At their core, all filmmakers are con artists. Their intent is to deceive and manipulate the viewer, making them believe in the images they conjure, so much so that they become emotionally invested in the flickers of light that play out before them. Some directors can do this with consistency, others manage to catch lighting in a bottle, only able to cast their spell once, forever toiling afterwards to create that magic once more.
Such was the case with Tobe Hooper in the summer of 1973. Working with a small crew and a miniscule budget, he was somehow able to create a film that would go on to be regarded as a masterpiece of horror, transforming the genre, for good and ill, with a movie that continues to resonate some 50 years after its release.
The plot of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is simplicity itself, its threadbare story one that had been told since cinema’s silent era. A group of travelers run into trouble, take a wrong turn and wind up in the midst of a nightmare, their sense of displacement exacerbated by an inexplicable threat.
Yet, it’s how Hopper frames the story and constructs it that proves jarring. It begins before the lights even go down as the title itself, promises that we will witness the most gruesome of acts, a slaughter of the sort not witnessed before on the silver screen. Had you seen the film’s poster while walking in – sporting the tagline “Who will survive and what will be left of them?” – Hopper’s dark seed of grim expectations would have been planted even more deeply.
Primed for the worst, viewers were et on a hair trigger, eager and fearful for what was about to ensue. And this is when the magic began, as Hopper pulled off one of the great con jobs in film history. Utilizing razor sharp editing, he cuts on action again and again, suggesting the acts his hulking, killer Leatherface commits rather than showing them, knowing full well what the viewer will see in their primed imaginations will be worse than what he could show them. Deafening, jarring sound effects and committed performances from his cast, help in creating a mood of dread that had not been achieved in the cinema before and rarely since.
There’s a seedy aesthetic to the film that smacks of an amateur documentary, so many of Hopper’s shots assuming a fly-on-the-wall aspect. There’s a sense of intrusion throughout, the viewer hijacked into sharing in the victims’ trespass into the Sawyer home. We know we shouldn’t be there and yet we’re trapped, unable to turn tail and run, like we hope poor Kim and Pam (William Vail and Teri McMinn) will. Much like the cat, curiosity gets the best of them, and they become Leatherface’s first victims. Needless to say, satisfaction does not bring them back.
During the 40 minutes that pass before these gruesome deaths, Hopper created a sense of foreboding that’s unparalleled. The group, which also includes Jerry (Allen Danzinger) as well as brother and sister, Franklin and Sally (Paul Partain and Marilyn Burns), have just come from a cemetery where graves have been riffled through. A grotesque piece of art consisting of a decomposing corpse, straddling a large monument, his hands cradling the head of another, has been created, it being the first clear image that assails the viewer.
This event is just one of many obvious omens the group ignores. The newscast that plays on the radio in their sweltering van is a litany of dire events. There’s an out-of-control fire in the oil fields of Texas, a cholera epidemic is mentioned, as are two incidents of rioting, a pair of grisly murders in Gary, Indiana, the collapse of a high-rise in Atlanta and a case in which an 18-month-old child has been found chained in the attic of their parents’ home. This is far from a normal newscast, yet it goes unheeded, as does Pam’s warning that “Saturn is in retrograde,” a sign the believer of horoscopes says should be heeded. The world is literally out of joint, yet all the warning signs that should be heeded – including the ramblings of a drunk old man at the cemetery – are ignored. Thus, their fate is sealed.
And while much has been written regarding the tone and mood of the movie, the humor in the film is often overlooked. The half-wit at the gas station where they stop, mindlessly wheeling his large bucket of suds back and forth in front of the doomed van to wash its windows, the Old Man (Jim Siedow) chastising his son (Edwin Neal) for allowing his bother to destroy the front door and the perverse Sawyer clan mocking poor Sally when she awakens to find herself tied to a chair, a grisly repast in front her, all produce genuine humor, albeit of the darkest sort. Hooper is toying with us in these moments, allowing the viewer a brief respite from the mayhem, only to cruelly pull the rug out from under us after providing a false sense of security.
America in the early 1970’s was a tumultuous time, many of its social ills evident in the Sawyers’ plight. They are victims of economic and social upheaval, their workplace and home torn asunder by forces beyond their control. The slaughterhouse where generations of their family have worked has no use for them anymore. Machines now do the work faster and more efficiently they any man could, so they have been relegated to the unemployment line, forced to use their skill set to survive, this time harvesting wayward travelers rather than docile bovine. Not only is this done for sustenance but commerce as well, their “barbeque” readily available at their filling station. That there is no fuel for sale at the establishment further underscores their sense of abandonment.
Regarding their family, the absence of a mother figure is obvious and has a profound effect on them all. A new sense of independence for women was being realized at the time and one imagines Mrs. Sawyer likely having left once times got rough, perhaps getting a job of her own in a far-off town. Left to fend for themselves, the Sawyer men are left adrift, their home their ramshackle, filthy home an effective metaphor for the decay of the nuclear family, their behavior devolving to the most primitive.
Yet Leatherface, the simplest of the family, does his best to fill this void. We witness him doing domestic chores, his grisly kitchen activities a grotesque display of food preparation for the clan. More obvious is the apron he wears and the mask he dons, replete with garish red lipstick and topped with a cheap wig, suggesting a conscious effort to become a perverse matriarch. This, as well as a poignant moment in which he is scurrying about the house, rocking and quietly moaning in an attempt to quell his fear for having done something wrong, casts him in a momentary, sympathetic light.
Throughout Massacre we’re in the palm of Hopper’s hand, the spell he weaves so powerful, there’s no escaping it even when our eyes are closed, our hands over our ears. The film’s dark images, both seen and suggested, haunt us long after we witness Leatherface’s maniacal dance in the morning sun, chainsaw whirling about him as he turns in circles of delusion and delight. And while moments from inferior knockoffs are swept to the dustbin of our minds, Massacre’s scenes are seared in our memories, the power of them never diminishing, only gaining strength as we further contemplate their meaning and horror.
