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Take your seats, class: Movie critic Owen Gleiberman continues his exploration of horror movies for week 6 of EW University. Check out our gallery of the 20 Top Horror Films of the Last 20 Years and yesterday’s class on legendary horror flick Psycho. Stick around all summer long for future EW University courses on Quentin Tarantino, vampires, and more.
‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’: Vengeance verite
In the early-to-mid-’70s, scuzzy dark horror movies played in scuzzy dark places. There were no megaplexes, and even if there had been, they wouldn’t have programmed any of the grimy B-movie bloodbaths that had begun to spring up in America like garden weeds. Films like Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes were off the radar of respectability. (If you’d been told back then that a movie like Saw 3 would one day open on 2,500 screens, it would have sounded about as unlikely as a porn film playing on network television.) The fact that you had to seek these movies out — in a drive-in theater, say, or a run-down, sticky-floored grindhouse converted from some crumbling ’50s movie palace — only added to their forbidden aura. By the ’70s, exploitation horror had become, in effect, a kind of underground culture that trafficked in underground things: Satanism, dismemberment, cannibalism, and — in one unforgettable instance — death by power tools.
The mystique of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tobe Hooper’s terrifying 1974 masterpiece of redneck-gothic fear and slaughter, begins with one word: chainsaw. You hardly have to see the movie to conjure up a pretty sick image of the damage that could be inflicted by that particular piece of machinery. The movie, in hindsight, was rather restrained; mostly, it suggested what today’s slasher movies show. (How many graphic closeups do you need to communicate the dramatic concept of Death By Meat Hook?) Yet it made you feel as if you were seeing … everything. Not just the gore, but the evil. Here’s the scary original trailer:
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre opens with a van full of scruffy ’70s hippie kids driving, without quite knowing where they’re going, into the sunbaked Texas wilderness — an image that has been imitated a thousand times since. Kids. Driving. Away from civilization. What’s been echoed, as well, is the film’s collection of ominously leering, mockingly “hospitable” Southern creeps (an image actually introduced a decade before in Herschell Gordon Lewis’ rambunctiously primitive 1964 gorefest Two Thousand Maniacs!), who in this case are peddling some extremely suspicious barbecue at a store along the local highway.
Mostly, though, what would resonate through the decades long after the release of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was its most indelible and nightmarish image: a mute, portly psychopath in a slaughterhouse apron, with a thatch of black hair standing up from behind the mask he never takes off (it is made, we soon learn, of human skin), wielding a chainsaw — the scary buzzing phallus that he uses to decimate all “visitors.” His name is Leatherface, and his bizarre first appearance has some of the primitive shock value of the shower scene in Psycho. (He clubs a dude with a hammer, as though he were cattle, then slides a metal door shut as if slamming the gate to hell.)
You could claim, quite rightly, that anyone who goes to see a movie called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre knows exactly what they’re getting. Yet one of the surprises of the movie is how spare and low-budget Hitchcockian it is, with an aridly accomplished documentary vibe. It was based, the opening titles said, on a true story, and the thing is, it really felt that way. At moments, it seemed as raw and real as The Blair Witch Project. And since we never got to see what Leatherface looked like, it’s almost as if he really was that guy — the crazy grunting man-beast who wielded his chainsaw like some evil piece of medical equipment. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was such a queasy-crazy this is really happening! bad trip that when I learned that the guy who played Leatherface was an actor named Gunnar Hansen, I just figured that Gunnar Hansen must be a homicidal maniac too.
What Chainsaw channeled, far more than any other horror film of its time, was the dementia, the terrifying insanity, of violence. It made you feel like you were really experiencing what it was like to be murdered. And Leatherface was such a relentless, inexplicable force — a human pig out for vengeful slaughter — that there was something almost cool about him, especially in the movie’s brutally poetic final moments, when, now in a jacket and tie, he twirls his chainsaw around in the highway dawn.
Leatherface was so badass that the movies tried to imitate him for decades. Michael Myers in Halloween? Just a domesticated suburban version of Leatherface. Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th? He was Leatherface goes to summer camp.
As for that chainsaw, no one could ever top it. Yet it became nothing less than the template for modern horror. If you attack someone with a gun, or even a really big machete, it suggests that you’re trying to kill them — and fast. But a chainsaw builds sadism right into the equation. It’s not just an instrument of death, but of torture. And torture — in the Saw films, the Hostel films, and a hundred grade-Z imitators — is now the universal language of horror. The difference is that it’s no longer underground. It’s playing at a theater near you.
For Discussion: Thirty-five years later, does the fear factor of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre hold up? Do you think it’s the first torture–porn horror film? Where does Leatherface rank on the list of the all-time great horror-movie monsters? Discuss on our Comments boards!
More EW University:
Check out Owen’s class on seminal horror flick Psycho
Slideshow: The best horror films of the last 20 years
Final exam: Take a stab at our horror film trivia quiz
See all EW University courses
Comments (1-22) of 22 Add your comment
I haven’t watched the original version in quite a few years, but I definitely remember it still holding up. The most memorable scene for me though is the dinner scene. It was like a mash-up of the sloth death in “Se7en” plus the dinner scene in “Hannibal,” but of course way before either of them even happened. Plus, we probably have this movie to thank for people jumping at us with chainsaws on every haunted hayride in existence.
That’s exactly right. I saw this for the first time last Halloween, and I had the exact same “Oh God that thing’s alive?!?!” reaction as I did watching “Se7en”.
I completely agree with the observation that it really made you feel the experience of being murdered. That’s exactly how I felt- the raw reality. Also, it’s one of those movies that when I watch it, I can almost smell it. Gross, I know. But the heat and the fear seem so realistic, it really is a visceral movie. I say it definitely holds up.
Letherface’s first apperance is still one of my favorite horror movie moments. it’s chilling and disturbing
A funny thing happened when my friends and I watched the original after seeing the 2003 remake during our freshman year in college. The dinner scene in the original was too much to handle for us (girls AND guys)and we had to shut it off. With all the crazy horror stuff they come out with now in theaters, even that can be stomached better then seeing something like that.
Though I shamefully admit I’ve never seen Se7en, I’ve seen pictures of the ‘Sloth’ scence and I completely agree with the two previous posters. Tobe Hoober got the point across, for sure.
I’m sure I’ll get blasted for this. The original film has its place as a vanguard, but it’s really not that great of a film. I’m sure at the time it horrified people because they hadn’t really seen anything like it, but if you watch it today it’s incredibly boring. The writing is beyond moronic, as each character wanders off looking for someone else and eventually gets killed. (You would think at some point they would stick together.) There’s nothing to it. The ending is still spectacular, as Leatherface chases after the only remaining teen. THAT moment fits everything you so beautifully wrote here. It’s the kind of scary-thrilling moment you love from horror films. But the rest of it is dull. I agree with everything you said about Leatherface. But until the end of this movie, it feels cheap, horrendously acted (boy, are they BAD), and brainless (the writing is beyond-description bad, almost to the point of becoming funny, as the characters continually wander off like solid cows to the slaughter).
I agree the acting is bad, but none of the characters knows anything hinky is going on until it’s too late.
This movie is one of my favorite horror movies of all time. The part I like best is that the scariest moments take place during the day. That for me sets it apart from other horror movies. A villian so scary that he doesn’t have to wait til night to terrify people.
I agree. The scenes during the day are freaky – especially the first killing. Because it’s so sudden and shocking. Nowadays, the scene would be dragged out and much more explicit, and as a result, not as scary.
I also think the movie (which admittedly, is not well acted) broke barriers by having a non-saintly handicapped character who is a pain in the butt (way before Seinfeld did it) – and then having the guts to brutally kill that character. Still gives me shivers.
I think it most certainly DOES still hold up. I watched it again last year, and I still feel it captures, more than nearly every other horror film, the feel of a living, breathing, you-are-THERE nightmare. What is still one of the most shocking things about the film is how darkly funny it can be at times, as well. And I don’t think poor Marilyn Burns, who spends the entire last act of the film understandably screaming, is given enough credit for terrified beyond the brink of madness performance.
Today’s horror movies aren’t even in the same country as TEXAS. Texas IS horror. Saw is a MOVIE about horror.
Director Tobe Hooper did something that Herchell Gordon Lewis would have done, but took it to the next level. Texas Chainsaw was brutal and Rick Bakers make up still surpasses any make up artists work. The film is a horror classic. Eli Roth has nothing on Tobe.
It is loosely based on the Ed Gein case. While he never used a chainsaw on live people, he did disect corpses (and killed two women) to use their skins for clothing, masks, chair coverings, lamp shades, and a “mammary vest”. He was such a simpleton and easy going, nothing like Leatherface.
My friends and I were camping when we decided to go into town and catch a movie. It was a very small town, with just one theater, and TCM was showing. After the first murder, I had to stand up at the back to watch – I felt too confined in my seat. I don’t think any of us got much sleep that night.
I remember watching this movie in the theater when it first came out. Believe me – there was nothing like it previous to this. To this day – when someone say Chainsaw Massacre – I can LITERALLY FEEL the meat hook going into my back. Horrifying!
Yep.. Torture porn indeed. But it was creative .. today’s torture porn really lacks that element…
-horrorreport.com
Most terrifying movie ever made. It disturbed me on such a base level that I equate all horror with this. And I saw it as an adult in the ’90s after having seen COUNTLESS slasher flicks. The realism is horrifying on the basest level. The remake wasn’t bad either! Jessica Biel + wifebeater + Cowboy hat = hottest chick EVER. And I’m gay!
I absolutely agree with you (about the original, anyway). Saw this in my twenties,twenty years after it came out, on video, and it scared the bejesus out of me. I have actually never been able to watch it a second time and I don’t scare easily. Sensational film-making. Accomplishes exactly what so many horror films fail to; it scares you on a bone-deep level that stays with you a long time.
This is the most scariest movie that was ever made!!!!!=-}
i don’t believe in the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE until i see it!!!!!!
I think the Texas chainsaw is the awesome movie that was true.
i’ve only seen the trailer for this film – i was so disturbed by that i have never been able to see the whole thing. se7en and the silence of the lambs are two of my favourite films – i’ve seen a lot of scary movies but this one for some reason is beyond what i think i can handle!