The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Is a Near-Perfect Film: Horror in American Cinema, Part 2

So not long ago I wrote about my disappointment with season 1 of American Horror Story and its reduction of horror to Dutch-angled bullshit. But despite the fact that I am the most negative of Nancies, we should consider, as a counterpoint, what makes good horror. What makes something that really gets under one's skin.

Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The very name conjures up every trope of B-movie slashers (or what the Brits used to call "video nasties," further proof of that they are the Anglophone virgin to our Anglophone chad). If, like me, you grew up in the VHS environment of the '90s, it's the sort of title that promised every cheap thrill we wanted as idiotic tween boys -- gore, tits, and ideally gore-spattered tits. Sure, the movies we watched had those -- as we worked our way through the Scream and Halloween and the questionable-things-done-last-summer franchises, but there remained something totemic about Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The name held magic, as if it was the most forbidden film, something only to be provided by older brothers who smoked soft packs of Kools, or by the kid down the street whose family always seemed just a bit off.

And sure, I'd seen it at some point then, and liked it a lot. But it wasn't until about 20 years later that I re-watched it, and actually got it. And it was at that point that I knew it belonged in my top 10 American films.

What is the most shocking to modern viewers -- especially after Saw, Hostel, and all those other torture-porn flicks of the '00s -- is how little actual blood and violence there is. There is some, for sure, and that opening shot of a dismembered corpse on a tombstone is pretty damn grisly, but that is far and away the most explicitly bloody thing in the whole movie. Rather, the film's horror is entirely predicated on eerie tone and near-surrealist imagery, with set design more inspired by the work of Dali, Klee, or Yves Tanguy than Fritz Lang.

  

We need to view the movie in the context of horror at the time. For the previous 50 years, American horror had occurred in two strands. First, there were the familiar creature features that had been around since the Silent Era, but which are probably most familiar in the form of the campy matinees of the 1930s through 1950s. Second, there was a more high-class "psychological" strain, as exemplified by Hitchcock's American movies. However, the two had rarely met, although a handful of other low-budget masterpieces -- Freaks, Carnival of Souls, and Night of the Living Dead being three excellent examples -- managed to pair visceral horror with an in-depth portrayal at the anxiety and sheer weirdness lurking beneath the surface of modern life.

What sets Texas Chain Saw apart is the thoroughness with which the story eviscerates the American cinematic tradition that came before it. 

To give a spoiler alert at this point is more or less pointless. If you have watched a horror movie, any horror movie, you know the score. You know about going into houses you shouldn't. You know that there will be a last girl. But that is not the point.

Consider our killers. Leatherface, with his human-skin mask, a detail taken from the crimes of Ed Gein in rural Wisconsin 20 years previous (as a sidenote, another one of the most horrifying films about American life, albeit in a completely different way, Werner Herzog's Stroszek was shot in the same Waushara County fields that Gein stalked), is the most-remembered, but most people only remember the mask and of course the chainsaw.

They are less likely to remember Leatherface crossdressing in a matronly apron with lipstick and blue eyeshadow, like a nightmare version of a '50s housewife. and they don't remember the members of the cannibalistic Texas clan, the near-dead, near-immobile grandfather awkwardly slinging his sledgehammer while his son recounts his past glories as one of the most productive employees on the killing floor at a meatpacking plant. They don't remember the squeaky-voiced, stringy-haired teen giggling as he slashed his hand open, like an ur-version of the American teenager at his dumbest. They don't remember the barbecue pitmaster and gas station owner who seems the concerned middle-aged dad until it's realized that his veneer of normalcy conceals a brutality and cruelty as profound as the rest of them.

Similarly, the victims are a bunch of young, kinda-hippie kids. They traipse naively through the countryside, talking about astrology, representatives of contemporary America to be slaughtered by reflections of a previous America as seen through a funhouse mirror.

Hell, the very landscape itself is ominous. Part of what makes Texas Chain Saw work is that most of the actions takes place in the daylight. Instead of dark attics, you see a denuded landscape, the mythic Texas plains of so many Westerns presented as a land of shuttered slaughterhouses, abandoned frontier homes, semi-functional gas stations, with the radio reporting crimes of increasing severity, utterly unrelated to the plot, indicative of the sort of 1970s cultural paranoia that one associates with movies like Taxi Driver, All the President's Men, and The Parallax View.

By the time we reach the film's climax, the cannibal feast, the family is presented at the exact same angle used in Leave It to Beaver or Father Knows Best, squabbling just a bit (family life, don'tcha know). Daddy is at the head of the table, just waiting to cut into the roast.

 

The result? An 80-minute fever dream. The sort of thing that, even as a cynical, jaded adult, can haunt me on those long, sweltering late afternoons. On Sundays where I have nothing to think about other than dread. On which the very concrete seems to hiss with menace.