“…the most purely horrifying horror movie ever made…never less than totally committed to scaring you witless.”
EMPIRE magazine
“If you look at all of us who worked on the film, we probably got paid less for the time we spent than if we’d got a job at McDonalds”.
GUNNER HANSEN (Leatherface)
Who made it? Directed by Tobe Hooper | Written by Tobe Hooper & Kim Henkel | Director Of Photography Daniel Pearl | Special Effects by Dean W Miller | Make Up by WE Barnes & Dorothy J Pearl | Edited by Sallye Richardson & Larry Carroll | Music by Tobe Hooper & Wayne Bell
Who’s in it? Marilyn Burns | Paul A Partain | Edwin Neal | Jim Siedow | Gunnar Hansen
If you weren’t watching this the week it came out, you might have been watching…
Zardoz | Lenny | The Conversation | Earthquake | The Man With The Golden Gun
Production notes and whatnot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Texas_Chain_Saw_Massacre
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11755740/
What’s it all about?
We open on black. A gravelly voice-over narrates the rolling yellow text with an overdose of looming portent. And frankly, so he should:
“The film you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of 5 youths, in particular Sally Hardesty and her invalid brother Franklin. It is all the more tragic that they were young. But had they lived very very long lives, they would not have expected nor would they have wished to see, as much of the mad and macabre as they were to see that day. For them an idyllic summer afternoon became a nightmare. The events of the day were to lead to the discovery of one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”
The screen morphs and fades and one of the most terrifying scores in motion pictures begins its grinding hellscape. Chimes. Metal whines. Scrapes. Echoes. Clanging. Flashbulbs reveal blinding snapshots of…what is that? Bodies? Figures. Dead and decaying. Teeth and skulls flash and fade. Digging sounds, splintering wood, the dull ugly crash of discordant cymbals.
Blimey. This is unsettling already. Now a crackly Southern radio-news voice. Plodding and methodical, unravels the gruesome headlines in bare facts. The town of Newt in Texas. A grave robbery. Bodies tangled in grizzly works of art, wired to a monument. A dozen empty crypts. Heads or extremities removed…
The screen clears to dazzling, bright sun. We see a grotesque rotting corpse strung up to a lonely gravestone in a grotesque tableau.
Holy moley. If your skin isn’t crawling already and you can avoid shutting off the VCR and opening all the curtains and going for a long healthy walk, then you’re staying for the credits. Red gore. That sickly yellow font. Abstract biomorphic shapes dance and spurt.
Leave now while you can…
Corpuscles, oil, smears. Dancing sun-spots and flares in ugly petri-dish close up. The bad news from the tinny car radio continues. Of course it does. “Oil spillage, Cholera epidemic in San Francisco, Houston violence, Suicide, Collapsing buildings, Removed genitals murder, Daughter 18 months old, chained in attic…”
Christ on a horse. Let’s take a short break.
We are in true terror territory. I am breathless merely typing this out. I cannot even remember the last time a movie opening was so effective in unsettling the viewer. Strong stomachs are going to be needed ahead, the visuals seems to say. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Okay. Deep breath. Let’s keep going.
The sun is bright, Wicker Man bright. Scorching and dry. We are deep in Texas. Near the town of Newt, Muerto County. It’s cattle country. Hicksville. Hoboes and haystacks. Miles and miles of sticky two lane blacktop going nowhere, forever, in every direction. A place to get lost in. A place to die. On the dusty tarmac, an armadillo lies dead, baking on its back.
We meet our heroes. Everything tells us we won’t get to hang out with all of them for long. Their green panel van thrums at the roadside. Huge monstrous trucks duel on highway. White planks lead in a slope from the side door of the van. They are for Franklin (Paul A. Partain), him from the opening narration. Franklin is in a wheelchair. Simple and touched, childlike and naïve, Franklin struggles to pee awkwardly into a warm bottle.
Peeing in a bottle in a wheelchair. Not easy.
In the van, his sister and their three chuckling doofus friends laugh and chat. We are in road-trip land. A van full of ageing teens, sunglasses, loud shirts and louder attitudes, out for the day on some long, roaming trek.
A passing truck thunders past (no doubt on the search for David Mann’s 1971 Plymouth Valiant)…
Speilberg’s Duel. By comparison, a particularly uninspired episode of “Brum.”
and the whirling gust of air pressure causes the van to rock, and Franklin to tumble down the grassy bank, falling spasmodically from his chair. One of our heroes, a denim clad hunk named Kirk (William Vail) hero helps him up with a bored, idle concern.
So we’re back in the truck. Let’s meet our ill fated teens. They’re all groovy-talking jive ass white hippy types. All teasing and “hey maaaan!” laid back chit chat. We have young Sally (Marilyn Burns), bespectacled Jerry (Allen Danzinger) in his flowery shirt; the canoodling couple Pam (Teri McMinn) and Kirk; and of course, simple young wheelchair bound Franklin. It’s all chewing gum and hot pants and pointy nipples through tiny vests, halter-tops and shades. The girls are in sandals and long centre-parted bleachy hair. They talk star signs and drivel, lazy to get where they’re going on this long summer Texas afternoon.
Tobe Hooper captures the tedious whining and lazy naturalistic hippy drivel of the cast
And where are they going? Well of course, to the graveyard we heard about in the opening radio announcement. There are fears that Sally’s grandpa’s grave may have been one of the plots that were robbed and desecrated.
They pull up. Hicks and yokels lounge and drink in backs of pickups. All warm bottled beers and slouchy straw cowboy hats, they chuckle and dribble. Lolling in the baking Texas sun, laugh and tease the young arrivals. “Things happen here abouts, they don’t tell about…” Sally wanders off with a nearby cowboy to investigate her grandpa’s grave.
Time passes. We’re back in the truck. Granddad’s plot was fine. They continue their lazy humming roll through the endless skies of Muerto County. One by one they all begin to sniff the air and gag, covering their mouths and grimacing. What is that smell? They cough and scowl, rolling up the windows of the tin van. They are passing the stretching expanse of an old slaughterhouse. Cattle country indeed. Franklin, always chatty and over eager, much to the exhaustion we expect of his begrudging companions/babysitters, is keen to spin a tale. This is where our ole’ grandpa used to sell his cattle. The gang are less than interested but simple Franklin we see is not one for social cues. He continues a passioned, eager monologue about slaughterhouse techniques through the ages. Mallets, sledge hammers. “Now they use a bolt“. Clean, “in and out.” More efficient. Heifer whines and human cries as they pass the rusty baking sheds of dumb fly-specked cattle.
Sally and Pam whine and moan and are precious and both irritating and irritated. They must have put up with this a great deal – part friends, part carers, of simple Franklin. Talk moves lazily to the unbearable heat.
They spy on the scrappy roadside, among the pale cacti and dying reeds, a hitchhiker. There is chattering, nervous debate about picking him up. The van is already tight with people. Plus…a local? We sense a fear in the unknown. But the smell and heat are intolerable so their hearts go out to this poor drifter, all beat-up high-tops and torn shirt. They stop’neath the wide Texas skies and in he climbs. This is Nubbins (Edwin Neal). He’s “a-headin’ South.” Twitchy, red wine stained face, greasy, manic and leering. Its clear from the first few moments this was a mistake. He crouches on his haunches among the wide-eyed teens. “My family’s always been in meat,” he giggles.
Nubbins. Not likely to be in Carpool Karaoke any time soon.
Both weird and wired, Nubbins has a violent and giggly energy. Wound up and smiling crookedly, he is the most cornball of local cornball hicks. The gang shy away, anxious to avoid upsetting him or leading him on, but young Franklin likes the company. They continue their talk of slaughterhouse techniques. “Hammer is best.” Giggling, the van continues across emptier and emptier scrubland, the country music on radio twanging banjos, jazzy vamps and some sickly “shoo-beee-doo-wahh.”
Nubbins, panting and eager, starts to peel out greasy photos from his jacket. Crumpled, bleached and bent, they are ugly home-Polaroids of dead cow trophies. The van are a little repulsed but, like us, oddly fascinated too? Nubbins begins to turn the stomachs of the gang as he recalls his old family recipe for “head cheese.” (Jerry Seinfeld fans will know all about this one. “Head cheese? Whooah! I don’t think so! I’ve always thought the words head and cheese should never be that close together…”)
Nuthin wasted, Nubbins yucks. The nasty photos are passed around trembling fingers. Franklin curious and keen of course, the girls whine and shy away. They don’t want the detail of the meat industry. Tragically, a detail they are about to become much closer to before the day is out
Idle and keen for entertainment, Nubbins takes Franklin’s little pocket knife. And then calmly, as if only to distract himself, the way you might toy with a bogie or pick at a toenail, he suddenly carves a line, deep, deep into his palm, dark blood pumping and throbbing down his arm.
I don’t care what part of the galaxy yur from…that’s gotta hurt.
Shrieks from the van. “The hell?!” Nubbins has a wide eyed stoner look. Hey, to him, no weirder than doodling with a biro. The van is revolted and shocked. Jesus, who is this guy? Hand bandaged, Nubbins has more party tricks up his filthy cap-sleeves. He tugs out an old camera, a box brownie old accordion Polaroid type. Unasked, he boldly snaps a shot of the group’s stunned faces. “Take me to my house?” he asks, awaiting the instant picture to develop. “Dinner?” he offers. They have good head cheese.
The Scooby gang watch their disturbed hitchhiker and decide not to get another
Well it’s all getting a bit much for the sweating teens. They try and decline politely with talk of schedules and “pushing on…” Nubbins is clearly hurt by the snub. He presents the now developed photograph, like an urchin trapping tourists. “Two dollars?” Rather than pay him off to avoid a scene, the loudmouth kids simply rebuff him. The picture ain’t even any good. They ain’t buyin’.
Well this is too much. No lift home? No 2 dollars? Well he won’t take this shit. Is this where Nubbins hatred begins? Is this the beginning of the fate of the teens? Might this have changed everything? A little kindness? It’s fair I think to say… no. These kids were doomed from the start. In righteous anger, Nubbins scrabbles with foil and gunpowder, burning the ugly photo in flash of bright fire. The kids scream in alarm at the craziness, the danger, the wild impetuousness.
But it doesn’t stop. Nubbins has been wronged. Suddenly he lunges, grabs Franklin and slashes the boy’s arm deep with his straight razor. Franklin screams and yelps, the van rolling to a halt. That’s it. Shouting, they throw Nubbins out onto the baking blacktop. They rev the van to make their panicked escape from this cornball crazy. As Nubbins stumbles he reaches out, smearing a bloody hand print on the hot green tin of the side of the van.
The kids pull away. Heavy breathing. Shocked. The idle fun of the day is gone. The van rolls onward, suddenly quiet. As it departs we see Nubbins blowing toddler raspberries at the disappearing vehicle.
“That’s the last goddamn hitchhiker I pick up,” Jerry says flatly.
Onward they drive into the Texas haze. They try to lighten the mood. The gals talk horoscopes. Many stars and planets are in retrograde it seems, and Saturn is…something. Predictions…
“A disturbing and unpredictable day.”
Crazy-ish Ralph. Oh just turn back. Turn back. Jesus…
Later.
Of course. The obligatory GULF gas station. We are very used to this trope, but we are thrown a curve here. Far from the ‘baccy chewin’ scruffy red baseball cap ‘Ralph’ of past horrors, (see Deep River Savages, Invasion Of The Blood Farmers, Enter The Devil etc) we get a genuine helpful owner Drayton. (Jim Siedow) Oh he’s happy to assist these kids. Genuine and smiley and helpful. Twangy Lurleen Lumpkin cornball country music whines and drips from the radio.
The kids are fillin’ up, trying to pump gas. The rusty shack offers a decent BBQ if they’re hungry? We’ll get back to that soon.
“Fill her up?” Nope. They’re outta gas at the station. Gas won’t be here till late afternoon. Sigh. They ask the owner about the old Franklin place, where Sally and her brother grew up. Warnings uttered from Drayton, but somehow genuine. “You boys don’t wanna go up messin’ around that house…some folks don’t like it.”
Drayton lazily swabs down the van windscreen with soapy water. Inside the baking tin vehicle, Franklin idly plays with his knife, jabbing and carving at the upholstery. He doesn’t know why. “I just start doin that…” The Scooby Gang grab some takeout BBQ lunch, brown baggin’ it as they say on Sesame Street and other Americana whatnot.
Good name for a band. “Americana Whatnot.” Fountains Of Wayne should definitely have been called “Americana Whatnot.”
Anyway. Drayton tells the kids, Newt is the best town for gas. They climb in to the old van and with a cough of oily exhaust, the van hits the road once again.
Simple Franklin, though, is nervous. He nurses his scar. Repeats his fear of hitchhiker. Might he follow us? The music, eeeever so slowly, turns darker. We sense howls. Horrors. Echoes and clangs. Clearly not listening to this music, the van by now is deep off road and into the shrubby dry trees. The road less travelled by. Anyone who has enjoyed An American Werewolf In London (dir J. Landis 1981) knows the warning. Stay on the road. But we guess they haven’t seen that movie as, to be fair, it doesn’t hit cinemas for another six years.
Ah well. Their loss. It’s a classic. Anyhoo, they are among the long grass, dust and trees of their destination – the old Franklin house. They pull up and pile out. We, of course, are SCREAMING for them not to. And not just because of the movie title. Becuase the genius of Tobe Hooper has now fastened us, unknowing, to the rack. We are in his hands.
The music grows. Clangs, chimes, scrapes… Lurleen is good and gone.
Well sump’in ain’t right…
As they all clamber out into the baking dry sunshine they clock the smeary blood marks on the van. Franklin is not happy. But the teenage kids are looking for kicks, as Fergal Sharkey always told us they would be, so they leave timid Franklin in his chair and head into the old tumbledown clapboard house for nostalgic titting about.
Franklin remains, outside in the dying sun, alone. He begins to look for his knife. He can’t find his knife. Nobody cares. While we at home, of course, are screaming: FIND HIS KNIFE FOR CHRISSAKES!
We follow the Scooby gang on a tour of the old decaying family homestead. Fusty, dry, crumbling. Peeling, hot, rotten. They lark and goof about from room to echoey room, while we tingle at the crackles of a spider nest in the dry cornices. Giggling from old memories. The innocence, the naïve glee is painful to watch. WE KNOW…THEY DON’T. Old memories come tumbling back in jokey remenicence. Torn curtains, mould and mustiness. Outside in the baking sun, Franklin is scared. Struggling and banging about in his chair, he is sad, helpless and not a little bit annoying and pathetic. Calling for his sister Sallyyyy… there is no answer. He’s in the way. He’s ALWAYS in the way, isn’t he? Our heart goes out to him. He moves around the porch, into the cool darkness and burning sunlight, baking heat and cold chilly shadows. Flies buzz and drone among grasses.
There are distant echoey laughs in empty wooden rooms. Pam and Kirk come a’stumblin out, high on their own goofyness. They fancy a dip in yonder “swimming hole.” Jesus, is this Mark Twain? Franklin begrudgingly tells the dumb horny pair to follow the trail between the two sheds yonder. See you in an hour or so.
Franklin wheels himself about, bored and ignored. On the dusty porch, he finds bones. Teeth. Jawbones and feathers, in an creepy warning nest. Bones hang and tinkle from the rafters.
We’re half an hour in, so… y’know, let’s take a minute.
How you feeling? Okay? Got the set up? We’ll talk more about this in the next “is it any good?” section of this piece. (Article? Essay? Review? Exhausting spoiler-filled plod?) But we are now very much in fear territory. Despite the minimal bloodshed of the palm-carving in the van, the movie has done its best to have us holding cushions over our faces, white knuckle grips, tumbling stomachs and whimpering “no…no…no…” A masterpiece of tension, we have seen nothing really. Nothing but an oddball hitchhiker, a dead armadillo and some dumb kids. Oh but we know. We KNOW. And we can only hold our breath and pray, PRAY it isn’t going to be…what we just know it’s going to be.
Nasties simply NEVER get better than this.
I know, I know we’re only 25 movies in. And we, I hope, together, will investigate over 140 more. But, as Toby Zeigler in The West Wing once said, “I’ll bet, all the money in my pockets, against all the money in your pockets…” we will never be subjected to this level of sustained terror again.
And you can quote me on that.
Okay. Deep breath. Let’s keep going.
Kirk and Pam trudge through the bushes, laughing and giggling in the sunshine to the distant swimming hole. They tumble, losing their footing into a dry dusty creek where a swimming hole used to be a generation ago. Panting, disappointed, they loll and LOL and sigh, puffing. But…what’s that? A distant rumble. Mechanical? A generator? Gasoline? At last, a way out! Kirk, all manly go-getting provider, decides to take a walk across the scrubby brushland to the source of the noise. In the distance, beyond the tree line…a distant white farm house.
Clanks of pots and bones in the breeze, macabre mobiles hanging tinkling and clacking in the dry wind. The ugly petrol generator growls and coughs. The pair approach the property through waist high sunflowers. Peeking through old farm netting, they spy a car lot. Covered in crackly tarpaulins, abandoned rusty 20 year old cars. In a blaze of lens flare, they make out a simple cottage garden.
Full of bravado, Kirk hollers. “Anybody here?”
The house is faded. Old. White clapboard, dry and warped from a hundred years of southern good ole boy sunshine. A whining child’s swing creaks and cracks. Bare wooden steps lead up, 1 2 3 to a scrubby porch. Silence. Clanks of rusty chains. Birds sing. Spindly dry trees cast blueish long-finger shadows.
The Franklins are looking for a forever home for their family while dad has a crash pad in the city
As Kirk knocks and bangs on the pale door, peering in the grey glass for signs of life, a dead tooth falls from the roof, clattering to his feet. Slinging his jacket over the outside bannister, he frightens Pam with the tooth, causing her to feebly scream in a wet, pathetic manner and run off across the scorched garden to the swing. Pushing at the door, it swings open on weak hinges. Kirk steps in to investigate the cool shadowy interior, dark and musty behind the ratty screen door.
As Pam swings idly, bored, back and forth, young Kirk enters the house, calling out for help. Dark and silent, he knocks, trying to arouse the hosts. The house is the classic Psycho layout, long hallway and creaky wooden stairs on the right leading up to the landing.
Is that…is that pig noises? Kirk steps further into the cool darkness. Behind him, the screen door slams in the dry wind. There is a ramp leading at the end of the hall to the open doorway. Oddly functional. In the doorway he can make out pale boiled skulls and bones hammered to the walls where family photos would normally be. He steps up further, calling out. Up the ramp to the door.
And then, suddenly, from nowhere, making us leap from our seats and scream, a figure lurches into the doorway. A male figure, hulking and huge in a greasy butcher’s apron, face unclear but somehow from our viewpoint, distorted and torn with flappy dry skin. Thick arm aloft, a hard heavy hammer comes BANG down on Kirk’s skull. Kirk drops, heavy, limp, to the filthy ramp. Pigs squeal and scream. Kirk’s body shudders and spasms, legs thrashing and twitching from the blow. Another crashing BANG on the skull and Kirk goes limp.
The man leans down efficiently, like a slaughter house worker, lifting him and dragging him off screen into the house. Seconds later he returns, hauling a heavy steel door on runners SLAMMING shut with a deafening metal BANG.
Silence.
Oh and now it starts. We are in. The rack Tobe Hooper has quietly strapped us to is now apparent. We are locked in, tied down. The wheels begin to turn, the rack begins to creak and stretch. And we can only now pray for release.
The music ramps up. Drones. We are in shock. What the fuck just happened? Hard discordant noises mix with dark and sick sounds of scrapes and sickly chimes thunderous groans and moans.
With Kirk gone for a while, bored Pam decides to get off her tight ass and find out where the idiot has gone. Climbing off the swing she approaches the house, it growing slowly in the frame as we low track under the swing towards its ominous looming stature. “Kirk?”
Kirk? Kirk? C’mon…stop kiddin’ around…
Nothing.
Pam wanders lazily in to the dark of the musty hallway. Scrapes and clangs echo on the soundtrack, making our stomachs tighten and twist. Ambling around the dusty ground floor, Pam stumbles, trips and tumbles, bang, into the lounge on all fours. The hell? Sudden clucking. Bones. Feathers everywhere. Old brittle turn of the century furniture. The rattle of the teeth and bones that lie everywhere, hang everywhere, wires idly turning.
Pam was unimpressed with what Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen had done to the guest room
Skeletons. Skulls and spines, bleached and bare. Chickens trapped tight in cages, staring and twitching. Metal music growls from what sounds like a machine deep within a steel bin. Animal parts and piles, stacks of dusty dry bones. Human skulls. Saws and machines on wooden table tops. An amateur workshop feel. The noise now, the music, simply deafening and cacophonous. Screaming panic and horror envelopes the world.
Pam gags, coughing, retching. Tearful she screams, stumbling to her feet. She must run. RUN! We’re yelling at the screen. Run. RUN! But…no. HE is there.
Filthy slaughterhouse apron, face of loose skin. He lumbers in, determined, shrieking like a trapped hog. Hammer wielded, he flails. She gives a throat- tearing scream and stumbles, runs. A clattering chase through the house of horrors. Down the hall. Into dying sunlight, out onto the scrappy porch. Inches behind her, the monster lurches, grabs, lifts her like an empty golf bag, weightless, hauling her shrieking back into the muggy darkness of the house. Up the ramp, into the centre of the home of horror.
My, my, my, said the spider to the fly
He hauls her, weightless and writhing, into the front room. Pam screams, hysterical screams. We see empty heavy meat hooks hanging, clanking. With terrifying power, Leatherface (Gunner Hansen, for ‘tis he) lifts her and with a…drop, plunges her onto the hook like a coat on a coat rack, leaving her spasming and swinging by her upper spine. Wide mouthed, paralysed with unspeakable terror, shock and pain, she twists breathlessly on the hook. But we have only just begun.
For on the beaten wooden workshop table we see the shape of Kirk’s limp body. With a growling scream and oily belch of smoke, Leatherface tugs the huge chainsaw roaring into life like a bellowing, angry dinosaur. Lifted high, he brandishes it and begins to carve, jab, slice and devour the off screen body like an ice sculptor or butcher. The deafening screams continue…
Back at the Franklin home. Quiet. Serene. Crickets chirp. A breeze ruffles the dry crops. There are three cast left. Jerry is teasing Franklin about the voodoo blood marks on the van. Franklin, paranoid and edgy, is still looking for the warm safety of his pocket knife. Some back-and-forth of harmless Brady Bunch bickering. Bored, Jerry decides to join the missing couple and head to the creek while they still have daylight. Franklin and Sally stay behind.
Like a maddening simpleton, Franklin is all “you mad at me?” to his sister, in his chair-bound whiny twang., grating and tiresome. Sally trundles away. What a day this has been…
We join Jerry as he tramps through the scrub, looking for Kirk and Pam. Following the same trail, he hollers for his buddy. “Kiiiiiiiirk!” The sun is setting.
Maybe they’re in that innocent looking friendly house?
In the baking, dying sun, Jerry searches. Through the blue shadows of magic hour, we hear the unsettling Gamelan clanging of dead wind-chimes. Finally, Jerry gets to a house, clapboard now sickly yellow in sunset. He knocks. “Anybody here?” Jerry spies Kirk’s discarded jacket on the bannister of the rotting stoop. “C’mon, quit goofing’ on me…” Flies buzz. Chains clank and clink in the wind.
Jerry moves slowly, cautiously inside. Up the slaughterhouse ramp. The kitchen. His eyes slide over the empty meat hooks. An empty butcher table. When suddenly, he is startled by a panicky banging and thudding from an old chest freezer against the far wall. Jerry, confused, fumbles it open in a panic.
Pam lurches up! Blue faced, gasping and freezing, from her ice cave.
But before Jerry can even comprehend, Leatherface appears behind him in the doorway. Screaming like a stuck pig, his heavy hammer brandished, there are bellows and shrieks and maniacal grunts as he pounds Jerry to the floor with huge sweeping hammer bangs. Then overwhelmed and panicked, Leatherface is at the window. Terrified like a lost toddler, panicky. He clucks and clangs. It’s too much. Too many people. What will grandpa say? Head in hands. Whining and weeping, something’s not right. For the first time we slowly see his face.
L’Oreal fights the seven signs of aging.
Or the face he has chosen to hide behind. Who knows who it originally might have belonged to?
Jesus…
Dry, peeling, yellowing crispy, old-feet skin. Ugly black stitches. A face, perhaps, he can look at in the mirror? The soundtrack to this horror, a whining metal. Like rusty wolves.
Back at the Franklin place. Van lights are bright in the darkness. Punched and pushed the van horn wails. Desperate, Franklin and Sally are slowly going crazy. “Must be lost!” Sally wants to look for them. Hollering desperately for Jerry. For anyone. “Probably back in a minute or so…” Frightened and lonely, they realise there are no keys in the van. They’re stuck. Stuck, alone in the dark. Panic rises like a fast washing tide. The van horn wails and blares. Sally and Franklin descend quickly to infighting and family feuding. Tears splash, faces flashing in the headlamps. Sally desperate at Franklin’s well-meaning ideas: “I can’t push you down the hill!” She leaves to look for the missing friends. Terrified and toddler-like, Franklin clumsily follows, trundling his awkward heft and chair, feebly, like a lost pining puppy. Crackles and snaps of death-dry twigs as they enter the woods. A cloudy moon hangs above.
Dull whine of crickets. Ugly cries of “Jerrrrryyyyy!!” discordant as the pair yell out. An ugly sound of a chuggy oily generator. A light? A house!
Torch flashing and searching, they are pumped and exhausted with relief. “It’s a house!” Silent and blue-washed in the moonlight, they move towards its ghostly shape. Clanks and clicks in the soundtrack. Further into woods, crunching, crackling when…Jump scare! Leatherface!
Grade two on the sides, leave some length on the top
Holy shit! The horror! A screaming chainsaw aloft, from the darkness he is suddenly there – apron, blank eyes, fat arms and his screaming machine. His frenzied attack is brutal. Insane. Carving and thrusting into helpless Franklin’s chair-locked chest, slicing and gouging. The coughing, petrol-saw roars and bellows, grinding and deafening. Over shrieks and screams Sally runs. Runs. For her very life.
Brambles, tired torn final-girl tears, the roar of the saw behind. We are on her. Leatherface slices through branches in lumbering pursuit. Flashes of moonlight through the dense woodland. More shrieks and screams. Tangles. He is close, swooping and thundering in the filthy butcher’s apron, a huge hulk of man. Blade tearing the air. Hoarse screams in throat-tearing terror.
Sally sees redemption. Safety. She sees, in the distance…a house. (Oh Jesus…)
Clambering, falling up the steps, Sally pounds at the outside doors for help. It swings open. Safety! In! Slam! The roaring saw inches behind her, it starts to grind and buzz through the flimsy wood, tearing it to spiky shards.
Sally bursts into the nearest room. For freedom. For help.
Silently, dumb and staring, preserved Psycho corpses watch from still rocking chairs. Overcome with terror, Sally starts thudding around hysterically on thin floorboards. Through the room, through the house. Desperate and wild, crazily and hysterical, she launches herself through a closed window, smashing the glass. Behind her, the saw belches and smokes oily clouds as it screams and whines. Desperate Sally is panting, back into the woods. Moonlight. Twigs snaps, branches crack and tear at her skin. She falls. Panting. Tiny inches behind, in a wild rage, Leatherface is on top of her. Round and around they go.
“HELP MEEEEE!!” Desperate screams. She runs, runs. Finally, breathless, we are back where it is safe. The GULF gas station. Sweat drenched hands slipping and slamming on all the doors, Sally collapses into the back room of the garage. A familiar face! Drayton! The kindly owner. He of the windscreen wiping and the BBQ. “Woah woah!!!” Sally is hysterical. Drayton clumsily sits her down.
A face you can trust
“Take it easy!” The reassuring comfort of the local, the older man. He hears her panting story. “Ain’t nobody out there now!” What happened? Gulping panic. Nope, there’s no phone here. Need to get truck.
Meanwhile sickly country music twangs. The flimsy door is wide open to the countryside, but silence and darkness settle. A brief breathless respite. Calming crickets sing. Drayton heads out to get the van, get the help.
Sally pants, gasps. Regains her breath.
A slow zoom on the warming fireplace.
Bones crackle and roast over the flames. Human bones.
Oh Jesus no…
Over the crackly radio, our familiar broadcast voice recounts the grim daily updates. Dismemberment and cadavers, organ removal, crypts, mausoleums, dozens of coffins robbed…
As Sally’s terror and realisation grows, Drayton’s sinister van pulls up outside. The creaking tin doors open. Drayton cannot help it now, barely surpressing evil, sexual giggles. “Now now…no need to cry, cooperate and we’ll have no trouble…” Innocent crickets sing. The sizzling of the bones and meat on the fire. Drayton pulls out greasy thick rope from a canvass bundle of sacks.
No. NO! Terrified, Sally grabs up long butcher’s knife from his BBQ table, swiping and wielding and waving feebly exhausted. Drayton laughs. “NO need to do that…”
They go toe to toe. A fight. Sally whimpers and struggles, while Drayton pounds her to the floor with dusty broom, Mark Corrigan style.
Thwacks and bangs and bashes, Sally is beaten to the floor. With a broom, though. So, y’know. But anyhoo, beatings are beating. She screams as Drayton laughs, knocking her out, dazed and lifeless.
Methodically we watch as Drayton ties up Sally with thick rope. Twangy syrupy country music slides and twangs. A bloody rag is pummelled into her gaping, gasping mouth, a filthy gunny sack over her head, he heaves her squirming to the waiting van.
Okay, admission. I don’t know what a “gunny sack” is. I took the phrase from Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B.Goode.” Or, if you’re a racist or under 45, Marty McFly’s “Johnny B.Goode.” Either way, it sounds right. It’s a sack.
This is a blues riff in B, watch me for the changes and try and not to kill any teenagers on meat hooks.
Blue in the moonlight, Drayton slams the van door with a rusty squeal and a crunch of old tin. Creaking iron and upholstery, the coughing van engine belches into life. Drayton locks up the gas station. With a throaty rev of engine, Sally whines and whimpers in the sack like a beaten puppy and they disappear into the Texas night.
Pitch dark. They thrum along the highway. “Hope you’re not too uncomfortable…”
Sally’s muffled, dizzy screams mix with wolf howls and tears. Drayton’s pervert, crooked teeth grin dribble chuckles of hunger and drooling carnivore anticipation.
Oh and now what? Who is this flapping and wailing at the side of the dark road, illuminated in the van’s sickly lamp light? Yep. It’s old Polaroid face himself, Nubbins. With a head full of headcheese and pocker full of Polaroids, he’s whirling and wailing in the darkness on the dusty road. Drayton is quickly out of truck, beating him about the head. “Damned fool go ahead got caught! Told you to stay away from the graveyard!”
The van with its terrifying threesome is heading towards the dark house, lit by pale yellow windows. Drayton is putting up with Nubbins’ hysterical giggling, scolding and slapping him like bad child, “Don’t leave yurr brothers!” Arriving in the dark, they drag Sally in, between them, onto the porch, into the darkness of the home.
The Sawyer family, for tis they, welcome the two men home. Plus their exciting surprise package. Floorboards banging and thudding, yelling and barking at Leatherface like he was the unloved family dog, there is Christmas lunch shouting and yelling in kitchen. Screams from everybody. Excitement and terror fill the echoing bone-filled rooms as Leatherface yelps, barks and squeals from behind his crispy dry mask.
Eagerly, panting and drooling, they tie Sally up. Shouts and echoes, creaks and squeaks. “Take it easy…” ole’ Drayton eases, the dad of the house.
There is the ugly crack of dry rope stretching and squeaking. Skeletal lamp lights illuminate the gloom. Bangs and crashes around the home as Drayton and Nubbins drag the final guest to the feast – chair-bound grandpa. A brittle, cadaver-faced pale skeleton of a man, clamped to a wheel chair, barely human.
They clunk and bang his ageing chair down from his room to the macabre delights of their…evening meal.
Would anyone fancy garlic bread or doughballs to start?
Adding to the hysteria the music grinds and clanks in deafening, iron-like thunder. Bones and boxes, feathers and brittle cadavers. “Lookie grandpa!”
Could do with some oregano…
Now we are at the long dinner table, sitcom style. A cosy scene we’ve seen a thousand times. The Cosby Show, Blossom, Friends, The Good Life, Who’s The Boss… But never, never, quite like this. There is jostling to get the best seats, as if they’re queuing for thanksgiving turkey. Grandpa is barely alive, crumbling, pale and drawn. A straight razor is held to screaming Sally’s neck.
Breast or thigh?
Drayton grabs Sally’s pale hand and feeds her trembling fingers, suckling, into grandpa’s slack mouth. His supping maw sucks and sups. Sally’s eyes painfully wide, frozen in the inevitable horror of the next few macabre moments.
Outside? Silence. A large moon hovers and watches. Innocent. Only god is watching.
There is a clink and clatter of plates. Flies buzz. Sally screams for her life. The family Sawyer, in parrot mockery howls and scream back in giggling childlike delight. Laughter, like kids copy the ducks and cows in a passing road-tip field.
“We were just havin’ fun”
“MAKE THEM STOP!!!” Sally screams. Ugly giggles ripple about the table. They prod and poke like a bored 5 year old with a dead pigeon. A table lamp made of torn face flesh illuminates an ugly glow.
“PLEASE! MAKE IT STOP!!” Howls of “bitch hog” from the shrieking clan. Sally, in panting fearful desperation, starts to bargain. “I’ll do anything you want,” passing through her own stages of grief. The macabre mocking and copying at increases at an hysterical gleeful volume like fireworks at night. Our stomachs lurch at the hick chuckles and spitty giggles.
It needs more Taragon, goddammit…
Sally’s eyes in full frame. Pupils, veins, wide and staring. Around her the dull family squabbles like a suburban Christmas dinner.
“Hey grandpa!” He’s the best, they boast. “Gonna let you have THIS ONE!”
“Never took more than one lick” the drooling family boast, like they were at a cattle auction. “Did 60 in 5 minutes once!”
To give Grandpaw freedom to work, they cut tearful Sally loose from thick ropes. Writhing and squirming, her tears are running. She pleads, knowing her fate. “No, no, no!” Banging of gongs and ugly saucepan lid cymbals echo about us, cacophonous. She kneels. The Sawyers grab at her hair.
They hand feeble Grandpa the heavy mallet. Limp and barely alive, he keeps dropping it in his feeble swings. There is no life to his pale frame. Like a stringless marionette. “Hit her! Hit that BITCH!” Sally’s head forced over a fetched battered tin pail. Screams and shrieks of pain.
She chose…poorly.
But howls of laughter and encouragement roar around the echoing room in the Dantean cacophony of hellish noise. “I’ll kill her!” others Sawyers volunteer. “Let me kill her!”
But at last, in the freedom of the bickering chaos, Sally twists and breaks free from the mad family. NOOOOO!
She runs! A dark hallway, a smudgy window… SMASH through the wood and glass into the bare dry garden, drenched in sickly moonlight.
Hobbling, panting, gasping she smashes, exhausted, through the dry brush to the road, falling stumbling and crying. A ROAR of chain saw behind her. Leatherface’s petrol machine coughs into hateful spikey life again, eager to its purpose. In hysteria, he hurtles after her down the lane to the road.
Nubbins, hysterical with libidinous drooling joy, follows, shrieking. Inches away he lunges and grab at Sally as she hurls herself for her life through the crowing southern sunrise.
On the road. At last.
And we would’a got away with it of it weren’t for you pesky kids
A huge red truck pulling a load, Burt Reynolds style, appears looming over the hill, horn honking with smoke. Nubbins flails, caught, pulled screaming under the 18 leathery wheels, crushed.
Always obey the Green Cross Code.
The truck driver slows and stops his huge rig, clambering out to help. But sees Sally…and sees Leatherface with his saw aloft roaring and smoking. Sally and the truck driver run, terrified, back to the cab of the truck, the driver hauling Sally in and slamming the door. Crazed by hysterical toddler frustration, Leatherface begins to score and carve at the truck door with his roaring blades, grinding silver slashes and shrieking streaks on the metal. Out the other side, the couple jump and run. Leatherface, confused, dulled and furious, follows, no lost energy, pulled forward by his rage, chasing the helpless pair along the early dawn road. The driver turns and hurls a tool at him, hitting his head and knocking Leatherface down. The chainsaw loose, it falls, glancing against Leatherface’s thigh and tearing through the greasy trousers to his pink bare flesh. The monster bellows into the still air and clambers up, redoubled in his stunted fury.
Over the hill, a pick up appears. If it isn’t a Ford “Cavalry” then it should be. Dust and whines. It slows and a screaming, tearful Sally clambers into the back, sobbing. The truck hauls away in smoke as a crippled and injured Leatherface lunges towards it. The truck drives, drives, drives away, Sally hysterical with tears, screams and a sick, exhausted laughter as they escape, more and more road expanding between them.
Going home. The theme from Local Hero.
Finally, in the searing sunrise of pinks and oranges, Leatherface – furious with frustration – whirls and winds alone on the road, shrieking, roaring chainsaw groaning and screaming in his hands, petrol fumes pumping and coughing, around and around and around in rage. Lens flare catches him in all his monstrous glory, bellowing at the one who got away.
round and round the garden, like a teddy bear…
Cut to black.
We sit in exhausted, sweaty silence. Tobe Hooper’s choice of ugly music grinds and shrieks and clanks as the white on black credits begin their slow, funereal crawl…
Aaaaand, relax.
Is it any good?
Well we arrived. For many, if not most, when talk turns (as sadly, no matter how much I try and crowbar pub conversation, it rarely does) to the Video Nasty scare, there are two or three that spring revoltingly to mind for your average non-horror fan. They’re the movies that have, for their own reasons, left the grubby photo-statted list of the tired 1980s copper on the beat looking for newsagents and dodgy proprietors to raid, and leapt into popular culture. Yep, the ones everyone has heard of, for better or for worse. Maybe not seen, possibly never glimpsed. But are there in the consciousness of you, your mum and probably your Nan.
The films that, thanks to some nasty titles, lurid VHS art and tabloid frenzies, became the catch-all for everything unpleasant of the era. You know the tapes I mean. The Evil Dead – it’s dead people (urrgh) and they’re evil (booo!); Cannibal Holocaust (same story. Like being cannibals isn’t enough, they needed to have a holocaust? Or if you prefer, like holocausts aren’t awful enough, this one had to star cannibals?); I Spit On Your Grave (the icky coffin and phlegm combo, plus Demi Moore’s bum) and naturally Driller Killer (because…oh for heaven’s sake).
The undead, psychopaths, cannibals and Bruce Willis’s ex-wife’s butt-cheeks
But I would go as far to say that, for its pure shocking title alone and distant tales of banning and court cases and Midwest stereotypes, “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” is simply the shorthand for “one of those films.” Exploitative, unnecessary, shocking, bloody, gruesome and horrific to some. Daft, silly, preposterous, juvenile and retrograde to others.
And far it be from me to argue its status.
Has it hung about popular culture forever purely because of the idea? Texas (hicks and cornballs and inbred yokels) plus Chainsaws (buzzing, bloody, relentless screaming death machines) and Massacres (dozens, maybe even hundreds of chopped up, ploughed up, carved up teenagers)?
Well probably yes. Nothing about it sounds wholesome, or interesting. It conjures up zero images of insight, humour, observation, realism or depth. It sounds like about $7 worth of direction and $100 of blood and 90 mins of screaming. I mean, what am I? 13 years old?
And I am well aware that to argue its merits makes me one of…well, y’know…those guys.
C’mon, you know exactly what I mean. One of those guys. Sigh.
Gingery hair, a scruffy neck beard. Pushing 16 stone. An obscure faded gamers t-shirt pulled over my scratchy belly. Tin of cider. Tickets to San Diego Comicon. A basement full of B-movie posters (originals) and plastic busts of Freddie and Pinhead next to my boxed Funko Pops. 7 gaming consoles, INCEL chat-groups in my darkweb favourites and a nasty, malicious giggly streak.
To sleep, perchance to dream. About Disney stopping putting black women in all their remakes…
Well fine. It’s a type. It’s not even a lazy type as the world (or at least a large part of the online world) is full of these characters. Type who will loudly tell you that the worse a movie is, the better a movie is. Who will argue Howard The Duck over Howard Hawks. Who will argue Michael Caine over Citizen Kane. Who will think Scream is a horror movie for people who don’t really understand horror movies. Who will show their nephews The Human Centipede over The Very Hungry Caterpillar. People for whom The Toxic Avenger is the pinnacle of “amaaaaaazing.”
I went to art college. I know these people. At best John Waters. At worst? Harry Knowles. And hell, if this image helps, then go forth. Go nuts. Suit yourself.
Director John Waters (no taste) and Harry Knowles (no Hendersons)
In my defence (and isn’t it just soooo people like me to be leaping to my defence before I’ve been attacked) this isn’t me. Yes, my top ten, desert island movies are picked from the nostalgic end of the spectrum. I do still have a warm crush on the 1980’s cinema I basked in during my teens. I don’t doubt that, on an empirical scale, my particular tastes would be fairly juvenile, popcorn and playful. I would take Ghostbusters and Back To The Future over most things on the art house circuit. I would consider It’s A Wonderful Life to have a bigger emotional kick than The Seventh Seal. For laughs, When Harry Met Sally… beats the crap out of Some Like It Hot or The Lavender Hill Mob. And Jaws is pretty much better than any of them.
What, right now, probably passes for the author’s top ten. Ish. Oh arse, I forgot Airplane
But in the last few weeks I have decided that Tobe Hooper’s 1974 horror The Texas Chain Saw Massacre deserves a place on my desert island. Not because it’s become my go-to feel-good Sunday afternoon favourite. Not because it gives more and more every time you watch it (the way critic Mark Kermode swears his favourite The Exorcist does, every time he puts it on – last count over 200 times).
But for the same reason that my DVD of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest is still in its plastic wrapper.
It is simply so effective at what it sets out to do, it works so incredibly well at its goal and achieves so deliciously exactly what Tobe Hooper was aiming for, that it is both a masterpiece and probably something I’ll never watch again.
“Cinema,” as we’ve said before – quoting the late great Roger Ebert – “is a machine for creating empathy.”
Ebert! Hey Ernie!
And so my argument goes, I have NEVER felt the shared blood-chilling terror and relentless screaming panic of a set of characters like I have this movie. Yes, when Tim Robbins finally redeemed himself at the end of Shawshank, yes when Brody and Hooper finally began to laugh, splashing and bobbing, at the end of Jaws. When Rocky Balboa hollers for Adrieeeene as he falls into the arms of Mickey.
Yes, even when Forrest realises Jenny is dead and begins his lonely run across America – I was with them. Tear in the eye, fist pumping, cheering their triumph. Great writers, directors, musicians and production crews can do this.
But in ‘Massacre, I haven’t had to pause a film so many times in its run-time to simply take a breath, look around the room, make tea and remind myself I was home and safe. To try and unknot my guts, wipe my freezing wet palms on my jeans, play with the cat, drink a pint of water and swallow hard. Repeating, it’s only a movie. It’s only a movie.
Oh call me a wuss if you like. I’m certain Neck-Beard McCider would call me a novice, a lightweight, a big girl (identity politics or lack of are oft part of their make-up) and tell me to man up. “Call that gruesome?! Call that scary? Ha! You should see…[insert revolting snuff rapey-offal-filled grizzle fest here].”
But we’re going to take a moment to talk about why UK’s Empire magazine went on record saying “the most purely horrifying horror movie ever made, never less than totally committed to scaring you witless,” – how it came to be and what to make of it nearly 50 years later.
Okay. So. Much has been written about the backstory, funding, creation, shooting, distribution and cultural impact of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Hooper and Kim Henkel co-wrote the screenplay in 1973, including the teasing and provocative opening crawl and scene-setting (albeit misleading) voice-over.
Hooper states that the pre-film crawl, suggesting the “true story…” set up (a device to unsettle, used famously by The Blair Witch team as well as, tragically, the Coen Brother’s Fargo) was a response to the feeling of being lied to wholesale by the US Government over the Vietnam war, Watergate and other similar high level scandals.
In fact Henkel and Hooper’s entire approach to the story and screenplay was a personal reflection of the times they were living in. However we can note here a stark contrast in the approaches of Hooper and his contemporary Wes Craven, who’s much more bloodthirsty “Last House On The Left” had premiered just 2 years earlier. Granted a 2 year period of American history that took us from the pilot of Happy Days, through the Patty Hearst kidnapping, Watergate, The Exorcist, The Hi-Fi Murders, Ted Bundy, Roe Vs Wade, the return of Vietnam PoWs, the Dog Day Afternoon robbery, American Grafitti, Skylab, Fritz The Cat, the digital watch and The Godfather. All while comedian George Carlin is being arrested in Milwaukee for explaining the seven words you can never say on television.
Worth digging in here a bit, since it’s a key part of the legacy.
We talked in the review of Last House… (Well, I talked, you played on your phone a bit I imagine) that Craven’s brutal cinematography had been a reaction, too, of the times he was living in. As we saw, Craven felt that violence on screen in the 60s and 70s was sanitised, cleaned up and cleansed for the family viewer. Reports of “shootings” or “rapes” had no detail, no lurid close-ups, no in-your-face guerrilla film-maker reportage. It was reported tidily, by the numbers, matter of fact, so as not to “upset the viewer.”
Craven reacted to what he felt was a cosy view of violence by presenting it in all its mundane horror. But now, just 2 years later, Hooper was moved to create Massacre based on the “lack of sentimentality and the brutality of things.” The polar opposite. It was the gruesomeness, not sanitation, of 1970’s post Vietnam news reportage that led him to feel that, in his own words, “man was the real monster here, just wearing a different face, so I put a literal mask on the monster in my film”.
Aaaand…terrorized inaction!
Script in hand, designed as we will see later to have as little gore on screen as possible to secure a family-friendly certificate and therefore wider distribution, Henkel and Hooper went on the search for funding. They put on ties and polished shoes and presented themselves as a company called Vortex Inc. They were looking for an equivalent today of a million dollars. (For reference remember, young director George Romero had put another backwoods house of horrors on the screen 6 years prior for about the same figure. It could be done. And with skill behind the camera, long days and a compliant team willing to put in the gruelling hours, it could be done well. By contrast, Scream, in 1996, would cost 25 times that amount. Read here why that is). Hooper’s friend Bill Parsley formed a parent company named MAB and put up the equivalent today of about $340,000. The Parsley-sighted deal meant MAB had a 50% share of the movie and its future profits. News was spread to the cast and crew that their salaries would be based on securing the all important distribution package and sweetened this questionable deal with a promise of percentages of the profits. Regrettably of course, Henkel and Hooper failed to tell them (either through error or cunning) that of course, this was only after MAB would have taken its fat 50% off the bottom line. Thus cutting all salaries and earnings in half.
Shooting took place in a scorching Texas July on the roads and houses near Round Rock, Texas. Gruelling hours to save equipment rental time meant the cast were sweating and sobbing in 95 degree heat. The Sawyer farmhouse, was covered in animal blood and littered copiously with the remains of cattle and other animals, dead, rotting and maggoty.
Lawrence Llwellyn Bowen’s new episode of Changing Rooms is available on iPlayer
Once in the can, it was then a matter of getting the movie picked up by a distributor. The funding of Massacre’s costly distribution, trivia hounds, is a story in itself. In a nice piece of symmetry, just as 1974 audiences were settling in with popcorn and milk duds to revel in the sweeping mafia mood of Coppolla’s epic Godfather Part 2, genuine mobsters were delivering briefcases full of cash to a young Tobe Hooper and making him, of course (what else) “an offer he couldn’t refuse…”
The Godfather. The movie that wished it was My Cousin Vinny.
The lone distributin company willing to get involved in such a disturbing and grizzly movie was one Bryanston Films that stepped up with a deal to get the movie into theatres. What it is alleged Hooper and his accountants didn’t know was Bryanston had tied with the Colombo crime family in New York, a tough organisation run by Louis “Butchie” Peraino.
Louis “Butchie” Perain. Butchie to his friends. “Please take that shiv out of my gums” to his enemies.
Mob accountants having a way with a ledger, as we learned from the squealing bookmaker in De Palma’s excellent glossy Armani-draped loveletter, The Untouchables, profits and percentages found their way into Peraino’s pockets, rather than the cast and crew.
An attempt to recover funds by suing Bryanston came to nought, as Peraino’s involvement in another 70s slice of exploitation “Deep Throat” got him in trouble and some prison time. Probably considered, therefore, likely to have been on the shadier end of the Massacre contract, Peraino lost the case. It was only in 1983, nearly a decade after production, the new owners New Line Cinema attempted to make amends and pay out what was owed to the cast and crew.
In pushing the movie to 1974 audiences, marketeers leaned very heavily on the opening of the movie and Hooper’s “based on a true story” claim. As we’ve said, in the sense that Massacre is a story of America tearing itself apart, it is “true” indeed – at least to his idealogy. However Hooper would elaborate with more concrete specifics, telling journalists it was inspired by the gruesome grave-robbings of Ed Gein, in 1950s Wisconsin. But given Ed Gein was not based in Texas, never used a chainsaw and did no real massacring at all to speak of (he was found guilty of the murder of one woman, a Mrs Worden – although allegedly it was the prohibitive cost that meant he faced no further murder trials), we can safely say there were never any teens, no vans, no farmhouse meat-hooks or forest chases. It was Gein’s macabre trophies that were the true inspiration for the set dressing and grave-robbing antics that are suggested in the movie (always suggested, remember. Never shown). Gein’s home havnig been discovered by the FBI littered and draped with hearts, noses, nipples, skulls and skin amongst other grotesque keepsakes.
Ed’s Diner. Trip Advisor: 1 star. “The chef’s special sauce has an odd aftertaste.”
Sadly, upon its mob-funded, dirt-money release, The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rated it a disasterous R.
Complaints from some audiences about both its unrelenting attack on the senses (genuine) and its horrific gory blood-letting (largely imaginary) caused many theatres to bow to pressure and remove it from their scheduling.
Cuts were suggested to trim back some of the gore. But censors in the US and the UK were faced with the impossible position of having to choose which bits to cut. The blood? There is virtually none. The gore? There isn’t any. The saw cutting into flesh? Nope. The cutting up of bodies? Uh-uh. Grave robbing? Nope. The censors were faced with an un-trimmable film as there was no single scene, no gruesome set-piece that caused audiences to faint. Ban the whole thing or leave it the hell alone. You can’t trim “atmosphere,” you can’t edit “tension.”
All this controversy of course did wonders for the box office as folk queued to see what critics were labelling in turns “despicable,” in one breath and having a “plastic script,” in the next. “As violent and gruesome and blood-soaked as the title promises“, “one of the most sustained and believable acting achievements in movie history,” while Patrick Taggart of the Austin American-Statesman hailed it as the most important horror film since George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. When the 16.m million tickets were added up, it had generated over $150.8 million. A 15,000% profit.
Which brings us back to where we came in. Is it any good?
Well the story is simplicity itself. Ill-fated innocents head out to the woods and get carved up by a monster. We’ve seen this trope in our 25 movies journey already. In fact, if you’ll give me a moment to count…we’ve seen it close on a dozen times in one form or another. Be it Susan George and Dustin Hoffman attacked by Cornwall yokels or Duane Jones and Judith O’Dea overwhelmed by the living dead – there’s nothing innovative about the plot. Back of a fag-packet stuff. In fact in its bare-bones simplicity, it’s even more basic than those examples. It’s not about revenge, it’s not about masculinity, it’s not about radiation from a space probe that exploded in Earth’s atmosphere on the way back from Venus. The Sawyer family are grave robbing cannibals. They eat locals. They eat tourists. They eat anyone they can find. It wouldn’t be until one of the, count them, NINE spin-offs, 2006’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (got to love a colon, as my school organ teacher used to say) we got anywhere close to a clumsy backstory.
Ohhh but got to hate a clumsy backstory, right? There is something terrifying about a motiveless crime. My younger brother is convinced the home invasion terror The Strangers (2008) is one of the most terrifying movies ever made because of the total lack of any explanation or motive, save the chilling “because you were home.”
Plus, does anybody think The Silence Of The Lambs is more enjoyable because of Hannibal Rising’s tortured tale of Lithuanian sister-chomping peckishness?
What do you mean we’re all out of Cheerios? Ah well, pass the relative…
Tobe Hooper’s writing and direction cannot be overstated. There are good “teenagers cut up in a barn” stories (Friday The 13th) and there are postmodern “teenagers cut up in the barn stories” (Cabin In The Woods) but there will never be as gruelling and relentless an experience as this. Dialogue is cheesy and throwaway. The “kids” are daft and out of larky kicks. Hooper keeps them from being hateful Abercrombie models that we want to see punished. These are ordinary folk. A little foolish, a little reckless. But harmless and simple and never deserving of their fates. The story is beautifully paced, never rushing or dragging, simply lolling along in the Texas afternoon sun. They’re in no hurry, Hooper’s in no hurry. Simply knowing from the wink and nod of the set up that whatever is going to happen is going to happen and we can only sit and wait. Sit and watch.
But Hooper’s masterstroke and I feel the reason, in a decade of stalk-and-slash teens in trouble identikit shockers, Massacre will always sit as top dog, is the breathtaking combination of suggestion and restraint.
Going in, with THAT title and THAT poster, we are braced for all sorts of latex spurts, gory grue, stomach-turning offal and splattery splashes that we sit, simply waiting for it to happen. And, like a true expert, masterfully controlling his audience, a magician performing misdirection and sleight of hand, he gives us suggestions. Hints of horrors to come.
In the van, Nubbins pulls out his blade. He thrusts and drags it into his hand. We wince, we pull away. It’s shocking, surprising, out of nowhere. The sudden cut, the nasty slash. And now we’re set. If this is how it starts? What can be to come? The suggestion of blood and horrors in the opening act just teases us of how much more bloody, how much more gory, how much more gruesome this is going to get. We know movies escalate. We know the action scene at the 30m mark won’t touch the action finale at the 90m mark. And Hooper brilliantly plays on our cinematic instincts and expectations. No WAY is the bloodiest part the van bit. No WAY. This is setting us up for some bloody gore and horror to come. Cover your eyes. Any minute now..
And of course, it doesn’t. It never comes. What sits with us, in a dazzling display of directorial confidence, is the idea of what we’ve seen. The expectation of what’s coming. The assumed inevitable.
So when we hear the roar of the saw, see the swinging of the hooks, jump at the figures in the doorway flinch at the brandished hammers? Our minds are already painting the pictures of what we’re going to see. And that brilliant fact that we never, ever do just makes the relentless suggestion only more exhausting.
Okay. Let’s go again people. Gunner, sweetheart, can you be more… leathery?
The cast are terrific. Its very easy, as we’ve said, to fill movies like this with hateful, blonde, hunky Chads and painful Staceys (as my bearded online confreres like to say). Bikinis, pecs, lip gloss, midriffs, chins and pouts. People you wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire. Somehow so perky, wide-eyed, cheeky and buff that their inevitable fate is somehow written in the stars. You can’t be going around with your high SAT scores, your sorority leadership, prom queen tiaras and football scholoarships without the general public wanting to witness your comeuppance. But p’raps that’s a more modern thing. In Massacre, Hooper has cast and directed a fun bunch. A harmless bunch. Each of them brings a little something to make them more than paper cut-outs and we wish no real harm on any of them.
Not Franklin! Anyone but Franklin!
For me, and this is very personal, the addition of Paul A. Partain’s Franklin is the master stroke. Oh Franklin. I can’t be sure why the addition of this touched, special, troubled and fearful young brother makes the ensemble so, so much more painful. There is the innocence of course. The childlike wonder. But the casting and writing makes us all simply yearn and reach out to help. To save him. To shelter him. He is so simple, so naïve, with his talk of the old days, his trusty pen-knife, his timid fears of the boogeyman hitchhiker who might be out to get them. It is a painfully moving performance. He is the burden, the stone in the shoe, the killjoy that the group have taken to heart. We love the group more because they’re including him. We share their frustration and pain in having to, let’s face it, put up with his toddler whining and whimpers. But when he and Sally finally head into the woods to search for the missing Jerry, our hearts ache. No, Franklin. No! Anyone but Franklin. Patronising? Probably. But as I say, this is a personal response. And without Hooper’s brilliant addition of this lost puppy, this mewling kitten to tug at the maternal instincts, Massacre would not be the emotional powerhouse it remains.
But we must, if we are going to discuss the effectiveness of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – (you’ll note I smugly put Chain and Saw as two words. That’s how it is in the credits, that’s how it is here at Let’s Get The Banned Manically Pendantically Back Together) – talk sound and music. With all our talk of missing gore, lack of blood, restraint and suggestion, let us for a moment agree that it is the soundtrack of this 70s shocker that raises its game.
Firstly, the score. Or what we can call the score. There is no hummable theme tune. There is no catchy riff or “Best Of Horror themes vol III” melody to recollect. What we have is a searing, scorching grind of metal on flesh, flesh on metal, tangling chimes and deathly scrapes. Echoes, clangs and ugly death rattles do their effective best to get nerves jangling and hairs on end.
Let the genius Mark Corvern show you how it’s done.
The chain saw is of course that star of the soundtrack. Heaving, coughing, wheezing and screaming in lustful anger, the last half hour belongs to the titular machine. Combined with everything we’ve discussed and dissected, this movie belongs to the saw. Smoking, fearless, roaring and relentless. Swept through flesh, stabbed in chests and whirled in fury, it surely earns it’s place in the title.
A fucking nasty masterpiece.
Nasty?
Yep. Of course. Haven’t you been listening? But again, as the censors struggled with, you won’t find anything you wouldn’t see in a mild episode of ER. No blade touches fleshes. The horror and terror are screams, roars, leers, suggestions and relentless, heart-tearing unstoppable menace. The final 20 minutes are almost unwatchable. And its all, ALL in your own imagination. Whatever you think you see? You imagined it all. Purely joyful in its mechanism, monstrosity and manipulation. A joyful exercise in terror.
What does it remind me of?
Everything and nothing. Look, I know I appear to be overstating all this. And you may load it up on Amazon or Netflix or invest in a quality BluRay and come away cold, unmoved and merely mildly tittilated. But as regards resonance? We are in the relentless door-pounding terror of Night Of The Living Dead. It starts gracefully slowly, leads you up the path and then leaves you there, alone, to your own devices. It has the sustained relentlessness of Straw Dogs as we realise that no reasoning, no pleading, no rationalisation will stop what is coming. We can only grab what we can and pray for death or redemption. We have echoes of Last House On The Left with the killer family, murdering and torturing for mere amusement and kicks; The hicks and inbreds of Schoolgirls In Chains, without the clumsy backstory; the squealing animal brutality of Pigs; plus the mundanity of Axe. Everything you could ever want. And so much, so much more.
Were can I see it?
Oh everywhere. It’s om Youtube, although it might be a cut version. But what have they cut? DVDs and BluRays abound with all sorts of commentaries and extras. It’s probably on Amazon Prime and Netflix.
Watch it. Thank me later.
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