The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Review (Film, 1974) #31DaysOfHorror
content warning: blood, gore, violence against women, self-harm
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is revered as a classic of independent and horror cinema in America. The film is terrifying and brutal, but it’s also incredibly beautiful and innovative.
The film lays out exactly what it is in the opening credits. The opening narration tells you about a series of brutal crimes. It specifically calls out the tragic events that befell five youths, including Sally and her brother Franklin. This is followed by radio news reports about desecrated graves and brutal crime scenes at the local cemetery.
Sally, Franklin, and their friends travel to the rural town to see if their grandfather’s grave was one of the ones destroyed. They quickly run into a dangerous hitchhiker and almost run out the gas tank trying to escape him. This leads them to the ancestral Hardesty home (Sally and Franklin’s grandparents’ house), which is a stone’s throw away from one of the most depraved families in all of horror cinema.
Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel’s screenplay is incredible. The amount of tension created with that opening narration is not guaranteed if the story that follows isn’t well structured and engaging. The film literally tells you nothing good will come of this day and then snaps back to when the five friends are laughing it up on a road trip. The foreshadowing and scares that come out of nowhere are terrifying before we even meet our chainsaw wielding best boi Leatherface.
Leatherface is brutal when left to his own devices. He is a terrifying figure who appears out of nowhere with a sledgehammer to take out anyone who tries to come into his family’s home. Then you meet the family later on and discover that Leatherface is, himself, a victim of an incredibly abusive household. I mean, it doesn’t excuse all the slaughtering, but that poor man never stood a chance with a family like that. He’s just trying to follow the rules and not get in trouble.
Sally and her friends have the opposite philosophy. They’re going to do what they want, when they want to, and they would dare anyone to stop them. Not a smart choice. I’m not saying that I always root for Bubba Sawyer over the actual protagonists, but he does seem to have better survival instincts than the conga-line of young people wandering into a stranger’s house because they hear squeals and screams.
Even then, how the scares happen is incredibly innovative and unpredictable. Jump scares have been a thing since Jacques Tourneur had the bus pull up on Alice Moore in Cat People. Jump scares this sudden come from Tobe Hooper. These are blink and you’ll miss it shock moments that define how the slasher film works in America.
The other element at play changed the face of American cinema to this day. You can’t exactly get away with throwing someone up on a meat hook or swinging a sledgehammer right into someone without limiting your audience and getting red flagged by the MPAA. Hooper shot these scenes to imply what happened. Oh, there is no doubting what you saw, except you never actually saw it happen. You’ll see the body get lifted up, then a closeup on Leatherface, a closeup on the victim’s face, and suddenly they’re on the hook. Or you’ll see the hammer swing into frame, a closeup on Leatherface, and suddenly the body is on the ground bleeding out. It’s so quick your mind is tricked into thinking you saw it happen, but you didn’t. You only think you did.
I could go on about this film for hours. Tobe Hooper and Wayne Bell’s score is absolute chaos in the best way possible. You think the jump scares are bad? Just wait for the sudden and unpredictable appearance of whatever percussion they banged together to create that amazingly awful grinding noise in the opening music. J Larry Carroll and Sallye Richardson’s editing, combined with Daniel Pearl’s gorgeous and grotesque cinematography, make the most of Hooper’s vision for this story. The beauty of the film is only surpassed by its brutality, and even then, some of these gory sequences set against an orange sunrise look like particularly niche oil paintings ready for a gallery showcase.
If you have not watched The Texas Chain Saw Massacre before, you are in for a treat. The legacy of this revolutionary independent horror film is still felt today. Hooper took so many risks that it’s practically experimental cinema. The scares still hold up almost fifty years later and wouldn’t be out of place in any modern slasher film.
I encourage you to find the restored edition of the print as it truly brings out the beauty in the quieter moments. The color of the landscapes and perspective shots through wildflowers really make a difference in how you experience this film.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is streaming on Shudder.
***