The enduring horror of 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre'
A semi-personal history to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Tobe Hooper's slasher classic
When I was 12 or so years old, my uncle showed me two classic horror films on the same night. One was John Carpenter’s Halloween, a movie I found entertaining enough at the time but was not particularly frightened by. Slow-moving killers rarely scare me.
The other movie we watched that night, as you’ve probably gleaned from the title of this post, was Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. This 1974 slasher is probably not a movie you should watch when you are 12 or so years old.
This is a movie that shook me to my core, and still does. It is a movie that scratches the surface of rural America and finds boundless depravity. I rewatch it every year around Halloween.
It begins with text scrolling across the screen and an ominous voiceover setting up what we are about to see: “The tragedy which befell a group of five youths” whose “idyllic summer afternoon drive became a nightmare.”
And the clincher: “The events of that day were to lead to the discovery of one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”
From the outset, this story is positioned as true. It’s not, but I didn’t know that when I was 12 or so years old. I didn’t have a smartphone yet.
These opening words are followed by total darkness that is broken up by camera flashes and disturbing screeching noises. Each time the screen lights up we see close-ups of rotting body parts.
When you’re 12 or so years old and you hear that introduction and see those images, you buckle the fuck up.
Soon, those glimpses of decayed corpses are demystified: In broad daylight, we see an unnatural-looking carcass contorted around a gravestone. A radio announcement tells us that there have been a series of graverobbing incidents. What we’re looking at is not a single exhumed corpse, but an amateur art piece featuring the rotting remains of several people.
Amid this ominous, bizarre spectacle enter the “five youths,” some of the most late 20-something-looking teenagers I’ve seen in a movie: Sally, Franklin, Jerry, Pam, and Kirk. The group is on a road trip across Texas; Sally and Franklin, who are siblings, want to stop at the graveyard on the way because their grandfather is buried there. Or… he was.
After visiting the cemetery, the group continues driving. They soon pick up a hitchhiker whose bizarre behavior- taking their picture, demanding money, then cutting himself- signifies bad things to come. Then, they stop for gas, only to realize the gas station doesn’t have enough to get them to their final destination.
While they wait for a gas shipment, Franklin suggests they visit his grandpa’s old place nearby. They drive to the decaying, run-down old home, where Sally and Franklin give them a tour. Franklin, who is confined to a wheelchair, lashes out at the group when they obliviously go upstairs without him.
Hearing about an old swimming hole nearby, Pam and Kirk wander off to get some romantic alone time. The pond is dried up, but the sound of generators at a neighbor’s house gets their attention. (Is that buzzing sound a generator, or is it, you know, the thing from the title?)
Maybe they can barter for gas, Kirk says. Big mistake!
The story of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre will be familiar to anyone who has seen one (1) slasher film. (It kind of invented that horror subgenre, you see?)
One by one, these people will be picked off. Sally, the prototypical Final Girl, is left to fend for herself in the merciless Texas backcountry. This is the kind of movie that I think audiences have come to consider themselves smarter than. Slashers, by design, often feature characters who make bad decisions under duress.
Why would you separate from the group? Why would you enter a stranger’s house just because they didn’t answer your knock?
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is different, though, and not just because I like it.
Yes, the movie was inventing slasher tropes as it went, and it’s a high point of low-budget filmmaking. None of that would really matter if it didn’t work on a primal level. (Also, these alleged teenagers aren’t that stupid).
Nearly everyone I’ve ever watched this movie with is surprised at just how scary it is. I know I was surprised when I first watched it with my uncle.
“The best illustration of insanity is to show normalcy in an insane situation.” -Tobe Hooper
Now, from my more developed movie-going perch, I think the movie’s success hinges on how Hooper reveals this world, not just what he reveals.
The abrupt introduction of Gunner Hansen’s skin-mask-clad killer Leatherface is key to how that directorial perspective operates. When Kirk and Pam go to the neighbor’s house looking for gas, it’s as if they (and us by extension) have stumbled headfirst into a world of organized, depraved chaos.
As Kirk walks from the front door toward a room where an odd, pig-like screeching is coming from, Leatherface abruptly juts into the frame and smashes him in the face with a hammer. As Kirk’s body starts violently twitching, Leatherface hits him again, pulls him into the doorway, and slams a makeshift sliding metal door shut.
It happens quickly and efficiently, with the killer maneuvering like one of those laid-off slaughterhouse workers that were mentioned by the hitchhiker toward the beginning of the film.
Pam hears the noise inside, so of course she has to see what’s going on. Wouldn’t you go check on your boyfriend? (I don’t think I would, but only because I’ve seen The Texas Chain Saw Massacre).
Here, the audience starts learning more than the characters. When Pam enters the house, we have the same view from the front door to the stairs. However, we now know about the killer in the hidden room behind the metal door.
Pam goes further into the house, though, stumbling into a room decorated with caged chickens, piles of feathers, and ritualistic objects made of various skeletal remains. She sees a couch made out of what appear to be human bones (cobbled together the same way as that corpse in the graveyard), becomes sick, and runs screaming from the room.
The sliding door flies open and out pops Leatherface. Surprise!
He grabs Pam and hauls her into the back room.
Then, Hooper positions a shot within this hidden room, emphasizing a meat hook hanging from the ceiling. Before 12-or-so-year-old me really had time to process the shot, Leatherface had hauled Pam in and thrust her back onto the hook. Now paralyzed and bleeding out into a bucket positioned below her feet, she groans and flails in a final desperate attempt to get away.
This is where the younger me started to get very disturbed. As I’ve watched this film over and over in the ensuing years, I’m astonished at not only the level of horrifying detail in this house, but in how it’s unveiled.
These first two kills are very illustrative of Hooper’s process, and into why the movie works so well. We never know more than we need to in a given moment; the blunt, efficient cutting matches Leatherface’s own workmanlike movements. But when the camera does decide to show us more, the level of detail - the bones, the meat hook, the bloody bucket- is disorienting.
For a movie with this title to eschew gore in favor of dread and atmosphere catches many off guard. Is it really a “Chain Saw Massacre” if only one person in the movie is killed by that specific power tool? (RIP Franklin). Does it count if Leatherface chases people with it, or uses it to dismember someone who is already dead?
These are the questions that someone who watched The Texas Chain Saw Massacre when they were too young will grow up to ask.
My obsession with this movie also functions as a kind of aesthetic journey through my moviegoing life. I’ve watched it in almost every available format, in all kinds of venues, with many different people. Some of them are still close friends or family, others are not, but not because of the movie. (At least, I don’t think).
When I first watched The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with my uncle sometime in the early 2000s, it was on VHS tape. He had a top-loading player, which I thought was futuristic. A couple of years later, when I was in high school, I bought a special edition steelbook DVD of it. The cover features the iconic final image of Leatherface, twirling his chainsaw into the abyss.
This DVD was very special to me, and buying it marked the start of my annual rewatches. I rewatched this movie about as often as I moved apartments in the years after college, and somewhere along the way it was lost. I reluctantly upgraded to the Blu-ray, and have since bought a deluxe 4K release. The movie looks closer to Hooper’s vision in these releases, sure, but I’d still have the DVD if it hadn’t mysteriously vanished.
I’ve also seen The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in theaters a couple of times, both digitally and on 35mm film. While viewing it on VHS felt like a home movie gone wrong in the best sense, watching it on a beat-up print gave it a texture that was new to me. The print I saw was originally censored for a UK release, but was later brought back to the US and reassembled. It was scratched to hell, and the noticeable cuts where footage had been taken out and then put back in were jarring. It was a revelation.
To be fair, every time I watch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a revelation. I’ve been watching it for over 20 years, about half of its 50-year lifespan.
I keep waiting to get bored with it, but every October I get the same impulse: To see who’s around, ask if they’ve seen it, and then plan a movie night. Some years I watch it alone; it’s one of a handful of movies that I have memorized.
So, I’ve gone through Hooper’s technique in establishing and unfolding this world, but I realized I haven’t yet explored the thing in this film that I find the most disturbing: It’s a family affair!
Leatherface is hardly the scariest person here, to me. He racks up the highest body count (4 of the 5 young people), but he’s just doing what he was taught.
Earlier in the film, we meet his other relatives without knowing it: his brother is the hitchhiker that the group picks up in the beginning, and his father is the gas station attendant who tells them he’s out of gas. They are both imminently more frightening than Leatherface.
As the hitchhiker, Edwin Neal gives a performance of barely contained chaos; he howls and screams and commits violence on a whim. But it’s the father, played by Jim Siedow, who stands out to me as the most unnerving.
When Sally is the last one left, Leatherface pursues her in an extended chase sequence through the woods that ends at the gas station. Sally thinks she’s safe, and the man reassures her that he’s going to help her. He then ambushes her, ties her up, puts her in a sack, and takes her back to the home she just fled from.
The first time I watched this movie, and to this day, I found Siedow’s performance in this stretch impossible to shake. As he drives Sally, he tells her that no harm will come to her. Then, he prods her with a broomstick as she lays bundled up next to him, screaming. Siedow’s face fills with a kind of demented glee as he toys with her. It’s easy to see where his sons got it from.
And don’t worry, fans of the film, I didn’t forget about Grandpa. We first see him during the chase sequence when Leatherface chases Sally into his house. She runs up the stairs and into yet another room of macabre surprises.
Here she sees a greenish old man sitting in a chair, appearing very much dead. Next to him are the skeletal remains of a woman. As we find out when Sally is brought back to the family’s house of horrors, he is not dead. He’s Grandpa!
Grandpa is one of the final surprises that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has, brought down to join the family at dinner in its last minutes. This final sequence is a stretch of such totally immersive depravity that I find it difficult to articulate.
It builds on everything we know about both the house and the family, but Hooper and his cast find something new and disturbing in showcasing their dynamic together. The movie now takes Sally’s point of view: helpless, tied to a chair, waiting to die. The hitchhiker relishes the opportunity to forcibly grab and poke her; he hovers his hand over her face to let her know she can’t stop him.
Marilyn Burns' performance as Sally is essential to anchoring these final scenes. Her screams fall on deaf ears, and Hooper cuts frantically around close-ups of her face and eyes. You can see them widen, as if we’re watching madness seep in in real-time. She passes out from the fear, only to wake up to a depraved family dinner.
This was, to put it mildly, not an easy or pleasant performance to give. The movie was shot in an old Victorian house consumed by stifling Southern heat where accidents and injuries were common.
As John Bloom wrote in Texas Monthly in 2004:
“But no one was beaten, cut, and bruised more than Burns. By the end of production, her screams were real, as she’d been poked, prodded, bound, dragged through rooms, jerked around, chased through cocklebur underbrush, jabbed with a stick, forced to skid on her knees in take after take, pounded on the head with a rubber hammer, coated with sticky stage blood, and endlessly pursued by [Gunner Hansen] with his chain saw and [Edwin Neal] with his constantly flicking switchblade.”
Reducing any of these performances, or the movie’s effect at large, to these miserable working conditions diminishes the artistry and command of technique that’s present at every stage. So don’t even think about it!
Yes, the location of the shoot and the production’s low budget were catalysts for both creativity and misery. That’s really not a groundbreaking concept, though in its own tongue-in-cheek way, I guess the movie does invite us to ask how the sausage was made.
Fifty years on, this is still a film whose notorious reputation- from its production through the faux moral handwringing around its release- comes close to overshadowing it. If it were a lesser film, that probably would have happened long ago.
But The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a work of unhinged beauty that seems to rise directly out of the depths of hell. I don’t regret watching it when I was 12 or so years old. I can’t say I endorse it, either.