“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” Review: Looking Back at the Genre-Defining Yet Subversive Classic
The horizon refracts like water from the sheer heat. A Volkswagen emerges over the edge. 5 kids circling 20 are headed to a house one of their grandpa’s owns, and abandoned, dilapidated infrastructure once charmingly pristine. The floorboards are fractured, the zebra wallpaper is peeling and pale, and spindly spiders can be found populating its corners. The same deterioration and quaintness can be attributed to the gas pump that had no gas on the way there. There is an inherent charm and beauty to such aging, like the lines on your mother’s face that deepen as the years pass. What surrounds them, in every which way, is an eerie nothing, if you can call limitless fields and golden sunshine that.
In Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” you certainly can. The slasher genre-defining classic holds up to the test of time with a visceral terror and thematic sophistication that simply cannot be prescribed to its juvenile, late-stage peers. Maybe it being the first of its kind allows for such; not yet cliches, elements only exist to fortify this particular story.
From the start, bright, forensic flashes from a pitch-black reveal slimy, rotting corpses so close up, you don’t know what you’re looking at. A yellow moon shining in a seemingly starless sky, Sally (Marilyn Burns) tumbling in and out of blue illumination and shadowy brush, and the crimson-and-ink polarity of various meats in a cavernous oven further determine the film’s push and pull with light.
Similarly, gruesome acts that now, conventionally, must happen under the cover of night, transpire under an unremarkable, lazy sun. A disturbed hitchhiker jerkily wields a number of blades to cut a deep gash into his own hand and slice Franklin’s (Paul A. Partain) arm. He’s pushed out of the van, but not before leaving a symbol in blood on its outside. You can hear the noisy generator running behind Pam’s (Teri McMinn) animalistic screeches as she hangs from a hook, a bucket thoughtfully placed underneath her to catch her drippings.
There is no score to reduce the friction of horrors like these; there is no need to heighten intensity through sound when terrors onscreen are successfully jarring on their own. The camera has a gritty, documentary-like objectivity, grounding the film in an unbelievable reality.
The camera perfectly captures Partain’s remarkable yet grounded performance among a multitude of formidable, dramatically heightened ones. Out of the ensemble, his character feels most lived-in. The tension between his physical disability and his friendships is emblematic of the existential helplessness that pervades the plot. As the rest of the crew excitedly climb the rickety stairs of his grandpa’s house, he’s left alone in his wheelchair without a second thought. Pent up frustration manifests in childlike raspberries and bubbling tears in a striking moment of emotional upheaval. It feels earned, especially since his lack of agency has been established since falling from his chair at the film’s onset, and the hitchhiker, the negative prediction Pam reads from her astrology book, and a curious bed of bird bones and feathers makes Franklin lonely in his dread. Later, he truly can’t do anything about it when he’s mercifully slaughtered with swift precision.
Perhaps Partain’s performance is aided by additional details about his character that also flesh out themes of sustenance and mercy. Franklin comes from a line of cattlemen. He remarks that the methodology of killing such creatures has changed from bludgeoning to a swift bullet through the head, which the hitchhiker denies. Pam asks them to stop talking about it, as she likes to eat meat and wants to continue doing so. Later, Leatherface wields multiple killing tools—knife, club, chain saw—with a quiet duty. People have to eat after all, and it just so happens that human is their protein of choice, bringing into question how we delineate which animals are friend, and which are food.
The other perpetrators, however, like to play with their food.
Sally lurches to safety, in this case, the familiar gas station and attendant. After propping her up to sit, he briefly disappears to go to his car as she catches her breath, then comes back with a large sack.
“You’ll just cooperate, young lady, and we’ll have no trouble.”
He subsequently stuffs her into the bag, slings her into the passenger seat, and drives her to an undisclosed location, cackling as he pokes her with a stick. He pulls up to the same house she tried to escape and runs into the hitchhiker. As it turns out, they were all in coordination to consume her. They hoot and holler and jeer, delighting in her distress as they give her cut finger to their unmoving grandfather so as to revive him. This sequence is the most terrifying of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” as an allegory for an all-too-real prolific terror. It’s a punch to the feminine gut, eliciting a familiar, profound sorrow.
Leatherface is not only a villain, but also a victim. They never speak; their perceived incompetence is met with berating and physical abuse by their family members and elicits their own animal-like whines. Their androgyny is clear; their mask features subtle lashes across their eye holes, they wear a wig in the final sequence, and sport a button up and tie the first time we see them. Leatherface exists in this undefinable gender in-between as an extension of their “scary” distinction from the rest of society, something that would later proliferate other horror films like “Silence of the Lambs.”
And all within a succinct hour and twenty.