![]() ![]() "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," introduces its audience to Leatherface, a monstrous and unnamed giant whose house is filled with vile trophies taken from his victims. But how similar is director Tobe Hooper's hideous magnum opus to the crimes on which they claim to be based? In the years that followed, the brutal slasher would be hailed as a cinematic masterpiece and has since been cited as the inspiration for countless horror films. Proust had his madeleine, I have my sliding steel door.When "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" was released in 1974, it was banned throughout the country over its severe depictions of violence. That’s why The Texas Chainsaw Massacre still spooks me today. You carry them on your back, right through to adulthood, and all that it takes is a film to remind you. You can jump the fence, run the field and pay your pocket money as forfeit. And perhaps that’s the thing about all childhood frights. But The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is different: it’s a bumbling childhood trauma, reconstructed with meat hooks and mallets. Horror movies introduced me to the work of David Cronenberg and Stanley Kubrick and from there to Dario Argento, Georges Franju and the psychological depths of the European arthouse. These days, when people ask me how I first became interested in films, I offer horror movies as the gateway drug. #Texas chain saw massacre true story movieI watched the rest of the movie as a quivering wreck. In that instant, in that barnyard, we had genuinely thought that our lives were in danger. Pre-Teen Me saw the man as a monster the beast in the shed sent by Satan to claim us. Our own version of Leatherface was merely a west country farmer, justifiably enraged by the pesky kids on his land. Teenage Me, of course, knew that there was nothing to fear. And watching that scene, sitting drunk on the floor, Teenage Me was abruptly reconnected to Pre-Teen Me, trapped in the yard with yellow straw in my hair. The sound that it made was exactly the same. That door looked identical to the door on the shed. But that still reckons without the pure glassy terror I felt on witnessing the first murder, when the mewling man-child Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) hits the kid with his mallet, drags him into a back room and rips the metal door shut. It is simply waiting for someone to blunder in down the hall.Īll of these factors might be enough to make The Texas Chainsaw Massacre my favourite (read: most terrifying) horror film of them all. Hooper shows us that evil is banal and that it hides in plain sight. It sits on the main road, where the trucks rumble by. But this home, crucially, is not tucked away in the forest. ![]() ![]() They keep a pet hen in a canary cage, gather for formal family dinners and make totemic folk art out of feathers, bones and twine. Inside their pretty clapboard house, the film’s American monsters maintain a ghastly facade of nuclear respectability. Even the sight of the sunflowers is enough to give me the chills. There is nothing to cling to, nobody to root for, and certainly no one we can realistically hope to reason with. The violence is indiscriminate it erupts without warning. Pretty much everything about Chainsaw continues to scare me. You might as well argue that were it not for the primal scream there would be no advertising jingles. This may be valid so far as it goes, although it risks rather missing the wood for the trees. In the years since its release, back in the mid-1970s, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has often found itself touted as the template for every slasher movie that followed. Hooper’s film is nasty, brutish and short, spotlighting a strain of human savagery that feels as old as the hills. It’s the most frightening thing I’ve experienced and I’ve been suppressing it for years.ĭirected by Tobe Hooper on an initial budget of $60,000, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the world’s great rustic horror film the tale of a bunch of innocent kids who stumble upon a household of out-of-work slaughtermen and are then butchered like pigs, one after the other. And all at once the farmer story isn’t funny any more, it’s a full-blown horror nightmare. Then all at once I’m 17, half-cut on scotch and watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on a rented VHS. Remember the funny thing that happened? The furious farmer and the slapstick pursuit? What a right old laugh we had that day. Fear of farms … The Texas Chainsaw MassacreĪfterwards we were keen to frame this incident as a knockabout comedy – so much so that I came to believe it. ![]()
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