The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Backwoods Slasher | 83 Minutes | 1974 | United States
(3.5/4)
Director: Tobe Hooper | Producer: Tobe Hooper | Screenplay: Kim Henkel, Tobe Hooper | Starring: Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow, Gunnar Hansen, Allen Danziger, William Vail, Teri McMinn | Music: Tobe Hooper, Wayne Bell | Cinematography: Daniel Pearl | Editors: Sallye Richardson, Larry Carroll
Five teenagers take a road trip to visit an old family homestead in the musty heart of Texas. The radio in their moss-green Ford Club Wagon plays the news, a grim recitation of industrial and environmental disasters and acts of wanton violence. They discuss astrology, retrograde planets and the malevolent influence of Saturn; stop off at the gravesite of a deceased grandfather amid reports of grave robbing; and after passing a slaughterhouse for beef cattle, they pick up a hitchhiker, who hacks the skin from his palm, demands payment for an obscured Polaroid, then sets a small fire and slices the forearm of one of the teens using a straight razor. They swear off hitchhikers, and stop to refuel at a gas station, a liminal space at the fraying ends of civilisation.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre opens ominously, with a scrolling intertitle and a narrator who in the honeyed tones of a newscaster evokes a ‘tragedy which befell a group of five youths’, ‘the mad and the macabre’, and ‘one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history’. Portraying the events of the film as real, against a sound palette of panting and grunting and sawing and cutting we see flickering images of bodies decomposing, and it’s all very Gothic, but as the camera pans out on a jellied ghoul straddling a grave monument in the amber sun, we get the first sense of something more freewheeling. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre wrings poetry out of a story which centres on some of the most blunt and brutal butchering on film. It’s a slab of meat elaborated as a fever dream, rare and intoxicating.
The iconic figure of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is Leatherface, but it’s a long time before we’re trapped with him in his family home replete with flesh ornamentation and bone furniture. More than half of the film is a hazy precursor. A combination of uncanny events, awkward camera angles, and the unbridled landscape serve to set the scene with a graceful sort of unease that’s as heady as it is discombobulating. Franklin Hardesty, a wheelchair-bound paraplegic whose physical condition makes him a sort of conduit for the events to come, is helped out of the van to urinate into a paint can by the side of the road, but debris sprayed by a passing lorry knocks him out of his chair, sending him tumbling down an embankment. The camera looks up at him in his wheelchair, or in the van cuts him off and catches him askew as it zooms in a little more closely. At the dilapidated homestead, as the others couple off – Kirk and Pam who head towards a swimming hole, and Jerry and Franklin’s sister Sally – he is left to shunt bitterly over raised floorboards and under ritual debris.
At the gravesite good old boys run the show, and a drunk lying on the ground offers a rambling warning, ‘Things happen here about […] I see things. You see, they say it’s just an old man talking. You laugh at an old man – there’s them that laughs and knows better’. In the van there’s a strange symbiosis between Franklin and the hitchhiker, who bond and bicker over head cheese and the best way to kill cattle, the hitchhiker snapping Franklin’s photograph then slicing his arm because his curiosity is vaguely antagonistic and because he’s close and vulnerable. At the gas station, not for the first time Sally and Pam are fetishised, implicitly by the proprietor and explicitly by the camera, which focuses on their backsides as they pull the lever of a vending machine to get Coca-Cola. The proprietor is out of gas, but the teens do come away with some barbecue.
As Kirk and Pam run giddily down through the backwoods to get to the swimming hole, which turns out to be no more than a muddy puddle, swinging shirts and airing out a blanket to ward off the bugs in the blazing heat, we see pots and pans and a smashed timepiece hanging from the dead branches of a tree and rope netting and old cars and fields of sunflowers as they follow in search of petrol. In fact if The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has a colour or a visual motif, it’s not bone or blood red or steel but the sunflower, sun-dappled yellow and black with a ring of bleeding orange. Soon they stumble across a house with a swing, and what follows is blunt and horrifying. It’s a lot to take in, the hulking form of Leatherface, the clubbing blow of his hammer, his pig-like groans and the putrid skin which masks his face, bodily spasms and the animal skulls hanging from the scarlet-red wall before the steel shutter door slams as he claims his first victim.
The teens feed towards the house one in search of another as the sun falls, and there are meathooks and the titular chainsaw and stuffed freezers and a helter-skelter nighttime chase through the scrub, and it’s all very grisly. When Sally, a survivor with none of the trappings of a heroine, makes her way back to the gas station, there’ll be no respite as she discovers the provenance of the barbecue. In general events inside the Sawyer household, the home of Leatherface and family, are more mundane than they were in the outside world: it’s partly the domesticity of the setup, which would be broadly comic if it weren’t punctuated by Sally’s screaming, partly the banality of evil.
The early scene in the van as the group pass the slaughterhouse makes the theme of meat tangible, offering an overt analogy for what lies ahead. The director of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Tobe Hooper has described it as ‘a film about meat […] about the chain of life and killing sentient beings’, and fellow filmmaker Guillermo del Toro apparently swore off meat for a year after first seeing the picture. No other slasher or horror movie quite captures the dense and raw physicality of murder, the essence of maiming and killing as butchering, and that quality alone would make The Texas Chain Saw Massacre memorable. Yet when Leatherface wields his chainsaw in the open air, the placid Texas landscape can’t help but careen and our world too starts to spin.
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