The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and its harrowing impact have rarely been equaled fifty years later

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a product of a unique time in American filmmaking, when independent exploitation films were dirtier than ever and equally capable of breaking into the mainstream consciousness.

Tobe Hooper’s 1974 film arrived in a newly transformed exhibition landscape. The 1967 outrage over the on-screen violence in Bonnie and Clyde marked the end of Hollywood’s Motion Picture Production Code and the introduction of film ratings.

Films like Easy Rider (1969) elevated the status of previously infamous Hollywood exploits. In 1973, The Exorcist was packing cinemas and producing production lines around city blocks with the promise of the most brutal horror film ever made.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was shot quickly on a shoestring budget, funded in part by the newly formed Texas Film Commission. The film gathered its cast and crew from Austin’s circles of recent graduates and dropouts.

The plot is simple enough: a group of young people become stranded when they run out of gas in rural Texas. They are terrorized and then murdered by an eccentric local family, including the chainsaw-wielding Leatherface: a non-verbal, childlike giant who wears masks made from the skin of his flayed victims.

We learn that this family has lost their job at the local slaughterhouse due to the introduction of gun technologies, which has led them to sell roadside meat made from human victims.

This detail has led to a series of thematic interpretations for the film, including commentary on class and family, gender and animal rights.

The film exposes the horrors of meat production inflicted on human victims. The parental home is the place where these themes come into conflict.

Porn and violence on screen

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was picked up by the Bryanston Distributing Company. In 1972, Bryanston was the distributor for the theatrical release of the hardcore porn film Deep Throat. The film’s success changed the popular discourse surrounding pornography and helped Bryanston broaden the theatrical release for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

In subsequent years, the media reported alleged unlawful conditions at Deep Throat, along with claims that Bryanston was linked to organized crime. Director Hooper, and many of the cast of Chain Saw Massacre, claimed they never received their share of the distributor’s box office.

Deep Throat’s proximity to the Texas Chain Saw Massacre stirred controversy, coinciding concerns about increasingly extreme depictions of sex and violence on screen.

Two years earlier, young filmmaker Wes Craven had switched from making pornography to horror films. His low-budget rape-revenge exploitation film The Last House on the Left (1972) was originally developed as a hardcore pornographic film. This approach was abandoned when it went into production.

Unlike Craven’s infamous film, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is not overtly sexualized. While there may be a sexual undertone to Leatherface’s pursuit of Sally and her companions, it does not escalate into on-screen sexual violence.

Regardless, the film was widely criticized, especially in Britain, where it was banned, and later played a role in public debates about the censorship of ‘video nasties’ in the 1980s.

As for me, I remember coming across The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at the video store as a kid: the title, the cover, and the R-rating promised incomprehensible horrors, many years before I actually saw the film itself.

Horrors were implied rather than shown

Controversies aside, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre played an important role in the developing field of horror film studies. It figures prominently in Robin Wood’s taxonomy of ‘reactionary’ horror films (which uphold traditional values) and ‘progressive’ horror films, which take a more ambivalent attitude towards the figure of the monster and challenge conservative social values. Wood counts The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in the latter category.

It is also central to Carol J. Clover’s influential codification of the “last girl” story, in which a single young woman is able to resist the monster’s attack.

In addition to Halloween (1978), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre helped steer the trajectory of American horror films in the 1980s.

Set in the manicured surroundings of the suburbs, Halloween conveys its menace through the slick technical qualities of its sliding camera and John Carpenter’s staccato synth score.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, on the other hand, locates its horror in the back roads and dilapidated farms of central Texas. The idea of ​​Texas looms large, connoting a place of lawlessness, violence, and danger.

Hooper accentuates his long shots with extreme close-ups through rapid editing. The film’s most grotesque horrors are implied rather than shown. The most visceral impact comes from the extended chase sequences and through the soundtrack: Sally’s piercing screams and Leatherface’s ever-present chainsaw.

While The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has spawned several sequels over the years and influenced even more imitators, from Ramones to Wolf Creek (2005) and X (2022), its intensity and harrowing impact have rarely been matched.