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Yes, it’s about murderous cannibals – but this 50-year-old shoestring slasher is also a masterful critique of post-industrial capitalism
There is no face in cinema quite like it. It belongs to a young woman – Marilyn Burns, just turned 25 – hunkered down in the cargo bed of a speeding pickup truck.
Her beauty is obscured by the blood that runs from forehead to jaw, matting the hair. Her mouth is so wide, her teeth so bared that her expression is almost apelike – a rictus of terror, or grin of animal rage.
Horror cinema is full of fearful faces. But this one is different, because it shows both the victim and her prison in one. You don’t have to have seen the preceding 83 minutes to know that its owner has fled from something unfathomably dreadful – or to realise that no matter how far or fast that truck drives, she will never shake it off.
The image is a parting swipe from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: the shoestring slasher released 50 years ago this month, from which cinema itself may never escape. The thing sits at the centre of the medium’s history like a churning black hole.
Its influence on horror seems obvious: by rewriting the rules on what was filmable, Tobe Hooper’s 1974 masterpiece transformed a grubby gutter genre into one that was simultaneously head-spinningly radical and deeply conservative. It paved the way for the slasher-movie spree in the years ahead. And it established cinema’s “final girl” trope, in which the only way to survive a killer’s rampage was to be a virginal young woman who was far too nice to avail herself of the decade’s new freedoms. (Take that, second-wave feminism.)
Look more closely, though, and the film’s legacy is harder to parse. Was it the first slasher movie? Its villain, Leatherface, kickstarted the craze for mute, masked fiends who skewer packs of screaming youths.
But the slashers of the following decade – Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and the franchises they spawned – centred on lone killers who stalked their teenage victims through the American suburbs, with the underage drinkers and premarital lovers typically getting picked off first. (Talk about the ultimate Reaganite folk myth.)
The model for Hooper’s plot, on the other hand, was pre-cinema; even pre-America. It’s a tale of the children who get lost in the wilds, then stumble upon a strange house whose outcast owner beckons them in, while sizing them up for the pot.
Hooper was a part-time filmmaker and TV cameraman in his late 20s when he asked his friend Kim Henkel: Why don’t we write a present-day adaptation of Hansel and Gretel? Hooper had already directed one feature, Eggshells (1969), which mulled the latter years of the Vietnam War from the perspective of hippies living in a haunted house just north of Austin.
Horror was a ruptured genre. Studio-backed, auteur-made projects such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1973) drew huge audiences and won awards. But beneath them heaved a swamp of cheaply made shockers, held in a lower regard even than pornography – which was then enjoying a phase of chic semi-respectability, thanks to the mainstream success of Deep Throat (1972). And with no budget, stars or reputation to speak of, that swamp was the only place in which Hooper could work.
Not that there was a shortage of real-world material to draw on. A thread of serial killing had long run through American life, but in the 1960s and 1970s it entered a heyday of notoriety. Blame the domestic violence that rolled through so many post-war childhoods, and the anonymity of late mid-century life.
In 1957, the country had been gripped by the case of Ed Gein, a Wisconsin farmer who murdered two women and stole bodies from the local graveyard, fashioning clothing from their bones and skin, including a full-body “woman suit” and a series of facial skins, peeled and cured for use as masks. Gein’s story had already inspired the novel that became Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho. It also helped shape Hooper and Henkel’s script, along with the Houston Mass Murders of the early 1970s, in which the heir to a small Texas sweet factory, Dean Corll, abducted, raped, tortured and killed at least 28 boys and young men, with the help of two teenage accomplices.
Hooper’s film begins with a claim that the events depicted actually took place. It isn’t true, but audiences surely shrugged and thought, why not? Even the title – The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – lands with the thud of a tabloid headline.
Five youngsters on a drive run out of fuel. They call at a remote house for help. A large man wearing a skin mask – a member of an all-male clan of butchers left unemployed by automation – pounces on and dismembers four of them. After a prolonged and traumatising ordeal, the fifth youth, a female, eventually flees. No undead demons, indestructible stalkers, or gamma rays from outer space. The horror here was all human.
Even in the liberated 1970s, its contents were considered extreme. The Los Angeles Times described it as “despicable… ugly and obscene… a degrading, senseless misuse of film and time”. But two notable earlier works had readied the ground.
One was the classic zombie horror Night of the Living Dead (1968) – made for $114,000 by another TV camera operator, George A Romero, in Pennsylvania, far from Hollywood. The other, released to widespread acclaim in 1972, was John Boorman’s Deliverance – a baleful wilderness parable in which rural America, both patronised and bled dry, bites back at four swaggering urban intruders.
Hooper’s film married the latter’s timely thematic charge to the former’s worldview-shattering despair. In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s opening credits, over abstract footage of solar flares, a newsreader reports on catastrophic refinery fires, a cholera outbreak, and a wave of suicides triggered by a television outage. This was not suburban slasherville. It was the apocalypse opening its jaws, and the kids in the minibus were meals on wheels.
Except, in this case, it isn’t right-on protesters who are eating the rich. Post-industrial capitalism was in full swing, and the Sawyer household – three generations of slaughterhouse workers – were among those it had callously left behind. (Though in a sense they’d just transitioned to working from home.)
Yes, all right, so they were murderous cannibals. But at least they all still got around the table every night and shared a home-cooked meal. As a new generation of self-obsessed young whingers asserted itself across the US, were Leatherface and his kin the old-fashioned nuclear family’s last stand?
Or was the whole thing an allegory for the 1973 oil crisis? After all, Texas was home to the original black gold boomtowns, and the youngsters’ desperation for fuel is what ultimately condemns them.
Or could its eruptions of violence be traced back to the Vietnam War, from where real-life atrocities were being piped nightly onto American television screens?
Whether or not you held the film to be filth, it had to be admitted that it was sufficiently engaged with the world to also qualify as art. And the Bryanston Distributing Company, which had made a blockbuster of Deep Throat, snapped it up for $225,000 plus a 35 per cent cut of the profits and sold it as both. Word got out that a number of prominent politicians would be attending a special screening of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three in San Francisco, so Bryanston reportedly pressed the theatre to programme Chain Saw as the second feature.
Out west, outrage erupted – while on the East Coast, New York’s Museum of Modern Art took a print into its permanent collection. It was banned in Brazil, Ireland, most of Scandinavia and France – and also selected for Cannes.
In the UK, it was shown to the British Board of Film Censors in early 1975. The board declined to grant it a certificate, but its secretary, Stephen Murphy, noted in a letter that this was more than schlock, writing: “It’s a very good film which we must take seriously.”
It also cleverly tricks you into thinking you see more than you do. The first act of violence – Edwin Neal’s hitchhiker grinningly slitting his palm with a penknife – is shown in retch-inducing plain sight. But what follows is more alluded to than graphically depicted. The notorious meathook sequence is a wonder of editing to compare with Psycho’s shower stabbing. The pre-existing splatters of blood on the wall, the glint of light on the metal, Teri McMinn’s gape of agony and fright, all combine to make you swear you actually saw its point piercing her back.
In the following decade, Murphy’s successor, James Ferman, also refused to certify a film he described as “the pornography of terror” – and it was only passed by the BBFC as an 18 certificate in 1999. Hooper’s film may have just turned 50, but here, in legal terms, it’s barely 25.
All this time later, why is cinema still caught between Chain Saw’s teeth? Largely because the thing is inimitable. Every horror filmmaker alive has seen it, but vanishingly few have dared follow in its footsteps. Wes Craven did, brilliantly, in 1977’s The Hills Have Eyes. Rob Schmidt paid homage in Wrong Turn (2003).
But while you can hear Chain Saw’s rattle in other national spins on the backwoods freakout – such as the UK’s Eden Lake (2008) – its ideas had already been dragged as far as they could go. It left little room for successors.
The various modern remakes smother the documentary quality of the initial film’s terror under a layer of studio gloss. And even its most brazen spiritual successor, Ti West’s X (2022) – which begins with a blue-movie crew pulling up to a lonely Texas farmstead – is keener to revel in the visual texture of the time than compete with the protracted depravity of Hooper’s blood-smeared opus.
As Hooper and Henkel were both keenly aware, the shock of the first was unrepeatable. After Chain Saw’s release, Hooper broke into Hollywood, where he made a string of chillers, including Poltergeist (1982): a job for which he was selected by Steven Spielberg. But when in 1981 he finally agreed to a Chain Saw sequel, he and screenwriter L M Kit Carson, of Paris, Texas fame, knew they had to take a different angle of attack.
In place of 1974’s nihilistic menace, they cooked up a grotesque funhouse romp: fans abhorred it, though later reappraised it on its own blackly comic terms. Meanwhile, Henkel’s self-directed Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, released in 1995 and starring a pre-fame Renée Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey, was an ironised, self-aware slasher in what would soon become the Scream tradition. (It’s not bad, but nor is it really a Texas Chain Saw Massacre film.)
So, the original stands alone, like that white timber farmhouse at the top of the uncovered drive. It might look as if nobody’s home, but listen carefully and you may hear the noise of a motor in the nearby barn. The abattoir is still in business.
4/5
4/5