I was nine years old when THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE first hit the
screen and despite my parents' somewhat lax criteria for what I could or
could not go to see with them, there was no way in hell they'd ever
have taken me to see a movie with so lurid a title. (Plus, while they
did not shy away from films with graphic violence, horror and gore
movies were decidedly not their bag.) So I endured the next seven
or eight years hearing wild tales about how the flick was so out of
control that there were scenes of limbs being graphically sawed off and
flung about as blood geysered all over the camera, and with each year
the tales of its rumored excesses grew ever taller. I mean, how could a
film featuring a family of chainsaw-wielding maniacs who engaged in
on-screen cannibalism possibly fail to appeal to the febrile tastes of a
budding gorehound?
Skip ahead to my junior year in high school and one of the venerable
Sono Cinema's now-legendary "Scream All Night" film festivals, the first
such all-night event that I ever attended. If I remember correctly, THE
TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE was the first or second film on the bill and
as it unspooled I found out firsthand that virtually all of the rumors
I'd heard about it had been second-hand bullshit spread by schoolmates
and their older siblings, none of whom had seen the film that I was
sitting through. There was no trace of the celluloid charnel house that
I'd awaited witnessing for all those years, and there wasn't even a
massacre to speak of. When I returned to school the following Monday, I
launched on a crusade to dispel the lies told about the film and steer
my classmates away from what at the time I felt was a textbook case of
the emperor having no clothes. Sadly, a good number of my peers shared
my opinion and none of us were willing to give the film a second
chance.
That changed sometime during my infamous year living in SUNY at
Purchase's B-basement during my third year of college, a period where I
and a good number of my friends wallowed in THC-laden excess and did
more watching of cult items on VHS tapes than actually giving a jackleg
fuck about attending classes. Somewhere between the massive doses of
untranslated anime shows straight from Japanese first-run TV, then-legal
Traci Lords tenderloin opuses, and cheapjack straight-to-video gore
flicks, THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE found its way into my stack of
tapes to be watched, and I got to it with the intention of refreshing it
in my bonghit-addled mind. Watching it alone and with full knowledge of
its actual content was a whole other experience from my first time with
it, and the second time around I found myself fascinated by its every
aspect.
The quintessential mid-1970's iteration of the kind of creepy "innocents
wander into some very bad shit" yarn that's been told around campfires
since Day One, the narrative is informed by the nation having been
exposed to the all-too-real nightmarish horrors of the deranged Ed Gein
and what he got up to in the 1950's, a litany of unspeakable acts and
"handicrafts" that found their way into the landscape of America's
darker shared consciousness immediately after they were made public.
Also a likely influence upon the film is an ultra-intense E.C.
Comics-style sensibility when it comes to the hellish situation the van
full of innocents find themselves in, with the story's descent-into-hell
aspects far outweighing the more obvious, broad humor found in the
average E.C. comic book. (Thankfully, THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE's
slow-winding tension and shocks don't suffer from the "comic" relief of
bad Crypt Keeper jokes.)
Upon viewing the film from a slightly more mature perspective, I was
taken by its look and feel, which transports the viewer into a kind of
netherworld road movie that's stated to be set in Texas, but for all
intents and purposes it's really a purgatory in the middle of nowhere,
which only serves to distance the story from reality and set it firmly
in an environment that would have made the Brothers Grimm proud. I used
to think John Waters was nuts when he said he felt it was a perfect
scary movie for kids, but I now totally get where he was coming from;
its gore is about 98% implied, there's no sex or nudity, and all of its
story elements can be clearly understood by kids without having to
explain away any "adult" content, which is why it so strongly reminds me
of an old E.C. horror comic. And I defy you to find a more terrifying
sequence than when Leatherface suddenly explodes onto the scene and
drags away that poor, tiny, screaming girl to hang her up alive on a
meat hook through the back. It's downright appalling and yet there's no
blood or gore whatsoever. and to me the fact that the scene is as
balls-out powerful as it is proves to me that this film is a work of
horrific art. And things only get more hysterical (in the truest sense
of the word) when the group's last surviving member (Marilyn Burns) ends
up as a very unwilling guest at what may be the most harrowing family
dinner in the entire history of cinema.
Worst. Dinner. EVER.
Following my mid-1980's change of opinion, I sat through the film
several more times, but the screening that took the cake was the one in
which I sat my then-roommate, Mark, through it. It was somewhere around
1992 and Mark had never seen the movie but expressed interest, so we
went down to the local bodega, procured a hefty assortment of beers —
"You're gonna need these," I told him — and then settled in to watch the
videotape. By the end of the film, Mark found himself completely wound
up and totally creeped-out to the point of practically having to be
peeled bodily from our living room ceiling. He did not expect to be so
strongly affected by what he thought would be just another horror outing
that might not have registered to his somewhat-jaded sensibilities, and
I firmly believe he enjoyed it all the more because it was more than
another of the cookie-cutter, garden variety slasher flicks like the
ones that proliferated during our adolescence.
Bottom line, I fucking love THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and I will
gladly sit through it at any time of the day or night. It's the ne plus ultra of
its particular breed of fright cinema and is a force to be reckoned
with. Accept no substitutes. (The first sequel is fun in a goofy way,
but skip all that followed that one. There's really just no point in
trying to recapture this kind of once-in-a-lifetime lightning in a
bottle, and I wish the sequel-makers and contemporary remake
regurgitators would realize as much.)
Poster from the original theatrical release.
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