THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE Explained: Welds You to the Screen

After the premiere of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre many critics gushed over Tobe Hooper’s craftsmanship. The man managed to cause panic without gutting anyone. This was attributed to his directorial genius. Meanwhile the truth turned out to be more banal. Hooper was never a genius; he simply shot the film that way because he was trying to qualify for a PG certificate. Ultimately the film received an R and etched itself into the collective consciousness as one of the most shocking pictures in the history of cinema.

When discussing the reception of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre the historical context matters. For the contemporary viewer it may not carry much weight (and rightly so), nevertheless it is worth skimming, in telegraphic summary, the events that shaped American cinema at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. Hooper’s film was born in times of unrest. Vietnam, political assassinations, television reports from American streets showing victims of rape, beatings and murders, fights for equal rights for ethnic minorities, Nixon’s corruptions crowned by the Watergate affair, the fuel crisis, the very real threat of World War III breaking out, and finally (on the verge of the 1980s) the AIDS epidemic.

All these phenomena found their reflection on the big screen, particularly in niche pictures, which undoubtedly include horror. A curious fact: Tom Savini, the man responsible for the special effects in Romero’s films, was a veteran of the Vietnam War. That is enough of general history. Time for local matters. Edward Gein, a modest farmer from La Crosse, Wisconsin, carried in his mind a defect that did not entirely allow one to see him as human: he very much liked to kill. He used to torture his victims for a long time, and after committing murder he was usually seized by a desire for sex.

After sex he became hungry, so he ate the corpses to wipe traces away. Raised in an atmosphere of a medieval sense of sin, corrected by a stern, devout mother, in his free time from penance he devoured Nazi medical publications describing the perverse experiments of Hitler’s doctors, and when night fell he slipped out to the cemetery to deepen his knowledge of female anatomy. The biography of the pervert became the direct inspiration for making The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, although, as the director himself admits, he stumbled upon the idea of the film by accident while shopping in a hardware store.

Unfortunately Hooper does not reveal which prop stimulated his imagination, but with a high degree of certainty one can say it was not tin snips. What makes The Texas Chain Saw Massacre from 1974 exceptional? Stephen King argues that in the realm of depicting macabre there exists something like a “yuk” coefficient and defines that coefficient in the form of a question: “Do you want to see my chewed-up food?” No, I do not want that. Thank you. The point is that a large proportion of directors working in the industry ignore that refusal and with crude finesse try to convince me that horror is a genre in which crossing the boundaries of good taste is not merely permissible but even advisable.

That is the fundamental error in the reasoning of Hooper’s followers. A good horror works the other way round: despite glaring ugliness it does not allow you to look away. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has the property of being able to weld the viewer to the screen. You will watch until you vomit. The art of horror, especially in that most hardcore field known as gore, is the art of forcing the viewer not to close their eyes despite an internal protest. That requires uncommon intuition, which, sadly, God does not hand out on Thursdays at the market.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre opens with the sight of a corpse skewered on a cemetery crucifix. A corpse with a child in its arms. To put it plainly: right at the beginning, without warning, we are hit in the face with death in its most physical form; we are bombarded with a macabrely posed human figure, impaled on a carved tombstone. The corpse stands out against a polluted, rust-orange sky. Bells toll in the distance. To make matters worse, the whole sequence is inlaid with cutaways to a flashing camera strobe, and the soundtrack consists of the voice of a radio announcer, the rattle of soil being dug up, and the ominous snaps of cracking coffin wood.

After that concrete introduction the titles come in: a blood-red background and white letters, blurred like the vitreous humor trickling from an eye socket. Everything trembles, it is heavy, aggressive, hostile, unnaturally oversaturated.

I see it and do not feel nausea — why? Because I have been professionally immobilized, welded vertically — to the seat — and horizontally — to the cathode ray tube; in short, I have been stunned by the brazen lack of ceremony of the creators who greet me with exhumed corpses. There is nothing like a warm handshake to seal an acquaintance. The apocalyptic atmosphere of the prologue, bordering on surrealism, makes any reaction impossible for me. From that moment I am the director’s property and I will do everything he commands of me.

I will forgive his stumbles, I will turn a blind eye to logical gaps in the characters’ behavior (the distinguishing sign of all slashers without exception), I will be indulgent toward the naivety of the screaming young woman running through the woods in her evening dress. I adore the feeling of powerlessness caused by directorial courage, consistency, and uncompromisingness. It really turns me on and sharply increases my sweating.

One more moment about the prologue, because I left the best for last. Hooper does not stop at showing the corpses. That would be too… trivial. Hooper does a camera advance. A perverse camera advance on the monument of rot. As if someone held my head in a vise. As if I were meant to savor this scene. Sum, quod eris, quod es, antea fui. I am — what you will be, I was — what you are. I doubt Hooper knew that Latin sentence, once mass-produced as tombstone inscriptions or written on the back of the title page of medieval manuals on “good dying.” It is only my private association. Regardless of context, the prologue crushes the skull.

Violence in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has a particular character. It is violence at a caveman level, although — paradoxically — the film does not contain a great deal of blood. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre presents a rotten world in which an unspectacular evil, primitive in its nature, has taken hold. To be clear — Leatherface with a running chainsaw is, of course, a spectacular affair, only that in Hooper’s portrait of the Sawyer family there is nothing behind it, no ideology. They simply live that way, like sixteenth-century cannibals thrown into the twentieth century, for whom city dwellers are meat to be slaughtered. Human heads are crushed here as easily as cow skulls, as evidenced by the murder scene in the cannibals’ family estate.

Here is one of the characters, surprised on the threshold by Leatherface, struck by the attacker with a blacksmith’s hammer and collapsing to the floor, convulsively kicking his legs. The fellow’s heels drum on the grate, after a while silence falls. The blow that crowns the agony falls straight onto the man’s head. The perpetrator grabs the victim by the ankles and drags him into the kitchen. The camera films the whole scene from a distance, placed deep in the corridor; the operator does not make absolutely any movements that could disturb perception or mask the more shocking details of the murder.

The only mask in this situation is the camera’s distance from the actors. Such a method of showing cinematic bestiality fully compensates for its relative bloodlessness. Okay, there has been a lot so far about various manifestations of deviation. So that the reader does not get the impression that the author of the text is a born pervert, aroused exclusively by violence, for balance I will mention my favorite shot in the film. The thing takes place in front of the Sawyers’ shack. The heroine rises from a bench-swing and, clearly impatient, moves with a decisive step toward the building into which her boyfriend just entered.

The camera politely follows her, placed to the side, roughly at knee height, so we have a unique opportunity to take a closer look at the girl’s flowing contours. Where am I going with this? Women in Hooper’s films, besides being simply pretty, can also act. That is a rarity when it comes to full-blooded slashers. In such undertakings acting skills generally lag far behind purely physical assets, which later strongly affects the film’s quality. Hooper assembled the cast perfectly, although for a large part of the crew participation in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was the beginning of the end of an adventure with serious cinema. A great pity.

As it has been said: the first fiddle in Hooper’s work is played by women. Or rather one of them — Marilyn Burns (Sally). Even the best-shot scene would be of little value without the actors’ commitment. Ms. Burns — she currently lives in Texas and directs a theatrical production — created a truly moving performance. What this woman does defies human understanding. Fleeing in panic from the foaming Leatherface, she seems wholly absorbed in the struggle for life. It is hard to imagine that the scenes with her participation, and especially the final sequence, were planned in advance.

My admiration is also aroused by the realism in the character’s behavior: the heroine has nowhere to flee, so she throws herself through a closed window, landing on shards of broken glass, and when she races through the forest she is so preoccupied with fleeing that she does not notice a treacherously protruding branch. BAM! and she is on the ground, spitting blood. I rarely encounter in cinema (not to mention horror) examples of such determination. Hooper does not take his foot off the gas for almost fifty minutes of projection, to climb to the peak of emotional intensity in the scene infamous for its disgusting pageantry — the dinner scene.

Today no one would be allowed to shoot something equally vile. It is here that debauched brutality and orgiastic excess reach the apex of expression. And who would have thought that the harbinger of the coming madness would be a disheveled, country lunatic picked up from the roadside.

A few words about the production design: the film is maximally greasy with filth, it literally seeps with grime. Intentionally dirtied film stock combined with the ugliness of the landscape — plank-shuttered ruins, dilapidated agricultural machinery, farm animals crammed into cramped pens — all of this together gives an immensely suggestive effect of a raw, inhospitable world. Not unimportant for the look of the locations was the indecently high temperature prevailing on set during shooting. It happened that actors (including Marilyn Burns, as she admitted openly in an interview) paraded around the set in their underwear only.

In conclusion, a sad one: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre opened the gates of artistic immortality for Hooper and at the same time squeezed out all his creative juices. A few days ago I watched The Toolbox Murders — another misguided idea on the list of Hooper’s endless cinematic failures. Worse still, it is his best film in many, many years. A tiny step forward. Maybe with his next projects he will finally get back on track. Hooper is a very clever man, not averse to irony, firmly planted on the ground, a man with a clearly outlined plan of action.

At least that was the impression he made in several interviews I saw with him. He probably also has a second face, a quarrelsome hothead, because otherwise it is impossible to explain why he makes new films in such shabby conditions, while younger people have stars and money on set. The Toolbox Murders proves beyond doubt one thing: the old master’s bewilderment.