The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(1974)
"The films I liked were
European films—Fellini, Antonioni, Truffaut—and I didn't see any reason why, if
I delivered the fear and the tension, it couldn't be a good motion picture.
With characters. Like a painting is a painting. And if it's good, it
lasts."
-
Director Tobe Hooper
In just a few short
years, starting with the release of Director George Romero’s “The Night of the
Living Dead” (1968), a remarkable sea-change swept over Horror cinema.
There was much more
explicit Sex and Violence, a trend that started earlier, England’s Hammer Studios’
Gothic Thrillers, but now that trend was exploding from behind the crumbling dams
of Censorship, while at same time the Gothic-stylings that been recently been used
to justify the increasing explicitness were becoming unfashionable. The newer films
became more contemporary in setting while Hammer, itself, had slipped into deep
financial trouble.
In the USA, our
Master of Gothic-style Horror, Roger Corman, had taken up more Producing than Directing
obligations, founded New World Pictures, switched his focus from Horror to Crime
and Biker movies, and even more importantly, he because the USA’s premier Distributor
of International Directors like Ingmar Bergman,
François Truffaut, Peter Weir, Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa.
With the fading of
Hammer and the partial disappearance of Corman from the Director chair, a
vacuum was forming, and young Filmmakers, some with bold new ideas, were
pouring in to fill it.
This was evidenced by fringes
of the cinema the sleazy “Grindhouse” market pouring in towards the center. The
term first applied to Sexploitation movies, but as they soon had to compete
with more fully-realized (and recently legalized) Pornography, so the
Grindhouse increasingly shifted from exploitive Sex to exploitive Violence
(with some sex). Some of these marginalia found surprising financial success while
more traditional Horror-fare became increasingly impoverished.
Then came 1974, the
year that gave the birth of the Horror sub-genre of the Slasher film -- cheaply
made, minimally plotted, nearly Grindhouse-level in their gratuitous Sex and Violence,
high-Body-Count, Serial Killer Thrillers pitched to a teen-and-college-aged
audience. What I call the first “true” Slasher was released that year, Bob
Clark’s hugely influential (though only modestly successful) “Black Christmas,”
which proved the template hundreds of films that flooded the market for the
next decades. Interestingly, starting with “Black Christmas” and “Halloween” (1978,
and heavily influenced by “Black Christmas”) Slasher films tended to get
nominally more respectable distribution than the Grindhouse, so the popularity
of the Slasher very likely played a role in the rawer Grindhouse’s market’s
demise.
Just a few months before
“Black Christmas” was released, there was a far more gruesome, almost-Slasher, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," and that one was pure Grindhouse. It was even more minimally plotted, with far less
interested in Character development or any of the other conventional elements
of narrative than “Black Christmas,” yet it also proved to be more immediately
successful and even more influential.
In the former case, what
other filmmakers took were story-points and narrative structure, but in the
latter, other filmmakers fell in love with Director and co-Writer Tobe Hooper’s
eye. “Black Christmas” was a stripped-down Whodunnit, “Texas…” was an intense,
irrational, Fever-Dream. What it lacked in traditional narrative virtues, in
made up for in intensity and invention. Both films are notable that they were
far better in realization than a quick outline would suggest, but with “Texas…”
that was more pronounced – it really should’ve been unwatchable, but instead it
proved to be unforgettable.
I admit it took me a
ridiculously long time to finally break-down and watch this thing. I knew the
basic conceit and was bored by it without even seeing. I started watching films
with a more critical eye in the early 1980s and found most things Slasher-related
mind-numbing, and this had less story than most Slashers. In my delay, I
probably lucked-out, because I didn’t see it until after the 2014 restoration.
Earlier, I likely would’ve seen a shabby, bleached print. The movie has an
exquisite color-pallet, and a bad print would’ve lost far too much of the
consummate, if shoe-string, craftmanship.
Its marketing,
starting with the title, promised nothing but the most visceral exploitation,
and it did deliver (from the poster, "Who will
survive, and what will be left of them?").
There’s a brilliance even in this crassness, because anyone who goes to see a movie named, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”
knew exactly what they’re getting into, and they got it, but presented with
more skill and panache than that audience could’ve predicted, or perhaps even
deserved.
It boldly pronounced
that it “based on a true story” which was false, and that was a well-known
Grindhouse ploy even before 1974. Though Hooper and his co-Writer Kim Henkel were somewhat influenced by Real-Life Serial Killer,
Ed Gein, who also inspired the more respectable “Psycho”
(1960), but here, that influence was nominal. The real inspiration was
isolation of the Central Texas landscape and the phenomenal success of “Night
of the…” and a couple of other films I’ll address later, which made many young
film-makers hungry for new Taboos to break.
By 1974, Horror film
was rapidly running out of fresh-seeming Taboos, but Cannibalism still seemed
to have some teeth (pardon the pun). Also, the earlier Gein-inspired film
hadn’t exploited the sick man’s hobby of exhuming corpses from local graveyards
and fashioning clothing and other keepsakes from their bones and skin, so Hooper
and Henkel felt the world was ready for that.
(1974 saw another film
inspired by Gein, still a fiction, but following
the Gein life-story a bit more closely, Alan Ormsby and Jeff Gillen’s “Deranged.”)
So, the plot of “The
Texas Chainsaw…” such as it is:
It opens with a montage
and a serious-sounding voice-over. The montage is creepy, with flash-bulbs
popping, labored breathing, digging sounds, rotting fingers with pointy nails,
liquefying skin and crooked teeth within lips reduced to something gelatin-like,
sunspots, and a dead armadillo by the side of the road (fun fact: armadillos
can transmit leprosy to humans). The voice-over (provided by the great John
Larroquette, who does not appear in the film as a Character) promises, "an
account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths, in particular Sally
Hardesty and her disabled brother, Franklin…[who] could not have expected nor
would they have wished to see as much of the mad and macabre as they were to
see that day…an idyllic summer afternoon drive became a nightmare…the discovery
of one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history."
A very specific date is
given for the film's events, August 18th, 1973.” This was an
in-joke, that was a few days after the film's primary-shooting ended.
Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns), her paraplegic
brother Franklin (Paul A. Partain), and their
friends, Jerry (Allen Danziger), Kirk (William
Vail), and Pam (Teri McMinn) are on a road trip
that is presented as fairly mundane except what triggered it, the Hardesty’s have
gotten word that the family’s old homestead had been subject to vandalism and
grave-robbing. They and their friends were driving into increasingly rural
country to examine the damage to family’s abandoned properties that none had
seen in many a year. These are nice kids, chatting, and to some degree,
annoying each other. Their reality is detached from the morbidity of the reports
of violence that are part of every day’s radio-news fair. They have no reason
to suspect they are at any risk…
Or at least until
they the encounter a Hitchhiker (Edwin Neal).
The Hitchhiker
quickly proves Mentally Unstable and Violent. They toss his out of the van and
drive on. They are shaken by the experience, but try to shrug it off. (He
slashed one on the arm, I would’ve gone to an ER and called the Cops, but not these
kids.) They think they’ve left to loony in the dust and are completely unaware
that they, themselves, have crossed some experiential line and from now on, essentially
everyone they encounter for the rest of the film will be Violently Insane. On the
TV show, “The Twilight Zone” (first aired 1959), Rod Sterling used to say,
“There’s a road sign up ahead, next stop ‘The Twilight Zone.’” For these kids,
there was no road sign, their reality has just simply, abruptly, ceased to be.
“The Texas Chainsaw …”
treated its Violence differently than “Black Christmas” though both relied
heavily on the disorientating fear that you can be muddling through you
every-day averageness, wholly unaware that the Violent Unknown is crashing into
it. A key stylistic element of nearly-all Slashers is that they encourage us to
take us the killers POV during the stalking sequences, that’s abundant in
“Black Christmas” but not much on display here.
Generally, in a
Slasher, violent scenes are interspersed with scenes of the increasing unease
of the intended Victims has they cope, or fail to cope, with the threat they
are becoming increasingly aware of; Slasher’s too often rely on awkward plot
mechanics that are generally supported by the Character doing SPTs (Stupid
People Tricks), wherein which the victims help sustain the Body-Count by
showing a complete lack of common sense. That’s also not true in this film
because the Killer (eventually Killers) isn’t hunting like a wolf, but a
spider, waiting for the unaware Victims to walk into the web, and striking with
quick efficiency. Three out of the five main characters are already dead before
the remaining two are aware that there’s a crisis.
Part of the trap is
the Proprietor of the local Gas Station and BBQ stand (Jim Siedow), who tells them the pumps are empty. This will
make the trip back difficult, but this should be nothing more than an inconvenience,
stranding the five youths overnight until the next fuel delivery arrives.
The youths arrive at
the homestead, which was abandoned, as expected, but inside the house they find
evidence, in the form of odd totems on strings, indicating fairly recent and
unwanted habitation. Kirk and Pam trek on foot towards what Franklin described
as the local swimming hole, but then they pass what seems to be a local shop
and, as they are also low on gas, Kirk not unreasonably approaches to ask for
help.
CHOMP.
Pam follows in to
see where he disappeared to.
CHOMP, initially
non-fatal, she will be tortured for a while too.
As the sun is
beginning to set, Jerry goes looking for Kirk and Pam.
CHOMP.
Three dead and not a
single SPT. Finally, Sally realizes somethings wrong, but has no way for her to
know what is actually going on. Even if she had enough gas, she couldn’t drive
away and leave her friends behind, and she’s such a small, waif-like thing, tasked
with protecting her wheelchair-bound brother in this place with few houses, no visible
pedestrians, and no paved roads.
Sally and Franklin go
yet another nearby house to ask to use a telephone.
Franklin gets
CHOMPED (well, technically, chain-sawed).
Sally escapes the Killer
and runs back to the Gas Station, a logical move, the only thing even hinting
of civilization for many miles. She is understandably hysterical, and the Proprietor
assures her, "You have nothing to worry about. You just take
it easy now."
Nope.
From
an article in Total Film magazine, "The only thing more terrifying than
the opening 50 minutes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is the last 30."
Slasher’s were
derivative of what came before, but mostly derivative of each other. 1974 set
up all the sub-Genre’s “instant clichés.” These are more obvious in “Black
Christmas,” but many are present here as well. But the thing is, after Sally
gets trapped a second time, “Texas…” moves away from that territory and into
something that is Darker, more Surreal, and flirts with the Satirical (though
it’s far-less thoughtful in its Social Commentary as “Night of the…”).
The Proprietor assaults and ties up Sally, shoves her into a sack,
and takes her home to meet his family. This family includes the fore-mentioned Hitchhiker,
a grandfather who at first seems dead (John Dugan), and the Beast that has already, single-handedly, murdered all
her friends.
That Beast has come
to be known as “Leatherface” because he wears a mask that is made of the tanned
flesh of human corpses. He can’t speak, so he communicates through moronic
grunts and squeals. He is monstrously huge, (the actor, Gunnar Hansen was 6’4”). Of no small
significance, he’s dressed in women’s clothes during the dinner scene. These
are all deeply depraved men with no mitigating feminine influences. Sally
forced to sit down and have a meal with them, mouth tape-closed, tied to a
chair whose arms are made of, well, human arms, watching the family’s antics in
mute Terror. She knows full-well that at some point during this long night she
will cease to be a guest and become the main course.
The weird family
bicker with each other as much as they abuse Sally, and perversely mimic the
division of labor within a conventional Nuclear Family, where all have become
care-givers for the crippled grandfather, the Gas Station Proprietor is the
father-figure trying to control the behavior of the Hitchhiker, essentially a disobedient
son, and Leatherface is, if not the mother, at least the domestic, and somehow
he is the most perverse of the Monsters because he’s a man preforming female
duties.
Grandpa surprises us by
displaying that he’s not completely dead. As Isabel Cristina Pinedo wrote, "The
horror genre must keep terror and comedy in tension if it is to successfully
tread the thin line that separates it from terrorism and parody ... this
delicate balance is struck in ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ in which the
decaying corpse of Grandpa not only incorporates horrific and humorous effects,
but actually uses one to exacerbate the other.”
Wrote Kim Newman, “[Hooper’s] degenerates are a parody of the typical sit com family,
with the bread-winning, long-suffering Gas Man as Pop, the preening, bewigged,
apron-wearing Leatherface as Mom, and the rebellious, long-haired Hitch as the
teenage son. Their house is a similarly overdone, degraded mirror of the ideal
home.”
Musician and film Director Rob Zombie discussed this scene with
an interviewer, "One thing I really love is that the villains in the movie
are so charismatic and so insane. Rather than be just these faceless killers
who are boring, you're swept up in their own family drama. Between themselves.
They're torturing themselves as much as they're torturing their victims. And
the actors: You're watching them and going, 'I don't know, are they
actors?' They're so convincing and you'd never seen them in anything else that
you go, 'I don't know. Maybe that guy's real...' You'd see these movies and it
really seemed like they were being made by a maniac. Like the director is going
to do anything he can to fuck with your head. You're not safe watching this
movie, so beware!"
Despite this
sections’ comedic elements, it may represent the longest scene of sustained panic ever captured by cinema, full of the
vicarious thrill of the family’s madness and Sally’s unrelenting terror that
there is no escape. Marilyn Burns may have proved herself the ultimate Scream-Queen
as quick, sharp, edits show us her reactions to the darkening Hell around her,
including repeated close-ups of her bulging eyes.
Fay Wray from
Hollywood’s Golden Age (1930s-40s) was often praised for her capacity to
project sheer Terror, but the whole of that legendary Actress’ resume pales
compared to this one episode. We feel Sally’s psychological and physical trauma,
not in the least because this scene is exceptionally long. In story-time, the
dinner drags on for hours, even in the film’s running time it is remarkably
long, somewhere shy of ten minutes. It is close to unbearable, but the
brilliance is that this exact version of unbearable was clearly intended.
Some Directors are
notorious for their abusive treatment of their Casts (Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley
Kubrick) while others are much beloved by almost all who work with them (Billy
Wilder, John Carpenter). From interviews I read, Hooper wanted to be a Wilder
or a Carpenter, but things didn’t work out that way.
One of the
consequences of a shoe-string budget is tighter shooting schedules because of
the accumulating costs of rented equipment. Everyone involved in this film had
to endure abominably long work days, in the middle-of-nowhere, Central Texas.
In 100* heat. And high humidity.
Actor Hansen, who played
Leatherface, is often asked if the filming was fun? "Not a bit of
it." He had to wear a latex mask and often a wool suit.
Hanson admits it was worse
for Actress Burns, “The whole dinner scene is burned in my memory, I think just
because of the misery of it. At that point we were really just on the verge of
mental collapse. And Marilyn told me about how awful it was for her, because
she was terrified... Just being tied to a chair and then having these men
looming over her constantly, she said it was really unnerving. I think that
whole scene was certainly the most intense part of the movie and I think all of
us were slightly insane by then."
That scene took 26 hours
to shoot.
Hooper added, "My
memory of shooting this film is that it was miserable and hot and very hard
work…By the time I finished the film, I think everyone hated me. Because I knew
what I wanted and I knew how to get it."
Maybe it was better than
that, most of the people who worked with Hooper here did work with him on later
projects. Hansen again, "It's an odd sort of thing, the first time I saw
him years later he actually was clearly nervous that I had walked into the room
and he sort of backed away. And I wondered about that because I thought he was
really good to work with. I mean he was very demanding in the sense that he had
a very clear vision of how he wanted to shoot a scene, but great. He's the kind
of director who focused on getting the shot framed, getting the shot lit, and
blocking the scene. So, he let the actors really be free. It was up to me to
create Leatherface. He'd tell me what Leatherface's state of mind was, but he
didn't tell me how he wanted me to create that. I think any actor appreciates
that, so I had no bad feelings toward Tobe at all."
Ultimately, Sally does escape, but is chased by
Leatherface. A passing trucker (Ed Guinn, the film’s only black character, and
I suspect that was a deliberate choice) attempts to help her, but things don’t go well for him; he seems to escape, but
that’s uncertain, and did so without Sally.
Another random driver (this
actor was never credited), this time in a pickup truck, does manage to secure
her escape, but by this point Sally has collapsed into completely incoherent
hysterics, and who could blame her?
The final image is
perversely poetic. It is a raging Leatherface, now dressed in a suit and tie,
inarticulately raging, and waving his chainsaw at the sky.
Throughout, we’re
carried by a bizarre and un-nerving score by Hooper and Composer Wayne Bell.
There is also great visual sensitivity to the dry and desolate landscape.
Complex framing devises executed flawlessly by Cinematographer Daniel Pearl. Perhaps
best of all was the work of Production Designer Bob Burns who overwhelms us
with detail (there are rooms full of strange altars made from
human bones, and other rooms filled with chicken feathers and charms and weird
relics, and so much more). All of this enrich the experience which was not
especially intellectual, but viscerally emotional, in a way few films have ever
managed.
Though “The Texas
Chainsaw …” is among the most gruesome motion pictures ever made, I would be
remiss in my duties if I didn’t point out, it was also all-but bloodless in its
violence. Hooper sets up his mannerism with his first kill:
Kirk enters the house
through an unlocked door and calls out for the owners as he walks away from the
camera, down a long hall. There’s a room there, well-lit compared to the rest
of the gloom, painted bright red, contrasting to the soft blue walls of the
halls, and decorated with hunting trophies. As Kirk steps into the room, he
stumbles, and suddenly Leatherface looms above him. Leatherface clubs Kirk with
a hammer, the impacts obscured by Kirk’s body as the camera behind him. Then Leatherface
slides a metal door shut as if slamming the gate to Hell. Hooper composing the
scene using the Victim’s own body to block the Gore, which also re-enforced the
Victim’s helplessness, and this composition will be used again when Franklin,
the only Character actually killed with a chainsaw, is cut to shreds without a
drop a visible blood.
So “Texas…” doesn’t really
have a “Chainsaw Massacre.” Hooper’s influences included far-more explicit
Grindhouse-gore, especially Hershel Gordon Lewis’ “10,000 Maniacs” (1964) and
Wes Craven’s “The Last House on the Left” (1972). The former being sick,
disgusting, largely incompetent, and stupider than cheese; and the latter being
sick, disgusting, largely incompetent but with some narrative and creative
ambition.
The restraint regarding
blood is because Hooper somehow got it into his head he could make the grizzliest
PG-rated movie in history. This ludicrous ambition proved a creative
master-stroke, because the manner of the Violence plays deeper into the Imagination,
we in the audience see more than we’re actually being shown. More respectable
films like Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960) and John Carpenter’s “Halloween,”
are justly famous for doing just this.
French Director Alexandre
Aja observed, "It's the editing,
the rawness, the craziness of what you see that makes the experience so
intense. Your mind creates what you don't see in the movie and fills in
the gaps to see all the 'massacre' that Hooper doesn't actually show
onscreen."
Hooper didn’t get his
PG; in fact, he was notoriously censored. In the USA, its rating waffled
between R and X. A few theater owners were threatened with arrest for showing
it. In England, the Director of the British Board of
Film Classification, James Ferman, announced that he was not only going to
ban the film, he was not open to negotiating his position the filmmakers
agreeing to remove of any particular scene or scenes, the film totality was
beyond the pale. This ban would stay into effect until 1999.
The critical
response at the time was largely hostile, Linda Gross called it “despicable,” and
I guess that was not inappropriate. But the more positive reviews were
especially interesting, because it was clear they really didn’t know what to do
with it. “Night of the…” was a film that one could present a defensible
argument for, but “The Texas Chainsaw…” was pure trash elevated only by the
uniqueness of the experience that obvious hands of a master molding your
emotions. Wrote Roger Ebert, “It's also without any apparent purpose, unless
the creation of disgust and fright is a purpose. And yet in its own way, the
movie is some kind of weird, off-the-wall achievement. I can't imagine why
anyone would want to make a movie like this, and yet it's well-made,
well-acted, and all too effective.”
Years later, Jesse Stommel drew
substantive comparisons between “The Texas Chainsaw…” and “Halloween” (still a few
years in the future), “‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ is revolting to look at, and the film
lures its viewer into gazing at the various frames with sick fascination.
‘Halloween,’ on the other hand, is a marvel to look at, with nearly every frame
being something you could imagine on a gallery wall. The colors in Carpenter's
film are rich, the lighting is bold, and the use of anamorphic format makes the
environment of each frame feel truly expansive, as though there is always more
to see in every image. By contrast, the frames in ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’
feel busy, claustrophobic, and at times downright ugly (albeit intentionally
so). While the two films use very different methods, they both comment on our
desire to look, our fascination with the repugnancy and occasional beauty of
dead flesh and bodies in pain.”
It would be fair to
say that cinema is a reactive, instead of a progressive media. Landmark films
on Social Issues respond to breaking points in the cultural Zeitgeist, they are
almost never ahead of the game. “Different from the Others” (1919) was a gay
rights protest film that disappeared into immediate obscurity, but decades
later, “The Boys in the Band” (1970) was a revolutionary hit because the
audience was ready for it.
Regarding Horror film, Christopher
Sharrett made a good argument that the changes in cinema reflected, not led,
the changes in the world outside the cinema by linking two Ed Gein-inspired
films. Regarding Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” he said it was uniquely "about the
fundamental validity of the American civilizing process" while the rawer “The
Texas Chainsaw…” amplified the same because of the "delegitimation of
authority in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate…If ‘Psycho’ began an exploration of a
new sense of absurdity in contemporary life, of the collapse of causality and
the diseased underbelly of American Gothic… [“The Texas Chainsaw…”] carries
this exploration to a logical conclusion, addressing many of the issues of
Hitchcock's film while refusing comforting closure."
Neither of these had
the political or social allegory that was obvious in “The Night of …,” but then
“The Night of …” was not especially ideological in its politics either. All
these films were about a more amorphous idea, that the center cannot hold, and in
“The Texas Chainsaw…” maybe the center wasn’t even really the center in the
first place.
Critic Mary Mackey saw this film in
terms of political allegory. I believe his over-states his case, but is his
focus on class-prejudice is dead-on. “On one level ‘CHAINSAW MASSACRE’ is a
neat economic parable something on the order of H.G.Wells’ ‘Time Machine’
[novel, first published 1895]. Five well-fed, complacent rich kids have the
misfortune to meet up with a working class family that converts them into
barbecue. The family, it seems, worked for generations in the local
slaughterhouse until automation (the invention actually of a new, faster, more
humane way to kill the animals) forced wide-spread lay-offs. The unemployed
family, showing true American self-reliance, hasn't gone on welfare. Instead,
the father has set up a small roadside barbecue stand, and the two sons and the
grandfather have proceeded to provide the meat. The meat, in this case, is
tourists—a class of people that, as far as the family is concerned, is no
different than any other breed of cattle. In this film the poor in order to
survive literally eat the rich.”
I want to say, though I am
praising this picture, it is a deeply immoral tale. It wallows in Violence
against women, Abuse of the Disabled, and Class Prejudice that is steeped in USA’s
long tradition of White-on-White racism.
I
found this in an on-line dictionary: “rape culture (noun) a society or
environment whose prevailing social attitudes have the effect of normalizing or
trivializing sexual assault and abuse.”
Yes, Sally does become
assertive, she is the architect of her own escape, not once, but twice, and as
a result is often referred to as “the original ‘Final Girl.’” And though, “Texas…”
doesn’t encourage the (mostly young and male)
audience to fall into the killers POV like most Slashers, but it does encourage
us to laugh along with the Maniacs Torturing Sally during the dinner scene.
Real-World
Violence against women is all-too-common in our society, and a huge proportion
of our media, not just Horror film, is devoted to it. Violence against women is
a more important theme in media with traditionally male audiences than female,
so a huge part of the Crime and Action genres. We often choose to over-look the
fact that when the plot is about a male Hero rescuing a girl it is really about
the Threat of Violence to the girl. Author Susan Griffin is famous for her angrily
titled essay, “Rape: The All-American Crime,” published only three years before
this film was released, “in our culture male eroticism is wedded to power…Not
only should a man be taller and stronger than a female, but he must also
demonstrate his superior strength in gestures of dominance…In the system of
chivalry, men protect women against men. This is not unlike the protection
relationship which the Mafia established with small businesses in the early
part of this century. Indeed, chivalry is an age-old protection racket which
depends for its existence on rape.”
Certainly,
if Violence against women is the subject, it need not be the indulgence, it can
be considered, analyzed, and dissected. Yet another Horror film inspired by Ed
Gein, “Silence of the Lambs” (1991) does just that, but it is hard to make the
case that Hooper has any interest in that here.
“The Texas Chainsaw…”
is unusual that it kills more boys than girls, but there’s no getting around
that it fetishizes the violence against women in a way it doesn’t concerning
the violence against men. Kirk and Jerry don’t get much of a chance to be
scared before they die, and though Franklin does get a chance to be terrorized,
he’s also the most effeminate of the males. Further, he doesn’t suffer as Pam or
Sally, both of whom were cruelly tortured for extended periods.
Though there is no explicit
sexual component to any of the violence, sexual innuendo abounds regarding both
threatened females. This is especially true of poor Sally. The depraved family
talk about what they are going to do to her next (kill her, carve up her
corpse, and eat her) in language that could easily be precursor to a gang-bang
(the men discuss
who to “let have her,” first, and ultimately conclude “let granpa have a whack
at her”).
Then there’s Leatherface,
the biggest Monster, is so clearly abused by his family, and forced to embrace
female work that is meant to demean him. He is clearly Developmentally Disabled,
and that is why the Proprietor and Hitchhiker seem so free to kick him around.
This mirrors how, earlier in the film, no attempt is made to show wheelchair-bound
Franklin in any sympathetic light. We’re supposed to identify with Sally more
than anyone else, and the early parts of the film have us rooting for annoyed Sally
to leave her brother by the side of the road. Actor Paul A. Partain recognized how insufferable his Character was
mean to be, and stayed in Character even between shots. He is sure everyone
hated him before primary shooting was over.
As for White-on-White
racism, the USA’s Petite Bourgeoisie are, to a large degree, the arbiters of
our language, and because of this, there are lessons to be learned from the
structures of our hate-speech. Racism is not only directed towards other ethnic
groups (like Whites hating Blacks) but also the unacceptable members that are
in-group (so Whites hating Whites who demean their own White-ness). The phrases
we most commonly use have more layers of meaning the closer the target is to
ourselves (in this paragraph, “ourselves” assumes that you’re White-like-me).
The worst word for a Black is “Nigger” and any Black is likely to be called
that, including former President Barack Obama. But the worst label applied to
Whites is “White Trash,” a label that Whites that at a certain level of
education and socio-economic class there is an immunity from. Obama’s rival,
Mitt Romney was called a lot of bad things, his Religion was demeaned by
Bigots, but he was rich, so no one dared call him, “White Trash.”
Both of the films
that most directly influenced this one, “10,000 Maniacs” and “The Last House on…,”
were about America’s White Petite Bourgeoisie colliding violently with lesser
versions of Whiteness. As “10,000 Maniacs” concerned Rural, instead of Urban/Suburban,
Degenerates, it is the more instructive.
Don’t bother
watching “10,000 Maniacs” or anything else by Director Lewis, they’re all poor
films, but this one provided a conceit often imitated. All Horror films
concerning the Petite Bourgeoisie colliding with White Trash have the good
White people got into trouble because they drove away from Civilization, and in
this case, five Tourists visit a Deep-South town that is advertising a big Historical
Celebration. They are welcomed with great hospitality by the slightly odd town
folks (not unlike this film’s Proprietor Character), but this doesn’t last … You see, what the town is celebrating
is when the “Damn Yankees” burned the town to the ground and the central event
of the Celebration is when they torture kill of the northerners one-by-one in
revenge for the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy. This film even includes a BBQ
stand that serves human meat.
“10,000 Maniacs” is
credited as being among the very first films to really explicitly exploit this
deep-and-abiding USA prejudice, but there have been so many since, so many that
they’ve earned a collective nick-name, and are therefore their own sub-Genre, “Hicksploitation.”
Critic Ant Bit recently described
“The Texas Chainsaw…” this way, “It is a special dish
from the deep south, once tasted, never forgotten – and now, at a time when
once again there is a Texan family dynasty running a deadly campaign of shock
and awe against any perceived outside threat, Hooper's redneck-fearing
mythology has never seemed more relevant.”
Regarding “The Last
House…” its Director, Wes Craven, had been a first timer, while this was Hooper’s
second feature (I know almost nothing about his first, “Eggshells” (1969)).
Hooper’s film-making skill was lightyears ahead of Craven (and both were Galaxies
beyond Lewis). When Craven saw “The Texas Chainsaw…” he took notice, it left
Craven wondering "what kind of Mansonite crazoid" could make such a
thing. That wasn’t a turn-off though, it filled him with excitement.
Craven’s second feature, “The
Hills Have Eyes” (1977) was superior to “The Last House…” and, in part, a
homage to “The Texas Chainsaw …” He used some of the props from “The Texas
Chainsaw …” as well as Production Designer Bob Burns, and tried to hire
Leatherface Actor Gunner Hanson (Hanson was too busy working on his literary
career, but later regretted not taking this gig).
Leatherface’s wordless, masked, hulking, killing machine was an
obvious influence in the creation of Michael
Myers for Director Carpenter’s “Halloween” and for Character Jason Voorhees for everything
after the third installment of the “Friday the 13th” franchise (first film 1980, third film
1982). The use of color also had an obvious impact on “Halloween.”
Director Zombie (who I will acknowledge is talented, but whose
films I find insufferable) has built a trilogy around a family of depraved killers
that often feels like half-remakes of the “The Texas Chainsaw…” franchise. In
interviews, Zombie gushes praise, "It's just the style that it
was made in. It's beautifully shot—it's that really rough, handheld look.
Usually, movies look like movies. This just looked like you were there."
Director Aja still vividly
remembers the first time he and his Writing and Producing partner Gregory
Levasseur saw the film. "[We] used to go from video club to video club and
empty the shelves of all the horror movies like pirates because at the time in
the early 1990s in France, we couldn't find any great scary movies in the
theater. I remember one summer vacation we watched, almost back-to-back, ‘The
Last House on the Left’ and ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.’ Those two
movies were shocking, unexpected experiences that made a huge impression on us.
In particular, ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ became one of the most
influential movies for me, especially in terms of what I did in the horror
genre afterward."
Other directors who credit this film for influencing them include
Ridley Scott and Guillermo Del Toro, neither of whom have never made a Slasher.
The film’s impact on Del Toro was not merely
artistic, it also convinced him to become a Vegetarian. I waffle about how much
this film deserves to be considered either Political or Social Allegory
(generally, I give it less credit in those categories than the above-cited Mackey) but without doubt it
has become an accidental Political Propaganda film of some significance, and
much has been made of the film’s anti-meat consumption themes.
The quite silly, but still media savvy,
Activist Group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), lists “The Texas
Chainsaw…” as one of the “Top 10 Movies That Make You Go Meatless” and even recommends it as one of the best movies for vegetarian activists to show on College Campuses. Of special interest to PETA is that
when we eat meat we have no idea how it got there.
Early in this film, as the five friends chow down on BBQ obtained from the Proprietor
character, Franklin makes a point of this, but Sally lashes out at him,
“Franklin, I like meat. Please change the subject!”
Perhaps the greatest
measure of this film’s influence is not only the film-makers impressed by it,
but the subsequent changes in our culture. “The Texas Chainsaw…” was broadly
censored, but phenomenally successful. Now, films many times more explicit,
like the “Saw” series (first film 2004) open on thousands of screens the day of
release, and even network TV.
And yes, of course, “The
Texas Chainsaw…” became a franchise of diminishing returns like all good (and
often bad) Horror films seem to. It took a while before the first sequel was
made, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2” (1986). This was the only other entry in
the franchise the Hooper directed, and a disgrace. I’ve only seen parts of some
the six films that followed (so a total of eight, all of them gorier than the
original) while I channel-surf my cable, but their reputations are even worse
than the first sequel.
I should say though,
that the casting of the original and later films is notable. In this film, all
the actors were local and unknowns, yet narrator John Larroquette went on to be
a major Star, and several others went on to fine careers in media, though not
all in front of the camera. Later films in the series featured then-unknowns
Renée Zellweger, Matthew McConaughey and Viggo Mortensen. The casting was
similar in “The Night of the…” and George Romero’s gifted handling of unknown
actors was notable, but the unknowns in the “The Texas Chainsaw…” franchise
fared better professionally than the unknowns in the “Night of the…” franchise.
Both franchises also,
eventually, featured more established Actors, Dennis Hopper was present in both,
but as gifted as Hopper often was, he did no real service in either of these.
Sadly, despite all the
skill and power that Hooper put on display here, his subsequent career has not
been as distinguished. His biggest post- “Texas…” successes were the TV miniseries "Salem's Lot" (1979) and the film “Poltergeist” (1982), though the latter was
rightly more credited to Producer/Screenwriter Steven Spielberg. As for his work after that, they range from largely unknown, to modestly
entertaining but not money makers, to flat-out disastrous. The budgets varied
wildly, and it seems that the ones granted the most money were the worst: “Lifeforce”
(1985, the only actual big-budget), “The Texas Chainsaw … Part 2” “Spontaneous
Combustion” (1989), and “The Mangler” (1995) were all shockingly disappointing.
He died in 2017, four years after his last released film, “Djinn” (2013), which I haven’t seen, but was
both a Critical and Financial failure. Hooper did escape the Grindhouse ghetto,
but he seemed to have fared worse than the other Directors who’d done the same.
One more thing before
I go. The primary filming location was an
early 1900s farmhouse
located on Quick Hill Road near Round Rock, Texas. Many crew members have
stated in interviews that it was only the excellent meals made for them by farmhouse’s
owner made the 16-hour shooting-days bearable. The house was far lovelier than
it appears to be in the film (Bob Burns turned it into a vison of Hell) but
suffered from the isolation of a local economic collapse that fit neatly into
some of the film’s themes.
The house was threatened
by the local economy improving; faced with being bulldozed for a new
development, but was saved by being loaded onto a flatbed and moved to
Kingsland, Texas.
It is now a
restaurant.
That serves meat.
Trailer:
Comments
Post a Comment