“What happened is true. Now the motion picture that’s just as real.” The theatrical release poster for Tobe Hooper’s 1974 horror milestone lured audiences with the promise of real-life atrocity — a lie that nonetheless gets at an elemental truth: in art, questions of true or false are immaterial. Even as a work of fiction, the horror of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is, in fact, real. Serial killers, political assassinations, regime change facilitated by reactionaries, the Vietnam War, the Phoenix Program, the meat industry, poverty, hunger; the blood sacrifices that are demanded and subsequently swept under the rug so that the blood may be kept coursing through the veins of a society-shaped monster.
Hooper’s funhouse mirror vision of slaughterhouse cruelty looks unflinchingly at the violence that feeds the beast. Far from a parody of the nuclear family (or The Last Supper, as has been suggested), the famous, agonizing dinner table scene is in actuality the nature of post-WWII family values laid bare, both in its penchant for violence as well as the misogynistic character of said violence. Gunnar Hansen’s Leatherface is something of a bumbling oaf who nonetheless, or maybe exactly because of this, unconsciously reproduces the patriarchal violence he’s surrounded by. True, men and women are both targets of his murderous instincts, but we see him dispose of his female victims with extra relish, toying with them, chasing them, hanging them from meathooks — playing with his food, a twisted foreplay to heighten his pleasure and win the approval of those who compel him to kill in the first place.
The sexual dimension of Leatherface’s rampaging is made more explicit in the film’s 1986 sequel — The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2‘s more overt comedic tone has somewhat overshadowed the 1974 film’s jet-black humor — during a famous scene which sees him lustfully rubbing the bar of his chainsaw against a woman’s crotch as the motor sputters menacingly. The scene is a darkly hilarious fit for the riotous sequel, especially coming off what is likely the film’s best jump scare, but the first film is no less preoccupied with this aspect of Leatherface’s character as well as the family structure as a whole.
This “uncovering” act, this laying bare of the blood and guts that power the machine and the libidinal impulses that animate it, extends to its “film about meat” preoccupations as well. The film’s first kill, a nasty hammer-to-the-head squelcher, is overlayed with the sound of pigs being slaughtered, squealing squeals of endless misery as Kirk’s (William Vail) body thrashes about violently, something a second blow quickly takes care of. An even more illustrative choice lies in Leatherface’s costuming: aside from choice in weapons — he doesn’t use his chainsaw all that much — he also spends much of the film dressed in a butcher’s apron.
While Leatherface is only one part of the cannibalistic family unit — Edwin Neal and Jim Siedow give wonderfully demented life to the Hitchhiker and “The Cook,” respectively — he does embody the film’s id, the scarred gray patchwork heart at the center of it. Even his name is a grotesquerie: skin, formerly living tissue reduced to a product, made into a perverse accessory — a horror to paint over the horror underneath. Beneath the mentally challenged hulk façade, there is something more psychologically complex to his role as essentially the family enforcer who is driven just as much by fear of retaliation as he is by the allure of quasi-sexual gratification. Indeed, whatever pleasure he derives from his actions appears to be rooted in the rule-following as much as the killing itself.
The oft-mentioned “documentary feel” muddies the “true story” aspect further — although certain documentary techniques are part of its cinematic vocabulary, reports of people mistaking it for a documentary carry the scent of tall tales — but its the film’s existence in the political moment of the mid-‘70s that truly imbues it with any sense of “reality.” This pertains to more aspects than one: the cinema of the era was one marked by paranoia and distrust. The same year, The Conversation, Chinatown, and The Parallax View all dealt with the lingering political nihilism that defined life after the revolutionary fervor of the 1960s, and the randomness, the pointlessness, the lack of a rational motive behind the killings points its finger in that direction as well.
This isn’t the Old West of Cormac McCarthy, ruled by an angry Old Testament God. This is the old world mutating into the new one — 25 years later, the notion of a serial killer, even a cannibalistic one, would seem archaic as it made way for the school shooter, the mass murderer of the information age — old bloodshed colliding, then fusing with the world of technology and post-war prosperity. This writer recently called Apocalypse Now “quite possibly the defining American film about Vietnam,” but in a very meaningful way Chain Saw’s griminess captures the savagery of the American project in a way that Apocalypse’s grand, sprawling spectacle can’t.
Hooper’s film sets itself apart in another crucial way as well, however, one which finds new resonance now that questions regarding cinema’s future regularly come to the fore amidst what seems like an ever-expanding list of mid-to-big-budget flops — speaking of The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, finding ways forward for cinema was at least one of the concerns that motivated Francis Ford Coppola’s own recent pricey commercial failure, Megalopolis. Hooper’s low-budget vision and Bressonian preference for non-professional actors (Bresson himself would chronicle post-‘68 hopelessness three years later with The Devil, Probably) provides a glimpse of what a future genre cinema could look like, though even its roughly $140,000 ($700,000 adjusted for inflation) reveals the circumstances of its production to have been fairly standard, if more modest than those of its famous peers.
But for a film such as this, there is a level it operates on that no reading (close or otherwise) can ever truly get around. Chain Saw isn’t merely thematically rich, politically intelligent, and (inadvertently) at the bleeding edge of an alternative vision of feature-length filmmaking; it also happens to be mean, nasty, viscerally thrilling, and scary as hell. Few moments in cinema rival the eerie quiet of the nighttime ranch being violently disrupted by the gasoline-powered roar of a chainsaw, a beast lunging at the camera like a terrible prehistoric vision suddenly materializing out of the depths of the collective unconscious, augmented with the mechanized metal arm of industrial society.
It’s no question that the legacy of Tobe Hooper’s sophomore film has endured — aside from countless sequels, prequels, remakes, and rip-offs, it has most recently inspired a direct (and unfairly maligned) sequel, which did away with the eccentric two-word spelling of “chainsaw” and took on the anxieties of the post-neoliberal, post-Internet world — although few films, if any, have managed to match the scorching, savage, nightmarish power of its images. It’s not just a testament to the potential of the horror genre, it’s a testament to the potential of the medium itself: 50 years on, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre still leaves blankets of ash in its wake.
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