Hooper can make a simple shot of Franklin trying to get his wheelchair over a door entrance seem almost unbearably stressful at this point, and so when Kirk and Pam head out to a long dried out swimming hole and then spot a farmhouse where they could hopefully buy some gas, the audience is already at breaking point.
A mass of daddy longlegs in the corner of a room, or a few unidentified bones lying around will do the job just as well. The film further sets us on edge by cutting scenes abruptly, sometimes almost mid-word, giving it a breathless quality that wallows in your sub-conscious.īut Hooper doesn’t need overt acts of violence to build up the tension and the feelings of growing disgust. It’s a sequence that further puts the viewer on edge, expecting the very worst. If the film was described as a blood bath with entrails flying, you knew the book was written by a clueless idiot who probably hadn’t even watched the film). It’s also one of the goriest moments in the film (despite its reputation, this is a remarkably bloodless movie) and this sets the audience up to think they have seen far more than they actually have (a fun game I used to play – pick up film reference guides, go to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre entry and see what was written.
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If this is the set up, what the hell is coming next? It’s a smart move from director Hooper and co-writer Kim Henkel, because this is already unlike anything that horror movie audiences would have seen before. When he slices his own hand open with a knife, starts a fire in the van and cuts Franklin with a razor, the audience is already reeling. He’s an odd sort, to say the least – a grotesque birthmark on half his face and a personality that hovers between harmlessly sub-normal and dangerously psychotic.
En route, they pass the local slaughterhouses and pick up a hitchhiker (Edwin Neal). The kids are investigating whether Sally’s grandfather has been dug up in the grave robbing atrocities and checking out the old family farmhouse, now entirely dilapidated. The film is letting us know that the events that are about to unfold are not even that unusual in 1974 America.
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Even as we meet the characters – Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns), her wheel-chair bound and whinily annoying brother Franklin (Paul Partain), boyfriend Jerry (Allen Danziger) and friends Kirk (William Vail) and Pam (Terri McMinn) – we hear a radio news report that is nothing but a series of atrocities – death, murder, mutilation and assault. The film continues to set us up to expect the worst. This is the most jaw-droppingly powerful opening in film history. Cut to wired up, rotting corpses that remain the most grotesque ever seen on film and a radio report about “grave robbing in Texas” before we then go to the opening titles or sun flares and Wayne Bell’s industrial score (the most vital, unsettling and entirely essential score in cinema history, Bell’s music is nearer sound effect than traditional score, and is a massively important part of what makes the film work – replacing it would be a crippling act of cultural vandalism). The text scroll and voice over, calmly telling us that bad things are going to happen to everyone in the movie and implying that this is a true story (without ever saying so) give way to camera flashes of decayed body parts and that noise – a discordant, startling sound that is somewhere between an animal squeal and scraping metal. The opening moments of the film are a textbook exercise in setting the audience on edge.
No other movie – not even Tobe Hooper’s own out-of-control sequel – comes close to matching the sheer levels of hysteria and madness shown here, and no film so perfectly manipulates the audience from the opening moments, bringing them to such a state of expectation that when the horror actually kicks in, it’s almost a relief. It takes the reinvented modern day realism that the genre moved towards in the 1970s and grafts it onto a new form of delirious gothic grandeur, and it is relentlessly, insanely horrifying – and absurdly funny. It’s a film that essentially reinvented the genre, putting into place elements that have long since become clichés (and yet still work with powerful effect here) and offering a structural style that the best of the genre have tried to copy but never quite matched. I could argue that it is the best film of any genre, if I felt so inclined. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is the best horror film ever made. If for any reason you don’t own this film or haven’t seen it, you need to rectify that immediately.
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