The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Less a horror film than an acid fueled nightmare, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an unwitting and unmitigated masterpiece of modern cinema. Along with Psycho and Night of the Living Dead, it is one of the 3 most important genre films in the last 50 years. Unlike the admittedly groundbreaking films with which it shares this distinction however, it has yet to be topped in either intensity or execution.
A textbook example of a time honored formula executed flawlessly, the now all too familiar story finds an inoffensive group of kids stumbling off the main road and into the clutches of the most mad and macabre “family” ever put to film. The kids are picked off one by one until only a solitary female is left who the family summarily binds, tortures and psychologically torments right up to the explosive finale. The genesis of the final girl and about a billion other horror clichés is to be found here. Yet, despite the repetitious thievery of over 35 years worth of imitators, we’re still waiting to see it done better.
I can think of no other film for whom the phrase “lightning in a bottle” is more liberally and deservedly applied. There is no logical explanation for how a group of essentially amateurs managed to gather together in the summer of 1973 and execute every facet of film making so expertly as to put 95% of studio films to shame, but there it is. That just happened.
The photography is a revelation. The dissolves, the slow pans and the cutaway’s coalesce to achieve a fairy tale atmosphere of impending doom. The experimental score is a jangling, clanging, rumbling wave of nauseating sound that never allows you to rest easy for so much as a single scene. The set design is so authentic it makes you physically uncomfortable. The acting is pitch perfect across the board, from the likable and believable cattle-like kids to the revolting rural family they fall prey to.
Speaking of, Jim Seidow is hilarious and menacing as the cook. Edwin Neal is jittery and repugnant as the hitchhiker, a character so vile and off putting you can verily smell him through the screen. Gunnar Hansen’s Leatherface is sympathetic, terrifying and disconcertingly unknowable. He’s as scared of the teens who trespass on his homestead as they and we are of him. A shambling approximation of a human being, he dons different faces and costumes to fit the role he is required to play. There is no psychiatrist who could uncover and treat the layers of psychoses this lumbering behemoth is suffering from.
This post Vietnam meltdown of a movie skins the antiquated notion of Rockwellian America, leaving bare the rotten reality of a nation at generational war with itself. It’s a portrait of this country’s diseased, dying and hateful past still possessing the power to corrupt and dismember its peaceful future. For proof of this subtext, look no further than the scene when the desiccated patriarch of these obsolete and passed over slaughterhouse workers is roused from seeming death by sucking blood from the finger of Marilyn Burn’s formerly innocent flower child.
But this film is strong enough to succeed without dwelling on any such subtext. It is a pre-eminent scare show of the highest order. It will violate your nerves, sicken your stomach and obliterate any trust in your fellow man. In short, it is a perfect horror film.
4 out of 4
reviewed by Matt Risnes
© Copyright 2009 John Shatzer
