The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Summary

“Look what your brother did to the door?!”

In the genre of horror, there are few films that draw as visceral a response as Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Released in 1974, the film was a runaway success at the box office. Made for somewhere around $100,000 (figures vary,) the film grossed over $30 million at the box office. The film completely changed the film industry with its unrelenting and grisly approach. The film was attacked by numerous critics, politicians, and other groups, as being sick and depraved and full of gore. The gore in the film is surprisingly minimal, but the film is extremely effective at drawing upon the imagination of the viewer. Almost all of the killing that happens in the film occurs off screen, which is ironically why so many people remember it as being extremely grotesque or gory. Tobe Hooper had an almost Hitchcockian understanding of how to manipulate his audience. The film is scary and does feel pretty unhinged, but I think the reason the film drew such a strong reaction from its harshest critics was the audacity of a film to be named The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The film lives up to its title by delivering a horrific display of oddball backwoods characters that enjoy taxidermy, cannibalism, and wearing dead flesh. The film is as atmospheric in its own way as the films of Val Lewton or John Carpenter, but in a humid Southern-fried style that was completely new for audiences. The film shocked the hell out of people and inspired a slew of imitators. Would the slasher genre have as many demented Southerners or masked killers if it were not for this film? The impact was immediate and can still be seen today, not just in the numerous remakes of the film (including another remake coming this year,) but in films by directors such as Ti West in his recent direct homage X, or the tension built up in Eli Roth’s Hostel, or in The Devil’s Rejects by Rob Zombie. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre absolutely changed the horror landscape for forever.

The film is prefaced with a voiceover by John Larroquette describing the horrifying true events that had taken place in Texas in August of 1973 to Sally and her invalid brother Franklin. Those events came to be known as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

A grotesque creation of pieced together bones and flesh perches above a grave at a cemetery. News reports say that graves have been ritualistically robbed of cadavers recently. This news inspires Sally (Marilyn Burns) to take a roadtrip out into the deep farm country of Texas to make sure that her grandfather’s grave has not been defaced. Sally has gathered her friend Jerry (Allen Danziger,) and the boyfriend and girlfriend duo of Pam (Teri McMinn) and Kirk (William Vail) for the trip in a van. They have begrudgingly brought along Sally’s wheelchair-bound brother Franklin. The crew passes a dead armadillo and they read horoscopes that spell out bad times ahead (“Saturn is in retrograde”) as they make their way to the gravesite. Upon their arrival, Sally walks back to inspect the grave and returns to the van. The friends leave the gravesite in the van. Franklin (Paul A. Partain) mentions an old house nearby that their grandparents lived in near the slaughterhouse. They stop the van at a gas station because they are running out of gas. The gas station worker (Jim Siedow) explains that he has no gas there, but he does have good barbecue. They ask for directions to the old house, and he claims to have no knowledge of it. He does warn them that they should not go poking around any old house out there, because it could be dangerous. The crew decides to push on to the house, with hopes of finding gas later. When the crew see a hitchhiker (Edwin Neal,) they decide to pick him up. This is the first of many bad decisions they make. The hitchhiker, with a birthmark on his face, is pretty bizarre. He has a discussion of slaughtering pigs with Franklin. He then shows the group the photos he has taken of slaughtered pigs, cuts himself with a blade, snaps a photo of them, and when they refuse to pay for the photo he burns it with gunpowder. As they try to get him out the van, he slices Franklin’s arm with a straight razor. They make their way to the old abandoned house. Kirk and Pam head down to where a swimming hole should be, but they see another house through the thicket. They decide to approach the house to see if they have any gas, setting off the events of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has not lost any of its power to impart dread in audiences in the nearly half-century since it was released. The film does not achieve horror through an abundance of gore, but instead through nauseating claustrophobia and unrelenting madness. The Sawyer family (actually called the Slaughter family in the original film) is an absolutely insane creation. They are a ragtag group of cannibals that still have some sort of backwoods familial instinct to protect one another and honor their grandfather. Their delight in causing pain and discomfort makes them truly scary. Their dialogue is pretty rudimentary and at times seems retarded.  Something is completely off in the way that they communicate with themselves and others. They have not kept up with the times, have lost their jobs at the slaughterhouse, and their only recourse is violence. These characters are so over-the-top that they feel real.

The technique of prefacing the film by saying the events in the film actually occurred has been copied a million times since (Fargo, The Blair Witch Project) but was novel at the time. As Gunnar Hansen mentioned in Chainsaw Confidential, the events in the film were completely the invention of Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel. People Gunnar encounters across the country still claim that these events took place and that Leatherface is very real. The film’s documentary-style cinema verite approach (largely due to budget) helps sell the opening narration that the events were real, and also lends a realistic edge to all the proceedings. A larger budget may have harmed the efficacy of the film.  It is hard to watch the film and think that these insane characters don’t exist somewhere out in some forgotten corner of Texas, and that is arguably the greatest strength of the film.

Tobe Hooper employed cinematographer Daniel Pearl and his cast and crew for six weeks of filming in the horrible heat and humidity of the Texas summer in 1973. The film was an incredibly difficult shoot due to the extreme heat and lack of air conditioning in most of their locations. Gunnar Hansen had to stay in the mask aside from breaks that lasted fifteen minutes, which were rare. The dinner sequence was shot over the course of a 26 hour workday to make sure they got everything. The exhaustion seen from the cast is quite real. Marilyn Burns was injured numerous times during the filming by twisting her ankle running from Leatherface, getting hit with a hammer, and by having her finger cut by an actual knife by Gunnar Hansen. The cast and crew pushed themselves to the furthest extreme to make something special, and it all shows up on the film. Along the way, Daniel Pearl crafted some of the most memorable imagery in horror cinema including an often imitated dolly shot from the swing set as Pam walks toward the house. Wayne Bell and Tobe Hooper worked together on the sound design and compositions to maximize the amount of dread the film invokes. It works.

Sadly, the hardworking cast and crew that made the film were largely jilted out of that fortune due to mismanagement of distribution contracts and shady business deals. According to Gunnar Hansen’s book Chainsaw Confidential, at the time of its writing he had only received a grand total of $8000 for his work on the film. If Leatherface himself only made that amount, it can be guessed that the rest of the crew fared just as poorly.

The film was enveloped in a sea of controversy when it was released. It has been cited by politicians and critics as a despicable exercise, but as a horror film it can not be shrugged off. The film is rough and relentless and achieves its goal of startling and scaring the audience. It is impossible to watch the film and not feel claustrophobic yourself. Love it or hate it, it is one of the most important horror films ever made.

Video

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre arrived on Blu-ray with a 1080p MPEG-4 AVC encoded image in 1.78:1 from a 4K scan performed for the 40th anniversary. The results of the 4K scan are as good as one can likely expect for a film shot on 16mm on a limited budget. The movie is going to always look grainier than films shot on 32mm or 70mm, and no amount of restoration will change that fact. Fine detail for the most part is excellent. As long as expectations are kept firmly within the confines of the inherent limitations of the original film, this is an excellent transfer that could only be bested by a 4K UHD transfer.

Audio

Similar to the video, the audio presentation on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has been given a good amount of attention. The DTS-HD MA 7.1 track gives a  surround treatment to the film that expands the field nicely and allows the unconventional score and sound design by Tobe Hooper and Wayne Bell to shine. The dialogue is crisp and clear. The inherent limitations of the original sounds recorded are evident, but fans should be extremely pleased.

Supplements:

Disc One: 

• Audio Commentaries: 
• Track One: Writer-Director Tobe Hooper, Actor Gunnar Hansen, and Cinematrographer Daniel Pearl. 
• Track Two: Production Designer Robert Burns and Actors Marilyn Burns, Allen Danziger, and Paul A. Partain. 
• Track Three: Writer-Director Tobe Hooper. 
• Track Four: Cinematographer Daniel Pearl, Editor J. Larry Carroll, and Sound Recordist Ted Nicolaou.

Disc Two: 

• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Shocking Truth 
• Flesh Wounds: Seven Stories of the Saw 
• A Tour of the TCSM House with Gunnar Hansen
• Off the Hook with Teri McMinn 
• The Business of Chain Saw: An Interview with Production Manager Ron Bozman
• New Deleted Scenes & Outtakes
• Grandpa’s Tales: An Interview with John Dugan
• Cutting Chain Saw: An Interview with Editor J. Larry Carroll 
• Deleted Scenes & Outtakes 
• Blooper Reel 
• Outtakes from “The Shocking Truth”
• Horror’s Hallowed Grounds: TCSM
• Dr. W.E. Barnes Presents “Making Grandpa”
• Still Gallery
• Trailers
• TV & Radio Spots 

Overall Scores:

Video – 4.5/5

Audio – 4.5/5

Supplements – 5/5

Overall – 5/5

Like it, or loathe it, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a true milestone of horror cinema. The film has lost none of its unique unsettling power with one of the most relentless final thirds of a picture ever made. The same way in which Spielberg inspired J.J. Abrams to make films, Chainsaw inspired countless filmmakers such as Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, and Ti West. For now, the 2014 two-disc 40th Anniversary set is the best way to experience the film. A steelbook of the 40th anniversary Blu-ray is also available, but only features the first disc in the set. For folks who only want the feature film and commentaries, without the plethora of special features, that is a valid option and not extremely expensive.  As it stands, this is an outstanding Collector’s Editions thanks to a completely loaded dock of special features, reference quality video, and a well engineered sound mix. The film itself may not be to the taste of every viewer, but its impact on cinema can not be understated. Fans of the film will certainly want to purchase this edition, especially if they have not upgraded to a 4K UHD player. For those with a 4K UHD player, there may be good reason to wait for the recently announced 4K UHD that will be released stateside within the next year. As it stands, this release earns our highest recommendation for fans of the film.