The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) - film review

Worried that their grandfather’s grave may have been desecrated by a maniac, Sally Hardesty and her wheelchair-bound brother Franklin visit the Texas cemetery where he is buried.  They are accompanied by their hippie friends, Jerry, Kirk and Pam, and plan to take a few days’ holiday at the old Hardesty homestead.  On the way, they pick up a hitchhiker whose erratic behaviour soon unnerves them.  When the hitchhiker attacks Franklin with a cut-throat razor, the friends eject him from their van.  Once the group has arrived at the Hardesty house, Kirk and Pam go for a walk and come across another house.  Hoping to buy some petrol from the house’s owner, Kirk goes inside and is instantly butchered by a man in an apron and what looks like a Halloween mask.  Pam suffers a similar fate.  Anxious over the disappearance of his two friends, Jerry goes to look for them, enters the house in which they were killed and becomes Leatherface’s third victim of the day.  By nightfall, Sally and Franklin realise that their friends may be in danger and set out to find them.  Wielding a whirring chainsaw, Leatherface appears from nowhere and starts slicing up Franklin, giving Sally time to make her escape through the woods.  She comes across a house and hurries inside, not realising that this is the very same house in which her three friends met their gruesome end.  Is she to be the next victim..?

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is one of three films which completely redefined the horror genre in the late sixties and early seventies, giving birth to a new kind of horror film which made the classic Gothic horror movie and its ilk a thing of the past.   Along with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), this was a film that would rip the guts out of the conventions of the genre and show just how terrifying a horror film could be.  The story it tells is loosely based on the real-life exploits of Wisconsin farmer Ed Gein, who also provided the inspiration for Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).  It engendered a spate of similar slasher movies (providing a rich seam for exploitation moviemakers), and continues to influence hoards of filmmakers with a penchant for the macabre and truly scary.  

In common with Romero’s debut film, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was an independent production, made on a ludicrously small budget ($140,000) with an inexperienced cast, but proved to be a phenomenal box office hit, grossing 30 million dollars in the US alone.  Owing to its explicit horror content (which is mild by today’s standards, with barely enough blood to cover a postage stamp), the film was initially banned in many countries, including the United Kingdom and Australia. 

Critical reaction was mixed at the time of its first release but since then its reputation has grown and today it is almost universally recognised as one of the true masterpieces of the horror genre.  Its influence can be seen in virtually all horror films made subsequently, from Halloween (1978) to Scream (1996), and many, many others.  The film itself inspired three direct sequels and a remake – none of which has anything like the extraordinary power of the original film.

Director Tobe Hooper had made just one film prior to this (Eggshells, 1969) and would go to make several notable horror films, including Poltergeist (1982) and the gory sequel The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986).  However, this would be the creative high point of Hooper’s career.  It is the sheer economy and restraint of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, necessitated by its tight budget, which gives it its realism and authenticity, making it a near-perfect example of the suspense horror film.  Having established very early on in the film what the nature of the threat is (in a few brilliantly executed shock scenes), Hooper plays with his audience’s expectations, like a boy maliciously pulling the legs off a centipede, one by one, before biting its head off and spitting the disgusting viscera into our faces.

As in any great horror film, the chills come not from is shown on the screen, but from what we expect to see or imagine we see (which is much more frightening than anything a film crew can ever hope to create).  The last thirty minutes of this cinematic nightmare are probably the  most tension-filled and nerve-wracking of any film, and the occasional excursions into black comedy serve merely to heighten the film’s gruesome appeal.  The film offers one of the most memorable of horror icons, in the shape of the apron-wearing Leatherface brandishing the grisly tools of his trade.

Whilst it may not be apparent on a first viewing, there is a political subtext to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre which gives the film a deeper significance.  The recurring references to animal slaughter and cannibalism imply a thinly veiled pro-vegetarian agenda.  As soon as the hapless hippies drive past the slaughterhouse (watched by cattle that seem to be strangely aware of their fate), they effectively become livestock, destined for someone’s dinner plate.  The victims are not murdered, but slaughtered as though they were animals, by individuals who merely regard them as walking food parcels.  No film could depict greater horrors than those that are enacted behind the walls of an abattoir.  If The Texas Chain Saw Massacre shocks us then perhaps we should reassess our values and possibly consider a change of diet...

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