Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Raw, uncompromising, intense and terrifying (and that’s just the title), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is far and away the most purely horrifying movie ever made.

One of the few horror films that fully lives up (or down depending on your view) to its notorious reputation, Tobe Hooper’s seminal masterpiece can be construed as many things - breathtakingly intense, unrelentingly grim, uncomfortably amusing – but, perhaps most significantly, it is genuinely and quite unapologetically frightening.

This is a film totally committed to scaring you witless.

Alive from the outset with a stark, oppressive atmosphere that mixes sweltering Texan heat with pure, unequivocal dread, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre followed hot on the heels of (and was in part inspired by) other nasty genre offerings such as Night Of The Living Dead and Last House On The Left.

After the morbid opening narration (delivered by comic John Larroquette who was a popular local DJ at the time) we cut to some startling, almost subliminal imagery that sets the tone almost immediately.
After brief flash bulb shots of what appears to be close-ups of rotten body parts, the camera pans slowly back to reveal two corpses crudely wired together. As the news programme on the radio becomes clearer, the newscaster warns that this “grisly work of art” is the latest in a long line of bizarre grave-robbing incidents.

This opening hook forms the initial plot motivation for our five young protagonists. Along with four others (including her whiny wheel-chair bound brother Franklin, Kirk, Jerry and Pam), Sally Hardesty travels into the heart of rural Texas to check that her grandfather’s grave remains untouched.
Despite the blazing sunshine and scorching heat, the Texan countryside is harsh and unwelcoming; dead armadillos litter the hot roadside and in the economic downturn, shuttered abattoirs and abandoned farms mar the skyline.

After brief, early encounters with a grizzled gas station attendant and (most strangely) a pyromaniac hitchhiker, the group visit Sally and Franklin’s grandfather’s old house. They frolic and joke around, but it’s when two of their number visits the farmhouse next door that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre REALLY fires up.

Enter Leatherface, a hulking, child-like degenerate who simply can’t be trusted to be left home alone.
After a shatteringly violent set piece (and surely the most excruciatingly tense ‘don’t go in the house!’ moment in cinema history), the youngsters find themselves being stalked and brutally murdered by Leatherface and tormented by his warped family of redundant slaughterhouse workers.
Only Sally, after a night of unparalleled torture and torment, manages to escape. Just.

Despite its reputation, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a remarkably bloodless film (could anything be gorier than that title?), where most of the carnage is either implied or delivered off screen.
To this day people are convinced that they have just watched the most sickeningly gory 87 minutes of their lives when in fact they have simply been letting their imaginations do the work from behind their closed, terrified eyes.

But that’s not to say this film isn’t violent; there are sledgehammers, meathooks, broom-handles, cut throat razors, and of course chain saws.

It could be argued that the women are overly victimised; the guys are bunked off relatively swiftly but Pam is hung on a meathook (the most disturbing scene) and left to expire in a freezer and Sally is chased screaming through the woods by the chain saw wielding Leatherface. The latter set piece is a brilliantly sustained sequence that trumps the lengthy chase scene at the outset of Romero’s Night Of Living Dead for sheer, unrelenting intensity. Worse, Sally is later mentally and physically degraded (seemingly forever) at the hands of Leatherface and his deranged family. But Hooper isn’t Argento and this is more of an interesting side-note note rather than coming off as significant or in any way misogynistic.

Technically, Chain Saw is a remarkable achievement; the art direction (particularly inside the bone-littered family home), sound effects (this is a panic-inducingly LOUD movie), editing and musical score (all apocalyptic rumblings and doom-laden keyboard surges) are all outstanding and contribute to the overall dreaded atmosphere.

Texas Chain Saw also passes the Brodieman Horror Litmus Test; for a horror movie to be truly great, even the daylight scenes must be scary. This is true for Halloween (Michael peering through the washing line), The Exorcist (unnerving autumnal afternoons) and it applies equally here. The Hitch-Hiker galloping after Sally with his razorblade at dawn, Leatherface rampaging through the brightly-lit house with his sledge-hammer, even the establishing shots of sun-kissed rural Texas; all utterly unnerving and totally sinister.

The acting is perfect within the constraints of the narrative; the kids are all believable (especially Marilyn Burns who must break some kind of screaming record as Sally) and the family (nameless, unknowable and abhorrent) possess traits which are at once realistic, diabolical and yet sinisterly amusing. Check out Leatherface racked with panic after murdering Jerry, pacing the bone scattered living room in a frenzy of confusion.

And how about those other classic moments? The moribund Grandpa too weak to deliver a fatal blow with the sledgehammer, or the chicken cooped up in the canary cage? Or less prominent images such as Kirk and Pam dwarfed by the sinister house or the human tooth on the porch?

Director Tobe Hooper shows admirable restraint early on but his camera assumes a pointedly aggressive stance later in the proceedings. Lingering, uncomfortable and downright threatening close-ups of Sally’s terror-stricken face show a director either at the height of his artistic powers or driven crazy from the Texan heat.
Nothing the director has put his name to since has come anywhere close to duplicating this. Life Force? Funhouse? Death Trap? All equally unworthy.

Whilst Chain Saw is legendary in the States, it is positively notorious here in the UK. It was withdrawn from theatrical release here in 1974 on the grounds that it was excessively violent (well, you’d have a hard time arguing the point) and was only recently granted a video release (I had to make do with a grainy pirated American copy for years!). And it doesn’t end there…
Complaints flooded into a TV station when it was shown last year, feminists protested in their hundreds when it finally hit London cinema screens in 1999 and the poster is still outlawed in commercial retail outlets.

There are subtexts here if you want them: the extreme inversion of the American nuclear family? The effects of mechanisation and the displacement of manual workers? An astrological premonition? Or perhaps even a persuasive argument for vegetarianism? (I knew a guy who based his college thesis on that last one).

Well no matter what your take on the above, Chain Saw is best enjoyed (if that’s the word) as pure exploitation and an unparalleled exercise in sustained, noisy terror.
It still exists independently of the four sequels (insane, incoherent, inept and indifferent respectively), this is a real one off that could never be duplicated.

It is powerful, macabre, unrelenting, harrowing and yet superbly crafted horror film that still retains the power to shock and disturb.

A grisly work of art indeed.


Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age