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(4 / 5)

Before the phantasmagorical visual effects of Poltergeist (1982), and before the cosmically outsized ambitions of Lifeforce (1985), Tobe Hooper made a cheap-looking, narratively threadbare movie that, despite its limitations, or maybe because of them, was more horrific than either of these films. In fact, it’s one of the more horrific things I’ve ever watched. The movie was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), a nasty little exploitation/arthouse flick whose elemental brutalism would go on to inspire an entire genre: the slasher film.

There’s kind of a plot: A van-full of five youths, including Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) and her paraplegic brother, Franklin (Paul A. Partain), travel to a graveyard—said to have been the site of multiple acts of desecration and robbery—to check on Sally’s grandfather’s grave. Finding his grave undisturbed, they decide to visit the nearby Hardesty homestead. En route they pick up a hitchhiker, who, after divulging secrets of his family’s meat packing trade, including methods of slaughter and headcheese preparation, manages to put everybody even more on edge with a little sadomasochistic knife-play. After they kick him out, they stop for gas at a BBQ joint/filling station, which they learn is out of fuel. Deciding to take their chances with a low tank, they soldier on to the old Hardesty place, where a quest for a swimming hole turns into a quest for gas at a neighboring farmhouse. And that’s when things get interesting.

The first half hour is slow. There’s some foreshadowing: a dreamy, delirious quality to some of the camera angles and ADR; Franklin’s morbid fascination with the cruel inefficiency of old methods of slaughter; the symbolism of solar flares and horoscopes implying that the characters’ fates are ineluctably sealed by an uncaring universe (a theme Hooper would explore later in his Lovecraftian Lifeforce). But mostly it’s just campy. The dialogue, the performances. Even the hitchhiker, menacing as he is, is played comically over-the-top. The payoff, however, is that the brutality of later scenes is made all the more brutal by contrast. When the first kill comes at around the thirty-minute mark, it hits like a sledgehammer.

Accelerating from zero to sixty in the time it takes a character to walk through a door, the movie goes from silly to savage in the blink of an eye and doesn’t let up until the end. The proceeding half hour of carnage has a relentless, uncompromising quality, the setting a kind of feculent grit, which serve as the main sources of the movie’s horror. There’s hardly any blood or guts in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Rather, the home occupied by Leatherface and the rest of the Sawyer family is a charnel house of dried-up carcasses and bits of voodoo gris gris with the hair left on, all weathered and leathered by the Texas dry heat. Leatherface doesn’t play cat-and-mouse games with his victims. Whether they’re being dispatched by chainsaw, meat hook, or hammer, when a character’s time is up, their time is up. Sometimes the horror is set to soft, diagetic country music, as if the world of the movie is saying, yes, this is happening to you, and no, the universe doesn’t care. Pam (Terri McMinn) sums it up best as she reads from her astrology book: “There are moments when we cannot believe what is happening is really true. Pinch yourself and you may find out that it is.”

The final act of the film is the most horrifying, even though, or more accurately, because, the pace is slowed down, the relentlessness dialed back. We’re given time to linger on the nightmare Sally is enduring, on the fact that “what is really happening is true,” absurd and grotesquely oneiric as it is. One sequence in particular, harkening back to Franklin’s monologue about the inefficiency of dispatching livestock with a hammer, is so agonizingly drawn out and real it’s hard to watch. And grandpa. Jesus Christ. I’ve never seen character design so simultaneously stupid-looking and creepy. Though I think he proves that they don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

In a way, I think that kind of sums up why the movie works so well. It’s stupid, cheap and dirty, but it’s made all the more horrifying because of it. Like a killer making a grainy snuff film, Tobe Hooper points his cheap camera at what’s happening and says, “This is the weird little nightmare world I’ve created. Now look at it!” And for an hour and twenty minutes, for reasons perhaps all too psychologically revealing, we oblige him.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is available on Amazon Prime Video with Shudder subscription.