenarios. Burn’s screams seem real, the fear in her eyes genuinely terrifying. In a remarkable scene, Burns passes out and Hooper closes in on her peaceful face. She slowly wakes to find herself back in the epicenter of hell, the dinner table, as the family leers at her and mocks her blood curdling howls. Hooper’s film is fascinating, and you have to look all the way to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom for a comparably exhausting and unredeemed look at the baseness of humanity and the subversion of the family. Texas Chainsaw is a cruel, dangerous vision, and while not as violent as its reputation, it has a consistency and conviction that keep it in the memory long after Burn’s screams fade. That Hooper went on to direct Poltergeist, Steven Spielberg’s idiotic horror film-cum-celebration of middle class may not be surprising, but it is disappointing. Texas Chainsaw pointed to a much more ferocious talent that has sadly remained constrained ever since.
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Nick Burton lives in Newport Beach, California. His fiction has appeared in many small press and web publications, including: Chronicles Of Fiction, Pauper, and of course Pif.