Cut to a roadkill armadillo. A group of young adults is driving a Kombi van out to the country to a disused house in the family of two of them. They stop for petrol but the servo has run out (they do have barbeque, though) and go on to the house. On the way they pick up a hitchhiker who was too edgy and weird to continue in the community of Deliverance who talks about animal slaughter and creeps them out so much they cast him back on to the road. Unsettled they get to their place and explore the house while wheelchair-bound Franklin has to listen while staring at the symbol the hitcher has left in blood on the side of the van.
Kirk and his girlfriend Pam go off in search of a water hole and see a house in the near distance. Maybe they have petrol. Kirk goes in first, finding the door open. He sees the bizarre wall through another door, which is clothed entirely in animal heads. Curious, he goes to take a closer look. In the interest of being spoiler free I won't go on but I can say that what happens to him is sudden and shocking and that he doesn't get out again.
Tobe Hooper's 1974 shocker is one for the ages. On one hand it doesn't mess around, starting with an ominous warning and following up immediately with a visceral payoff, starting the tale proper with a memento mori before diving into some of the nastiest violence seen on screen to date. Add to that the seemingly ever deepening sources of cultural commentary and you have a movie you can just watch as a scream fest and something you can talk about for years. There are five separate commentaries on the copy that I watched, as well as an analysis so dense it needs a second listen or even a third before the sound of the voice can be smoothed into receivable meaning. And that's just about the mask.
Having just watched it for the unknownth time, I am all but out of things to say. That was how I get to the end credits last night and then sampling some of those commentaries (some of them were revisits). I just watched a movie that deserves its status as an influential cinematic icon, and is just a bloody effective horror movie, and I had nothing to add. So I slept on it.
I'm going to start very personal and say that everything I see set in places like Texas reminds me of growing up in North Queensland. The Kombi, the roads shimmering with heat, the glare, the smell of the long, dry grass, walking around the big wooden country houses. Apart from the accents, this film feels like it could have been shot around where I grew up in Townsville. This means that there is an extra sheen of creepiness I sense whenever I watch the movie. I never knew of any of the corpse mutilations that the film starts with locally but my memory of the kind of heaviness I'd feel outside the city limits, the sense of things going wrong without warning, is very strong. Growing up, the tales of hitch hiking always turned a little weird from either hitchers getting into bad cars or bad hitchers getting into straight cars.
If you think that my pre-internet childhood would have exacerbated this effect of the great lore of hearsay I can only offer that no instrument spread urban myths faster nor more widely than the online world, it's just that hearing it without the claim of it exposed did make it feel authentic. If you'd told me the plot of Texas Chainsaw Massacre with a few local place names thrown in I, at twelve or so, would have believed you. That uneasy surface carries nostalgia with it.
That nostalgic recall of believing the worst of people beyond the sway of the family home is what struck Tobe Hooper when he wrote the screenplay in memory of hearing about Ed Gein, killer and bodysnatcher whose house was filled with repurposed human remains. Hooper remembered the case from people gossiping about it (he stayed with relatives in Wisconsin where the crimes took place). That's about as close as this film gets to its claim about being a true story but, as such claims are still made, regardless of their veracity, I think we can give him a pass on that. The act of it, though, impresses me, like those dream accounts you hear that flow far more freely and vividly than anything you yourself can muster. Tobe Hooper found something in his memory, under the school days and first dates, that haunted him to see again, and made a cinema classic from it. I'm simplifying this but I'm doing that to bring it closer to me and push it further away from more formal criticism.
One of the features of the film that would later become a staple of teen slashers was the mask. I was surprised to be reminded that Leatherface is referred to by that epithet in the film itself (it's also used in the cast list in the end credits). I'd thought this was a fan invention like Hellraiser's Pinhead but there it is, from the off. I digress. Leatherface is one of the most frightening baddies of any horror movie. He has no lines beyond a kind of disturbing whimper when stressed. He never reveals the face below the human skin masks he wears and the only indicators of what lies beneath it are the slightly bucky teeth and impenetrable coal eyes. Apart from the masks he adopts different costumes, assuming changing personae. He's brutal here and cowing and whinnying at his brother's chastisement. He could hammer you like a cow in the slaughter house, lower you on to a meathook or chase you with a screaming chainsaw or he could curl up like a roly poly bug in a corner if he thinks he's done the wrong thing. There is no history given, it's just how he lives. And that's before you meet his brothers and grandpappy upstairs whose age has given his own face the look of a desiccated corpse.
The thing is that this isn't really that much like hick horror when you think about it. The Duelling Banjos scene in Deliverance goes a lot further along that sleazy road. Some of the scenes showing the locals talking a little crazily in the sun do more. The family itself are only durn rednecks by their accents, their culture of meat life, extended carnivory and advanced barbeque technique say more about the overall culture. When Sally's non stop screaming ordeal at the table takes place, its base is butchery.
Hooper and co. are inviting us to examine what's on the end of our forks, how the sausage is made. When the crew in the Kombi go past the slaughterhouse they talk of things like head cheese. Franklin says to his sister that she'd probably like it if she didn't know how they make it. One of the others wants them to stop talking about slaughter methods because she likes meat. The interspersed shots of cattle in metal enclosures contain no violence done to them but there doesn't need to be any shown. We know what's going to happen to them. As a result the sight of them is profoundly eerie.
And that's the thing about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: eeriness. For all its violence (only a little of it actually done with a chainsaw) and screaming nightmarish panic, it remains a film of shivers. There is no bargaining with the family; they are on a course of generations' standing and will not change. The realisation that their celebratory slaughter is only an slightly sharper point poking from the national culture, is a shiver. The blood is just the colour of the makeup.
Viewing notes: I saw this on Second Sight's fantastic 4K disc but it is available for free through Brollie, by subscription through Shudder and rentable form the usual spots.
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