Films: 1970s
(1974) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Saturday, October 14, 2006
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Director: Tobe Hooper
Released: 1974
First things first, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" transcends its roots in the exploitation films by which its creators financed it production. "Texas Chainsaw" is an art-horror film born of low budget innovation and dedication to a singular purpose.
That purpose is atmosphere, and director Tobe Hooper captures a dusk-and-twilight universe, punctuated by black-blue nightscapes, that fully conveys a palpable otherworldliness. It is an achievement of photography.
Furthermore, the cast delivers nuanced performances that seem real, reacting in a frustratingly predictable, but believable, fashion to the absurd horror into which their characters plummet.
The story is merely plot. In the wake of reported graverobbing, four young adults drive to rural Texas to investigate the condition of a family member's grave. On their way out of town, they have a harrowing encounter with a self-mutilating and aggressive hitchhiker. From the gas station (dry of fuel) at which they stop, they decide to visit the now-abandoned family home.
In search of a watering hole, two of the travelers, Pam and Kirk (played by William Vail and Teri McMinn) discover a nearby farm. What they discover at that farm causes the world around the foursome to unravel in a particularly messy fashion.
The farm, as the kids discover, is populated by cannibals. This is where Hooper unleashes the next level of imagery - moving the film from unsettling to deeply disturbing. McMinn's Pam scores a solid and frustratingly paralyzed performance after falling into a room of bleached bones. Between photographer Daniel Pearl's painterly setups and McMinn's ability to convey raw emotion, "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" draws a line between observer and involved, and then shoves the audience past that line.
The hulking man-child butcher of the family, Leatherface, combines the mythical oversized beast with bizarre subculture. Leatherface steps back and forth across gender lines, donning a wig a ladies face for dinner - a misshapen male visage for the hard work of capturing and cutting apart his entrée. Hooper is dead on in bringing actor Gunnar Hansen's mass to life, keeping the monster from skulking and lurking. Instead, Leatherface charges into scenes with simple purpose.
What is horrifying about Hansen's performance is how quickly and brutally he acts out his character's violence. When Leatherface hammers Kirk to death, Hooper captures it artfully but never indulges. Leatherface appears and brings down the instrument. Kirk falls and twitches (Vail and Hooper create one of the film's most effect details without a single special effect). Leatherface hits Kirk again and that's the end of it. No jump cuts, no gratuitous close-ups, no Technicolor red splattering everywhere.
This brings up an important aspect of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," (which this writer would describe as a film that has been co-opted by past detractors and imitators). There is very little blood in the movie.
While "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" has a reputation for being a gorefest, it is not. Hooper recognizes, wisely, that the horror in violence is more in the doing and not as much in the aftermath. Watching Leatherface hoist Pam toward a waiting meathook is more intense that watching it sink into flesh (which he does not show). Watching McMinn act while on said meathook is more intense than a closeup of blood running from her back (again, not part of the movie).
This is the same aesthetic that served Todd Browning's "Dracula" so well, over 40 years prior to "Texas Chainsaw Massacre." Audience respond to human faces. Audiences create visuals out of their imagination. They sew together the disturbing images on the screen in a film like Hooper's, manufacturing scenes that do not exist. This is part of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre's" power.
Another part of its power is its relentless treatment of characters. Hooper may not display the results of Leatherface's butchery, but Hooper certainly pulls no punches when it comes to depicting his murderous actions. Among the other two victims in the film, wheelchair bound Franklyn (the late Paul Partain), is at once pathetic and sympathetic. The outcast of the group, and physically incapable of keeping up, literally and socially, Hooper treats him like the weakest of the herd onscreen. There is a specific cruelty to that choice, but it also ties the narrative of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" into a real-world dynamic. Watching Leatherface saw apart Franklyn in his wheelchair, we are watching the lion grapple and pull down the slowest gazelle.
What Hooper and writer Kim Henkel create, in the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is a reductive social horror film. Its characters travel from civilization to pre-civilization, from a world with certain rules to a world in which every taboo (graverobbing, cannibalism, gender roles, the sanctity of life) is violated.
Franklyn's sister, Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) survives alone. Her journey is the only journey that reaches an endpoint in which she is still able to react to her environment. Based on Hooper and Henkel's vision, that is a fairly pessimistic condition.
Sally is interesting in "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" in that it is unclear what she wants out of her travel to rural Texas. Initially concerned with her relatives' graves, she does not share her brother's more intense interest in their family's past (only Franklyn insists they visit the old house). Unlike Pam and Kirk, she is not on the road to party. Sally exists on the margins of her friends and family. Her proximity to them seems to equate to protection. Only when they are dead can she run away from the danger of the Sawyer family, but until they are killed the other three serve as a buffer between her and the cannibals.
Her journey is simultaneously a lesson of self-sufficiency and a searing exposure to the awful pit that can open beneath anyone at any time. Her ability to hide is first removed, and then, when she flees back to the gas station, her belief in the protection afforded by civilization is blasted aside.
Captured by the gas station attendent, known as Old Man, she is bagged and returned to Leatherface. What follows is a complete divorce from reality, and the final perversion of the social structure that the Sawyers warp. This starts with a twisted family dinner and ends with a reverse passing of family legacy, from young to old, as Old Man and the returned-to-the-family Hitchhiker attempt to get Grandfather Sawyer to hammer Sally's head open over a bucket.
When she escapes that backwards and lethal scenario, Sally appears to be uncatchable. Fully divorced from reality, horrible or otherwise, she outruns uninjured and more aggressive pursuers. When she finally manages to board a pickup and is raced away from a convulsing full-tantrum Leatherface, she is mad. Hooper completes her arc in Lovecraftian fashion and the unknowable is locked inside her skull, leaving her deconstructed reality in the hills of Texas. There is no resolution, there is only escape.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
