Its influences course through the veins of the genre. In the catalog of great horror, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre still holds superior standing.
#THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE HOOKS FULL#
What could be more terrifying for any prey than to be dehumanized and only holding the potential of food for your predators? This is all to say The Texas Chain Saw Massacre earns its grit full stop. The family eats away at humans as a means of sustenance. People get hung from meat hooks like cattle. The treatment of victims as meat for slaughter absolutely chills the senses. We feel his sensual connection to the violence in such an impactful, filthy way. There are few shots more haunting than that of Leatherface sucking his teeth and licking his lips. That the film is informed by an existent evil permeates every corner of its second half, separating it completely from other horror films of the moment. Leatherface and the family themselves feel like credible real-world monsters. Every object feels like it will give you an infection just by looking at it. It has a bleak aesthetic, especially for the time, creating a dark fixation on genuine horror. The point is not whether this could have happened but the constant suggestion that every element of evil exists within our world. Framed as a documentary-the characters at a distance with an objective lens-it holds elements of truthfulness. The film is exceptionally loose in its treatment of a real life monster.
It was brilliantly marketed around its correlation to the true story of Ed Gein (who was also the basis for Psycho, 1960). The reason The Texas Chain Saw Massacre works is its grounding in grit and reality. It has been credited as a signature inspiration for Alien, what is essentially a trucker film done in space. The film insists on movement this way, creating a journey that provides foundational material for so many horror films to follow. We get a deep backwoods feeling from everyone they meet, a suggestion that maybe we have ventured too far into the sticks.
The group is off on vacation and exploring the terrain of Texas country backroads. Half of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a road movie. What’s stood out in the most recent viewing is that the first half is a different movie. Amplifying that with gritty guerrilla-style filmmaking elevates the material to a frightening new threshold. Famously, the film begins with a scroll suggesting this is all based on a true story. Well ahead of the found footage boom, he predicted the modern undercurrent of horror, that what is real and grounded can also be the most terrifying. Director Tobe Hooper found genius in presenting horror as documentary. Let’s be clear: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is in a masterclass of its own.
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