(Originally posted at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat by Sean T. Collins.)
The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 10
4. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, dir. Tobe Hooper
Back in college I lived with the same six other guys for three years. All of us had different interests, almost all of us had different majors (I think there were two history guys, but one of those was also a musician, and the rest of us were involved in film studies, architecture, art, economics, and pre-med stuff), but one thing we all had in common is that any time I brought home a movie, everyone was up for watching it. It pretty much didn't matter what it was, whether it was rented for pleasure or for an assignment, whether it was something they'd been meaning to see or something they'd never heard of--next to playing Mario Kart, watching movies and then bullshitting about them was our favorite pastime. (Beer, pot, and sex were up there too, I think.) It was always fascinating to hear the different reactions and interpretations that would come from this disparate group of people.
Except in the case of this film. With this film, everyone reacted exactly the same: like they'd just been involved in a car wreck.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is the most thoroughly disturbing movie on this list--hands down, I would say. After seeing it for the first time I could not for the life of me understand how it had come to be lumped into the same slasher category with the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th sequels, to say nothing of the Slumber Party Massacres and Prom Nights and what have you. Yes, there are slashers involved in both, but then again there are car accidents involved in both Crash and The Cannonball Run. This movie is simply in a class by itself. If there is a more intense, more brutal movie about murder out there, I'm not sure I want to see it.
This is another one of those dark fairy-tale movies, the kind with a house of horrors and a dark forest, the kind where plot is first simply pragmatic and second disposed of entirely. It concerns a group of five young people--two couples and the parapalegic brother of one of the girls--who take a trip to the grave site of the siblings' grandfather, which they've heard on the news has fallen victim to a sudden outbreak of grave desecration. While out there, they decide to take a trip to the old family house, now abandoned. Upon exploring another house nearby, they encounter another family--one of deranged cannibalistic killers. The primary engine of murder for this clan is a huge idiot killing machine named Leatherface, so called for the masks he wears, which are fashioned from human skin. It seems unnecessary to detail the plot any further.
Superficially, the movie has much in common with its neverending horde of imitators: a blade-wielding killer in a mask, a group of silly and attractive teenagers who are slaughtered one by one, a "final girl" who outlives her friends. But similarities end there. Take the masked killer--this isn't some mute cipher gussied up in weakly supernatural trappings to make him some sort of dark-side Superman with a machete, like Jason Vorhees or Michael Myers; this is a lunatic with roots. He seems to be mentally retarded, and given what we see of his environment he may well be the product of inbreeding. He gibbers like a baby, squeals like a pig, reacts with grotesque obesiance when scolded and capers like a dervish when thwarted. He even sports different skin masks for different occasions--a motherly one when cooking, a made-up glamour-face when entertaining a guest--in a horrific parody of normal human etiquette. Gunnar Hansen, the actor who plays him, didn't just conjure some bogeyman out of the ether to guide his performance--he studied mental patients and the severely retarded. There's a there there in Leatherface--and that the there is this disgusting abscess of humanity is what makes him so frightening a figure.
Article comments
1 - Toby
I'm glad to see this film is getting the respect it deserves. It truly improves with each viewing. To watch it now is to despair at how poorly made films are today. The contrast was made clear to me when the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was rereleased maybe four years ago in the U.K.. Reading the reviews of film critics at the time, it was evident that many, now living on a diet of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, had forgotten the viciousness and brutality of this film, had forgotten what true horror was. But to classify the TCM simply as a horror film is to do it a disservice, in the same way as labelling Apocalypse Now as merely a war film.