(When the malevolent Leatherface wields that chainsaw, we don’t see the carnage.) His victims don’t have backstories or rarely anything interesting to say. There really aren’t jump cuts and not even that much gore. Essentially, this is what happens: One of Sally’s friends goes into this mysterious house and is killed, then another, and another. Future slasher films were bloodier and more elaborate, and yet they can’t compare with the simplicity of Hooper’s vision.
So what’s remarkable about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is that its low-budget aesthetic remains its great strength. But often, the films that arrive after the originators are more sophisticated, more expensive, more ambitious, making what came before look small and quaint by comparison. IHIqs1w0De- The Cinegogue August 18, 2017įilm scholars will tell you how The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, inspired by works like Psycho, was one of the first slasher films, influencing every sociopathic monster slicing up teenagers in movies like Halloween and Friday the 13th. On this day in 1973 the horrific events in Tobe Hooper's horror masterpiece The Texas Chainsaw Massacre took place. You can’t quite say why, but you sense a general unease. Even before the really horrible stuff starts happening, you’ve got a knot in your gut. You feel like you’re seeing something you’re not supposed to - that the scenes are uncensored, unpolished, cobbled together.
#Texas chain saw massacre story movie
Nobody would confuse the movie with a documentary, but Hooper’s experience in nonfiction perhaps informed The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s stark, unfussy images. Shot on 16mm, the film looks cheaply-made, hypnotically so. That’s a good word, although I don’t even know if it is a word.”Īnyone who’s seen The Texas Chain Saw Massacre knows what he means. After that first scene at the graveyard, the movie starts building veils of … ooginess. An important factor was setting the audience up with kind of a creepy, gooey atmosphere. … I studied what made horror films work and I decided to place a story in the ambiance of death. They were always trying something that they just weren’t pulling off. A slick look and the musical score was predictable. Romero’s 1968 zombie flick Night of the Living Dead, but Hooper lamented that Romero’s successors made films that “were so Hollywood-looking. “My sensibilities had been finely attuned to what I wanted to see as an audience member.” In the early 1970s, the horror genre had been goosed by the innovations of George A. “I really was trying to make a film that I wanted to see and hadn’t seen before,” Hooper said. But the real terror starts once they get to the family home, noticing another house nearby. Stories of graveyard-robbing are all over the news, and an edgy hitchhiker (Edwin Neal) attacks them along the way. They and their buddies venture to the family’s old rundown house in the middle of nowhere. They’re mostly nondescript, and it’s not even clear which of them is the main character - that only happens by default once Sally (Marilyn Burns) outlives the rest of her crew, including her brother Franklin (Paul A. At first, it’s merely the saga of five young people on a road trip in Texas. Technically speaking, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre isn’t a post-apocalyptic film, although you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. That it also happens to be relevant to so many of our modern concerns is merely icing on the cake of a truly disturbing, visionary work. And with a sequel arriving on Netflix on Friday, which I haven’t seen yet, now’s as good a time as any to reflect on a movie that’s like a raw wound, a nasty little piece of business that feels unholy, downright evil.
If anything, the film is even uglier and scarier now than when it came out. But where other movies - especially horror movies - lose their vibrancy as they get older, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre refuses to let you mock it. Sure, there are some awkward performances and a few other elements of that 1974 horror film that haven’t aged well. I’ve never seen The Texas Chain Saw Massacre on the big screen, but I have a feeling that irritating phenomenon doesn’t occur at repretatory houses when it’s showing. This tendency by some people is supposed to signal to the rest of us how much smarter they are than the movie: Look how silly this film is with its odd-speaking characters and their antiquated attitudes! There’s nothing lazier or more smug - yes, not everything in certain masterpieces holds up, but that doesn’t mean you need to let everybody else in the theater be aware that you realize it. It’s always annoying to go to a revival screening and listen to oh-so-hip audience members laugh at what’s archaic or dated about some classic film.
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