Texas Chainsaw Massacre for a very, very long time has been known as one of the originators of the slasher-style horror movies, and is as truly “classic” as a horror movie can be. I already knew so much about the movie, but sadly had never actually seen the whole thing… until now.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre follows a group of five (I’m guessing) twenty-something kids as they are going to check out their old family house in Texas. As the movie opens the viewer is told there has been some gruesome grave robbing and some of the corpses have been posed oddly in a graveyard. The kids stop by the graveyard to make sure that remains of two of the kids’s grandfather have not been disturbed. Further down the road, they stop to pick up a hitchhiker. Almost immediately the trip for these kids goes from bad to worse as the hitcher, described by one of the kids (Franklin) as “Dracula”, proceeds to cut himself deeply on his hand, purposely. He then takes a picture (apparently pretty poorly) of the group and demands $2 for it. When the others refuse to pay him, he lights it on fire and then cuts Franklin on the arm with a straight razor. The hitcher is then rightfully thrown from the van as the kids continue on their way.
Once the group finds the old homestead, they begin searching around inside the broken down house and talking about growing up in it. A pair of the kids breaks off and decides to find an old “swimming hole” out back. They instead find a dried up hole and an old farm house. The two figure that they can probably get some gas from the person living there and go to investigate. This was the second mistake they made, and obviously, the most costly.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre is almost forty years old, at this point. It was made in a months time, and at a (disputed) cost of anywhere from $90K to $300K dollars. It grossed over thirty MILLION dollars. Adjusting for inflation, that is close to $150 million dollars back then. That’s an insane profit margin. TCM spawned, no doubt, a myriad of imitators and an entirely new genre of horror movies. There’s no denying that it left a huge mark on the major motion picture industry.
As a fan of just about every kind of horror movie, it is very embarrassing to admit that I had never seen the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And when I say “original” I mean just that. I have seen a couple of the sequels, including the completely bat-shit crazy TCM: The Next Generation and at least one of the more recent reboots. I knew a lot about the movie, but had never actually seen it from start to finish. I can honestly say that now that I have seen it, I get it. I understand the appeal. I see why there were so many imitators.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in a word, is disturbing. Everything about it, including production. The idea of working in one hundred plus degree weather for twelve to sixteen hours a day for a month is bad enough. Then you add on top of that all the real life rotting animals, real blood, and filming in a house with no ventilation. That’s old school. They literally don’t make them like that anymore. At one point in the film I was actually thinking more about the production than the movie itself, as Leatherface runs wildly around in the middle of the night carrying a running chainsaw. Ballsy.
Besides the production of the actual movie, what is displayed on film is disturbing as well. Way before the days of “torture-porn” horror movies, this must have been very distressing and horrifying to viewers. The movie is portrayed as being based on real events, though this is basically a flat out lie, the killer, “Leatherface” is based around Ed Gein. Gein was, in fact, a guy that skinned humans, kept skulls for eating out of, and had boxes of human body parts like ears and nipples.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre plays up the isolation and brutality to such a high degree that it’s easy to see why this was such a scary movie in 1974. By the end when it is just Sally left with the family of psychos, you can see not only the fear of death but psychosis of both her character and the rest of the cast. The close-up shots of Sally’s face, and more importantly her eyes, capture that feeling of helplessness. At the end of the film, I have to hand it to Marilyn Burns (who plays Sally) for coming across on film as someone that has lost her mind.
I truly enjoyed watching this film. As evident by my unopened drink beside my bed. What I mean by that is, I was so caught up in watching the movie that I could not tear my eyes away enough to reach for it, nor did I want to pause the movie to accomplish this simple and quick task of opening a can of soda. As I said before, I get it now. This movie is wonderful, and I don’t use that word very often. I am sad that it took me thirty five years to see it in its entirety, but could not be happier having seen it now.
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