The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

 

“Psycho killer, qu'est que c'est”

(Or ‘The Greatest Horror Films Ever Made’)

(1974)

Dir: Tobe Hooper

 

“Just a short, back and sides please, mate.”

 

How does someone go from this to Poltergeist? The latter might be one of the friendliest, cuddliest, safest horror film ever made, whilst Tobe Hooper’s original hardware shilling scream-fest is one of the nastiest. Not nasty in the same crass, exploitative manner of Eli Roth’s Hostel or the later Saw films, but just the sheer mood that pervades every second, every reel of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

One of the most famous horrors of all time, it follows five youngsters as they travel to their grandfather’s old farm. Guess in what state? Along the way they pick up a hitchhiker, who, even by hitchhiker’s unpredictable standards, is an eleven on the batshit crazy scale. Unfortunately for our fresh-faced and nubile heroes, they come across a house owned by a dysfunctional family that make the Osbourne’s look like the Brady Bunch. And that leathery face chap? It ain’t Mick Jagger. But he’s just as scary.

It’s still mindboggling that this film was actually banned. Of course, I am writing from a modern, British perspective, where you have to practically murder an audience member to earn a tut of disapproval. Yes, people are killed in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and killed in not very nice ways. But there is no blood. What makes Tobe Hooper’s horror such a terrifyingly unsettling classic of the genre is the sound. There isn’t a horror film with a more effective understanding of the power of noises than this. Even before the screaming and gurgling begins, the atmosphere of this remote land is created through an ominous buzzing. Is it insects? Or is it something else? Other horrors of the amazing 1970s boom of excellence, such as The Exorcist and The Wicker Man have utilised natural sound as part of the manipulation of fear, but never as effectively as it is done here.

In Marilyn Burns, Hooper also has a heroine whose screams don’t sound like the contrived, forced, cartoonish wails of, for example, the otherwise excellent Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. When Burns’ Sally loosens her vocal chords, you really believe that she is being pursued through the woods by a crazy lumberjack. Even when one character is offed in a particularly swift and unpleasant fashion, he doesn’t simply die. Once again, not a drop of claret in sight, but we get the noisy convulsions of death, and the demented squealing of a psychopath. It really does unnerve.

By contemporary standards, the lack of blood and overt gore make The Texas Chainsaw Massacre a rather hard sell, but that doesn’t stop it from being an absolute, bone chilling classic, deserving of its spot in the eerie ‘Horror Hall of Fame’.

Now there’s a place I wouldn’t want to go at night.

**** ½ / *****