Criterion Classics: 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' (1974)
As the streaming wars wage on, The Criterion Channel, HboMax, Netflix and Amazon Prime have made it easier than ever for the filmmakers of tomorrow to find the gems of yesterday.
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
Tis the season! Well, the spooky season at least… The third entry in this series coincides with Halloween so obviously the only logical spotlight for this month was Horror. The Criterion Channel featured a playlist all month long of 70s horror films with familiar titles like ‘The Wicker Man’ and ‘The Crazies’ but for the latest entry, I’m taking a look at 1974’s ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’, directed and written by Tobe Hooper, co-written by Kim Henkel.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which I will subsequently refer to as ‘TCM', is one of the few horror classics that lives up to its acclaim. The story centers around a group of young people on a road trip to Sally (Marilyn Burns) and her disabled brother Franklin’s (Paul A. Partain) childhood home in Texas. After some stilted deliveries from all of the first time actors, Franklin unfortunately gets the most vicious chainsaw death but even Leatherface gets a taste of his own medicine by the end. While this isn’t usually credited as the genesis of the slasher movies that would later dominate the 80s, there are undoubtedly elements that would become tropes and staples of the genre. You got your young, attractive people looking for secluded areas to hook up, a murderer in a mask with an iconic weapon and a “final girl.” This was released four years before John Carpenter’s ‘Halloween’ and to give ‘TCM’ an even more tongue in cheek credit, the movie begins with yellow text crawling up the screen that describes what we’re about to see so… what’s up George Lucas? Just kidding. I know he copped the idea from ‘Flash Gordon’ (1936.)
The 1970s were a huge turning point for Hollywood. This is of course the era of some of the greatest dramatic films of all time from ‘The Godfather’ to ‘Taxi Driver,' creators were being given more freedom to tell daring stories that reflected the disillusioned American zeitgeist of post-Vietnam. Similarly, the horror genre took a step away from the Gothic thrillers of the Hammer heyday, which were often based on novels, to tell more realistic and gruesome forms of terror based on real life. Robin Hardy’s ‘The Wicker Man’ explored folk horror through cultism and real customs, The Crazies is another examination of biological and political fears by George A. Romero and ‘TCM’ is about a demented, likely inbred family of murderers in the American south. This focus on grounded realism is at the forefront of 70s horror and the details are peppered throughout the plot, the prosthetics and the picture itself.
Remember that opening text crawl I mentioned? It instantly insinuates the movie is based on a true story but never plainly states the events actually happened or are real in any way. This is a brilliant and efficient technique of bringing the audience into the world of the movie while they wonder if the killer is still out there, possibly right outside the theater. Of course, while there has never been a serial killer with the nickname “Leatherface”, the film was partially inspired by the real life murders of Ed Gein; aka “The Butcher of Plainfield.” Several aspects of Ed Gein’s insane story were lifted straight into the film: bodies exhumed from cemetery graves, furniture made from human skin and even his butcher nickname applied to Leatherface’s family career is the type of abhorrent barbarism you just can’t make up. Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ in 1960 and Jonathan Demme’s ‘The Silence Of The Lambs’ in 1991 were also based on Ed Gein’s atrocities but it’s in ‘TCM’ that the gore and violence of the crimes carried visceral, cinematic weight. While prosthetics on the actors skew towards fake blood and knife wounds, the disgusting set design of rotting corpses and macabre home decor paint a pastoral hellscape.
For these clever and unsettling reasons, ‘TCM’ clearly has had an influence on future filmmakers. The pseudo-documentary nature of the film laid the groundwork for other seminal works of the genre like ‘The Blair Witch Project’ and ‘Paranormal Activity.’ The mise on scéne of (real) half-decomposed animals and various epidermal furnishings in Leatherface’s home led to art director Robert A. Burns working on other gore-filled cult classics like ‘Re-Animator,’ ‘The Hills Have Eyes' and ‘The Howling.’ Tobe Hooper, would go on to make about a dozen more mostly horror features, including being credited director of ‘Poltergeist’ which several cast and crew members later reported that Steven Spielberg ghost-directed the film, pun definitely intended.
Another staple of 70s horror is the cinematography and more specifically, the use of daylight. ‘TCM,’ ‘The Hills Have Eyes,’ and ‘Jaws’ all take place predominately in the daytime; a choice that would gain Ari Aster much acclaim for his 2019 film, ‘Midsommar.’ He would also receive some flak for its overt homage to The Wicker Man but I digress. To armchair psychoanalyze, horror being shown in broad daylight could have been, subconsciously or not, a way for filmmakers to process the loss of their idyllic (and mostly white) American dream that reigned in the 1950s through the civil unrest of the 1960s. Then, as the 1970s broadcast the failure of the government’s war in Vietnam on national television, there was no more hiding the evils America tried to gloss over. In the words of the philosopher Francis Bacon, “Truth is a naked and open daylight, that does not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world…”
There is a plethora of inventive and flat out cool shots from low angles and POV shots that give a sense of voyeurism despite the obvious sloppiness of the handheld camera; albeit that was probably intentional by director of photography, Daniel Pearl. The performances, aside from Marilyn Burns are one of the few downfalls and the overall aesthetic has a very independent texture almost to the point of a grind house midnight movie. However, the pacing, tone and most importantly the kills are undeniably well executed. I can’t speak for the handful of sequels, prequels and remakes (there’s a 2021 remake to be produced by Fede Alvarez in production) but if for some mad reason you haven’t seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and don’t feel like going trick or treating for Covid, it’s time to see “things happen hereabout, they don’t tell about.”
Check Out The Criterion Channel’s 1970s horror collection trailer below: