Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Just the title is evocative of intolerable cruelty and violence. Enough to stop many people in their tracks from watching.
Director, Producer: Tobe Hooper
New Zealand International Film Festival 2025
Tickets available HERE.
It is also a masterpiece of cinema, horror genre, or whatever. Quentin Tarantino has called it one of the few perfect movies ever made.
In New Zealand I remember it on the TV One News in 1974, the late edition. The second channel was relatively new. A totally different world today where the mainstream media is now viewed with disdain if not outright contempt and is on life support.
But back then we all watched the same news. Then discussed it at school, offices, work sites, staff rooms. The story came across as a crime feature, with film footage looking like grainy newsreel. Fleeting images of a huge guy wielding a chainsaw, grotesque human skin mask. The first glimpse of the notorious and iconic Leatherface.
It was a public success. From a budget of just $US140,000, it recouped over 30 million. Many reviewers noted its extreme horrific nature but also recognised its artistic merits.
The cult of Texas Chain Saw was launched.
It did not come out of a vacuum. Like all great art, it has an extensive back story, where truth is stranger than fiction.
The true story begins with Edward Theodore Ed Gein. Born in Wisconsin in 1906 and died in a mental asylum in 1984. Spanning the horrors of two world wars and two nuclear bombs dropped on civilian populations.
The following story then comes back into focus.
Gein and his older brother had grown up with a domineering mother.
She reserved time every afternoon to read to them from the Bible, usually selecting verses from the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation, concerning death, murder and divine retribution. Gein idolized and became obsessed with his mother.
Gein was a desecrator of graves and corpses, and culpable of two homicides when he was finally stopped in 1957.
Later in the custody of a psychiatric asylum, he would admit to being in cemeteries repeatedly. Digging up newly interred coffins and often plundering the relatively fresh remains.
He would confess to being in a fugue state at these times and acting as an automaton. One diagnosis attached to him was schizophrenia. Batshit crazy has never made the DSM III.
When he was finally brought to custody, he was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial.
Found in the same house he was born, authorities found body remains which are too gruesome to list here. These included numerous pelts of human hide including masks, chairs fashioned out of long skeleton bones, and masses of teeth.
Gein was attempting to recreate his mother who had passed away a few years prior.
After a thorough forensic and pathological examination of everything which was found in his house, along with the matching to police files, this is the final tally.
Two confirmed homicides, seven suspected homicides from missing persons (all female except one), nine confirmed desecrated corpses.
He was tagged the Plainfield Butcher, the Plainfield Ghoul. Even the Mad Butcher.
Peter Leitch may have missed a trick in not prefacing his countless radio ads with a chainsaw.
Robert Bloch was the first to get a novel out with oblique references to the story. Psycho (1959) turned Gein into a motel owner Norman Bates who had an unhealthy obsession with his mother.
The first cinema masterpiece came from Alfred Hitchcock and his adaptation of Psycho (1960). One of the greatest film directors who has deeply influenced many other greats including Spielberg, Scorsese, Tarantino, Kubrick, De Palma, Cronenberg, Lynch.
His signature is all over Tobe Hooper’s original Texas Chain Saw.
The movie starts with a macabre tapestry of parts of two corpses fashioned into an art statement. In this digitally restored version, this scene comes to life more vividly than I remember from first viewing. That remains for the rest of the movie.
The period of the early Seventies is important in giving context to the underlying themes which TCM weaves into the narrative.
Five young people on a trip to the countryside, two of them visiting their old homestead and checking on their grandparents’ graves, after hearing news reports of desecrated cemeteries.
Flares abound. Forever linked with hippies and flower power. Suddenly, all of that got stomped on with the rush to Punk and it has never reappeared. The Sex Pistols called hippies out.
The prominent sub-theme is the ideology of Vegetarianism, and the idea of Meat Is Murder.
Early shots in TCM of cattle and cows lowing. The five discuss how their family was heavily involved with the abattoir there and the animal killing chain.
Franklin, who is a paraplegic in a wheelchair, takes delight in describing the killing method going from sledgehammer to compressed air bolt gun.
The Smith’s song is tailor-made for this movie in retrospect. Starts with what could the electric saws operating around the sound of cows.
Death for no reason is murder/ And the calf that you carve with a smile/ Is murder.
The Smiths recorded an earlier song, Suffer Little Children, making a similar art statement about the Moors murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.
Originally, I did not give much weight to this theme. Watching on the big Civic Theatre screen with an enhanced soundtrack, the idea is brought to the fore.
The heat and sweat are already visceral, before any slashing and slaughter. Most of the movie is shot in the bright sunlight. Texas sunshine. Akin to inland Australia to give a reference point.
The young people, driving their version of a combi van, aren’t drinking alcohol, but you get the impression everyone else is chronically inebriated.
Shades of the early sequences of George A. Romero’s Dawn of The Dead.
The gas station has no petrol. Now I remember. This was the time of the first Oil Shock, and carless days in New Zealand.
They are a little stuck there. Of course, all sorts of alarm bells go off.
The young people visit their old homestead, a classic creepy house in ruins. The noise of a diesel generator is the lure to the real house of horrors that awaits them. And us equally.
The first killing. Girlfriend and boyfriend are trying to raise the occupants of the house. In a medium range shot, a sliding steel door slides open and a huge guy wearing a leather mask kills the boyfriend with two sledgehammer blows to the top of the skull. You know it is fatal. That scene still elicits audible gasps, and we are off into the waking nightmare.
The movie carries the inner logic of an extended dream sequence, along with shifting time scales.
The film makers are incredibly inventive with a very limited budget. They can recreate the essence of a tracking shot with superb use of lighting and camera placement.
To get a terrifying sequence of homicidal monster guy chasing Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) whilst swinging a chain saw.
Texas Chainsaw massa-CREE/ Took by baby away from ME. Sang the Ramones. Johnny Ramone may have pioneered the chainsaw guitar sound.
Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) attacks a door with the saw. Thank you says Kubrick, as Crazy Jack axes through a door in The Shining to grin maniacally Heeeres Johnny!
Sally discovers the advanced rotting corpse of the family’s grandma. Grandpa looks half-desiccated, but he still draws breath.
Some of the body parts are on display, based on the heavily expurgated real items from the Gein house.
Chairs made from skeletal arms and legs. Lampshades from human skin.
After the Nazis were defeated, this type of art furniture was discovered as one of Heinrich Himmler’s pet passions. At least he considered them works of art. How far had the Nazis fallen into the abyss of evil?
The most grotesque set piece is the family dinner. Sally is tied to a chair. We notice the chair arms are human bones.
Leatherface is wearing a dress and a female facemask, and squealing. The male hitchhiker they picked up at the beginning of the movie is also there. The gas station owner is possibly oldest brother.
They explain in increasingly manic and disturbed tones how their family were abattoir workers and… Grandpa was the best killer of them all!
Barely alive Grandpa is brought down for the meal. He is presented to Sally, so he can deliver the coup-de-grace. A sledgehammer is put into his hand but he’s too weak to hold it.
In an excruciating extended torture scene, Sally is bent over a large metal bowl whilst hammer blows glance off her head. This is again filmed in medium range, so I would hope it was well-choreographed.
The final sequence is legendary and completes the perfect film.
Leatherface running after Sally, as we are now back in broad daylight. Two trucks appear on the road in front. A large rig and a smaller pick-up truck.
The chainsaw is swung wildly and there is no more thrilling or macabre scene that I can think off.
Like Hitchcock, the actual splatter and viscera is kept minimal. The techniques the filmmakers used have become the stuff of legend.
So is the acting, which may the most under-rated part of the movie. All unknowns at the time. There were calls for Marilyn Burns to be nominated for some sort of gong, for her incredible performance.
No one died on the set (as per rumours and gossip), but it was a physically challenging shoot with injuries to Hansen from wielding the chainsaw.
They all got to hate Hooper at the end, and he took special effort to make amends.
The list of movies influenced is myriad.
The Rob Zombie movies House of 1000 Corpses and Devil’s Rejects plunder whole bits from it. The tasty bits (licking his lips).
The Friday the 13th, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street franchises. There is a plethora of zombie movies.
There is a discussion of the movies impact, called Chain Reaction, surely deserving of an article. Stephen King makes an appearance.
I hear there will be new Netflix series soon.
Put on your leather face mask. It must be petrol or diesel chainsaw. The Original Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Let ‘er Rip!
Director, Producer: Tobe Hooper
New Zealand International Film Festival 2025
Tickets available HERE.
Rev. Orange Peel
