**** (out of ****)
Starring Marilyn Burns, Gunnar Hansen, Allen Danziger, Paul A. Partain, William Vail, Teri McMinn, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow, and John Laroquette
Directed by Tobe Hooper & written by Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper
1974
83 min R
The original “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” is a film of awful beauty and terrible power. It is made of screams, bones, spraying blood, chicken feathers, tall grass, two hot days, and threatening old houses. Its sound design is an ingenuous, repetitive cacophony of roaring power tools, terrified screeching, crunching flesh, and endlessly humming engines. The score replaces melody with ominous rumbles and percussive noises. I covered my ears—I couldn’t hear myself think—the chainsaw just keeps going and going, recreating in the minds of the audience precisely the thought-drowning and confused torment of the characters. “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” is the direct descendent of that other low-budget horror classic, “Night of the Living Dead.” Similarly, we can’t imagine it maintaining its nightmarish intensity with a large budget, classy effects, or any kind of polish. Both films have big budget remakes which opened to critical rejection. No, “Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s” all-out attack on the senses feels just like a nightmare: grainy, blurry, washed out, raw, with voices that die in the air while the rumble of the chain saw goes on and on.
“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” is also a nightmare with little to no context. A friend of mine loves what he calls the movie’s “emptiness.” Explanations and backstories only serve to make horror stories less frightening because we can take shelter in the world being rational and ordered—something “caused” this to happened, it didn’t just “happen.” But nightmares don’t work that way. Unlike the entire genre of crap slasher movies that “TCSM” unfortunately spawned—Jason, Freddy, whoever—the teenagers being put to the slaughter here aren’t being punished for teen sex. In fact, they’re not being punished for anything, except being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The movie’s pack of cannibals is equally without explanation. The madmen simply exist and are unable to see human beings as any different than cattle. They’re indifferent to killing. Everyone is given a personality but not much of a history. It’s implied that the maniacs used to sledgehammer the product at the slaughterhouse and this is to what they’ve sunk after being replaced by machinery (I guess we really are only three meals away from anarchy). But that hardly explains anything; when my dad got downsized by Shell he didn’t go looking for oil in people’s foreheads. Explanation and deconstruction are for later and “TCSM” gets its power from its quasi-documentary, “you-are-there” style. If none of the characters is calm enough to try to figure where these maniacs come from, why should the audience?
The movie begins with a ghoulish sequence about grave-robbing. The episode is it at best tangential to the rest of the movie, but its fleeting glimpses of decaying flesh, caught in the momentary light of a flashbulb, before leading to a macabre climax, sets the tone for everything that comes after. “TCSM’s” story is as simple as a nightmare: “I dreamt we were driving somewhere and then we were at my grandparents’ old house.” A group of teenagers in a van runs out of gas. Not far from the grandparents’ abandoned house is a house that hasn’t been abandoned. And that’s where things go wrong.
The family the teenagers meet is, strangely, a dark mirror of their own group. Both sides number five. Both sides have connections to a local slaughterhouse. Both groups are in some way motivated by grandparents. Both groups have someone who needs a wheelchair. In a way, of course, they are neighbors. Leatherface, the maddest of the madmen wears a wig and makeup, of sorts. He performs the feminine duties of cooking, and looks oddly girlish through the hips as he charges around on his rampage. So one could argue the two groups are both composed of three boys and two girls. One of my wife’s professors speculates that “TCSM” was born of the gasoline shortage of the early 1970s: the only reason the kids visit the madhouse is because they’re out of gas. And what do they find? A demon whose eponymous power tool never runs out.
Whether director-writer Tobe Hooper should be credited with artistic prowess or simply doing what he could afford on hand is immaterial. It is a film of relentless purity that sticks to its guns all the way to the last cut of the last shot. Everyone is sweaty and smells bad, everything is orange and old, every location has the sickening look of a place that has been lived in too long. Nothing particularly Texan happens in “TCSM,” but the horizon-to-horizon, scrubby tall grass is unmistakably Lone Star. Hooper’s detached camera permeates everything with a queasy uneasiness, from the first shot on, so much so that I was relieved when the first teenager was killed. It meant I wouldn’t have to wait any longer.
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