Texas Chainsaw--Opening Write-up

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

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Hooper wasn't exactly about to shy away from the presence of rotted corpses, dead animals, the very intimidating Texas sun, and the countryside that seems so open with roads free of very little automotive activity. It also seems to say when the kids visit the cemetery that Texas is brewing with mad locals who might just have been out in that sun too long.

How often has the dead animal in the road been used in horror films since this?

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The hitchhiker is the first visible sign of what is to come for the kids; a birthmark, twitchy facial ticks, and strait razor color his disturbia. Notice all the work inside the van; quite the closed confines. Definitely, Hooper gets all he can out of this singular location, shooting a lot in such cramped space.

Old Man Sawyer eyeing some fresh meat.

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Of all the places for your van to stall on you, eh? What a spot for anyone to find themselves. The 70s had movies that featured the dangers of the lost highway, but The Texas Chainsaw Massacre established that Americana (its farmlands; its valleys; its gas stations; its backroads; its gravel; its poverty; its rusted tin roof-houses, once occupied but now stricken by abandonment; the weeds and overgrowth of green; its absence of humanity, as if life took its normalcy elsewhere (if there is such a thing as normalcy) yields unbridled calamity for the innocent, for those unprepared for (or unaware of) a breed of human monster that seemed to arise en masse in the decade of decadence.

Franklin's portrayal in the film isn't exactly flattering.

The great horror films, for me, have a tendency to trigger that feeling of unease as characters approach severe misfortune. I was thinking of Dwight Frye as his Renfield goes to Castle Dracula in Transylvania, completely disinterested in the concerns of the villagers on the outskirts of the road to the abode of the vampire count. The kids walking towards the Sawyer home have no clue of the cataclysm that awaits them. In their case, there are no warnings. They need gas, or a ride, or simple assistance due to their predicament regarding their van's going kaput.There's no reason in their minds to consider this house holds such horrors that will greet them monstrously.

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I asked myself before revisiting (and it was about time; I have not actually watched this in full in twenty-five years!) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre a very simple question, “What to you, Bri, is your worst pure nightmare?” I have an answer, and it is one of so many reasons why The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remains so endurable as a horror film that evokes shivers to the very core. That scene where one of the victims of the Sawyer family enters the “chop shop” where, just prior to the kid’s entrance of the room, a female victim was hung on a meat hook as her beau’s head is taken off with a noisy chainsaw by a human-skin-masked maniac, discovers a seemingly dead corpse in a closed freezer emerge, arms flailing, eventually collapsing without much accomplished other than to establish her “still clinging to life” state. That is horrifying in its simplicity to me because just the thought of such a fate (just finding yourself in that house is scary enough)—stuck on a meat hook as if a slaughtered pig, later stuffed in a freezer for future “use”—is rather frightening.

I remember hearing through a news report that a citizen of my state in Mississippi was found way off in Kansas in a chest, in the basement of an unassuming house in the middle of nowhere, dead for quite some time in a state of decomp, and when I do hear or read of such a report, it always recalls The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to my mind. I guess the idea of fate—winding up at such an isolated farm house, baking under a hot Texas sun, inside it horrors unimaginable—does come as a thought when I watch a film such as this. How did I get here? What brought me to this place? Why did I ever find myself inside this house, facing for just seconds the harbinger of death before he visits upon me a hammer shot to the skull? To die this way, my body treated in such gruesome fashion? 

I think the treatment of the victims in this film might have been more of what caused audiences of that time to leave drive-ins in states of disgust, panic, and horror more on what is implied than actually shown in explicit detail. One of Tobe Hooper and company’s main successes must just be their earning “critiques” regarding gore and bloodshed and explicit depictions of violence that actually never show onscreen; what is implied can be even more impactful that just bludgeoning us with extreme amounts of copious ultraviolence (like in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning). You don’t see the head taken off with a chainsaw but you know it is occurring. While that victim dangles helplessly from a meat hook, you don’t see it penetrate her backside. The clobbering to the head is shot at a distance, the victim’s legs tremoring on the floor; we never see lingering shots of his head bleeding out, or grisly wounds that were obviously there thanks to the shot. When the paraplegic is in his wheelchair eventually suffers savage chainsaw violence to his face, as the day had went dark, it was so spontaneously explosive, out of the quiet of the night, Leatherface’s emerging built as a good jolt; this isn’t overtly gory as much as it is a shock to the system due to how it happens in such a moment of surprise. You always read or hear how we sometimes use “the calm before the storm” in describing such a moment, but I think it is a phrase with great relevancy in regards to Franklin’s demise, and in how it jumpstarts the final nightmarish half where poor Marilyn Burns (as Sally Hardesty) must overcome quite the horror show.