Make no mistake: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was unpleasant in 1974, and between all the shrieking, rural grotesques, and sheets of sweat coating the actors, it’s still uncomfortable to watch 40 years later. Before long, only Sally remains, to scream endlessly into the void. But soon the friends are separated, night descends, and Leatherface is joined by the other members of his family, including a couple of familiar faces from earlier in the story. Most of the action is set during the daytime-although the scenes at night are harrowing, in part because they’re shot with minimal light-and an early scene in which the quintet of heroes easily overpower a creepy hitchhiker suggests they have the advantage over any monster. The first victim walks into the house, peers down the dark foyer toward an open doorway-captured in a nifty series of quick-cuts that get closer and closer-and then before he has a chance to react, he’s twitching on the floor with a massive head-wound.Ī lot about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre defies convention, including the way the official title spells “chainsaw.” Hooper had some pie-in-the-sky idea that he could get a PG rating for the movie, so there’s no nudity, very little profanity, and contrary to what most people who’ve seen the film may recall, relatively little blood and gore. There’s none of the gradual build-up audiences usually experience with horror movies. The murders happen suddenly in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and while Leatherface isn’t graceful, he’s alarmingly quick, which makes the killing all the more unexpected. When two of the Hardestys’ pals make their way to a neighboring house to ask for some help, they’re separately surprised by Leatherface, who brains one with a hammer and hangs the other on a meathook, where she’s forced to watch her companion get hacked up by a chainsaw. Partain) as they take a van trip with three of their shaggy friends to their family’s crumbling old homestead in the country. The movie follows the sweet-natured Sally Hardesty (played by Marilyn Burns) and her obnoxious paraplegic brother Franklin (Paul A. People remember the assaultive part of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre most, though. Hooper fills the background of the movie with banal horrors-radio reports about raging fires and epidemics, and images of rusty junk and slaughterhouses-while Pearl executes gorgeously curving low-angle tracking shots, and finishes the film with a lovely scene of Leatherface twirling madly at sunrise with his roaring saw. Hooper has claimed he was inspired by news coverage of Watergate and Vietnam, as well as by casually morbid pop songs like Loudon Wainwright III’s “Dead Skunk.” Put all that together, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre becomes simultaneously assaultive and artful. Gunnar Hansen studied the movements and speech of the mentally handicapped to inform his portrayal of the hulking, masked killer “Leatherface.” Cinematographer Daniel Pearl laid what little pieces of track he had all over the set to add fluid movement and unusual angles. Writer-director/producer Tobe Hooper and his co-writer/co-producer Kim Henkel assembled a cast and crew drawn from Austin-area film students and movie buffs, all of whom had ideas about how to bring their best to this grubby little slasher. As disgusting, harrowing, and ugly as the 1974 horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is, the film has moments of eerie beauty.
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