The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Often spoofed, but universally revered, this infamous title will forever resonate across time and space and cast a great, big shadow over the titular state. And while it is not an especially innovative film, it remains one of the purest, rawest, most primordial and ultimately one of the greatest incarnations of horror cinema. Its technical simplicity is matched only by the grotesque quality of its characters and sets, one that runs deep into the American psyche wherein progress often leaves a putrescent residue. Both these features help fashion one of the most efficient experiences in terror-building which the world has ever known. Both sights and sounds are instrumental here in creating the affect necessary to launch the viewer into a dark abyss from which he or she will unlikely come out of. That is the unforgettable world of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Simple, straightforward, effective: exemplary usage of
the depth of field in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Bones and the news

Using a documentary approach at first, the film situates the action in the 'real' Texas of grisly news items. Playing out like a mere fait divers, it focuses on a group of hippie-sh city slickers caught in the dilapidated backwoods of the Lone Star State. It also focuses on another newsworthy reality, that of the disenfranchised Texan poor and their uneasy relationship with progress, which the young protagonists represent. The opening shot of the film consists of a scrolling text read by thespian John Larroquette. It talks of a seemingly real, although approximately delineated crime, the 'Texas Chain Saw Massacre'. The scrolling text gives way to a series of close-ups featuring various pickled body parts flashing onscreen as if captured by an antique Polaroid. This gallery of macabre portraits is followed by a radio report telling of another grisly occurring, the desecration of graves in a dusty roadside cemetery. Now, the ongoing documentation of events achieved through the use of multiple media enriches the narrative a great deal, leading the naive to believe that the events onscreen might actually be a factual retelling of real life crimes. And while the veracity of it all is hard to swallow, the naturalistic settings and half-professional actors contribute their fair share to the overall realism of the work, which contributes a great deal to the affective power of the film. The dilapidated homesteads and roadside gas stations all appear as authentic as can be, and so do the players, the reason for this being the low budget with which director Hooper had to work with, an inconvenience which he masterfully transformed into an asset.

Desecrated tombs, casual cannibalism and the
slaying of youths are hot news items

Cheap means as assets
As for the bone sculptures scattered around the scenery, they're yet another cheap, effective way to convey the casual terror one could experience during a trip in the lawless Texan countryside. They're proof of the loving care with which the cannibals hone their trade. These bones have been loved before they were hung over the Hardestys' porch. But what's more unnerving is that they involve some sort of long-gone ritual, which modern-day pagans have all but evacuated from their lives. Obviously, Texas is a film about modernity, and its impact on the traditional (read rural) lifestyle of Texans. As the hitchhiker so rightfully puts it, the air gun used to slaughter cows in contemporary abattoirs tends to 'put people out of jobs'. The industrialization process being what it is, it tends to remove the human factor out of the equation, thriving only to serve itself and its drive toward profit. As a result, traditional crafts tend to lose their relevance, and the sledgehammer artisans of old, such as the petrified patriarch of the Sawyer family, must find alternative ways of sustenance, such as the killing and selling of human meat. Enabling, or rather accelerating the cyclical movement of human life, modernity has the power to unearth deeply buried traditions and primordial ways of life born out of necessity. It is then that modernity and tradition come at adds, as exemplified in the sacrificial usage of trendy youths to feed the unknown poor surrounding them.

Yet another cheap, but supremely effective device contained in the film is the minimalistic soundtrack composed mostly of grinding metal noises. By contrasting with the realistic images onscreen, this array of impressionistic sounds (which seem to replicate an obsessive grating in the characters' ears) highlights with great effect the increasing sense of unease experienced by the victims as they come across more and more unnatural acts of barbarity. The bucolic wilderness and quiet calmness of the countryside are brutally challenged by these grating noises, just as the characters' most deeply-held beliefs regarding the sanctity of human life is similarly challenged. And so, aggression (and horror itself) takes yet another dimension, an auditory new dimension used as a raw expressive device meant to provoke an immediate advert reaction while remaining quite subtle, even controlled, in its usage. A welcome departure from the heavy-handed scores plaguing many lesser horror outings.

The relentlessness of true horror
The pacing of the film is exemplary. Just enough time is spent setting up the characters, leaving them ripe for the massacre very early on. In fact, while the massacre itself is satisfyingly surprising in its suddenness, it is the early apparition of a knife-wielding hitchhiker, which truly grabs you by the throat, never to let go again. Of course, it is never a good idea to pick up a hitchhiker in a horror film and so does the cast of characters learn a valuable lesson when they let a truly creepy, derelict-looking youth inside their van. Sporting all the attributes of a degenerate redneck, his sole presence puts the viewer ill at ease. His crooked smile and manic laughter seem to hide something sinister... and so does his fascination with knives. The first scene he partakes in is also the first classic scene of the film. Captured with utmost perceptiveness (mostly through its cultivation of uneasy silence and its unflinching framing), the thickening atmosphere between the characters gushes out of the screen and onto the skin of the aghast viewer who can only watch in awe as the action unfolds and things start getting edgier and edgier. The scene is mesmerizing, thanks in part to the soft, jazzy tune ('Fool for a blond' by Roger Bartlett) embalming the summer air while offering a savvy counterpoint to the increasing aggressiveness of the hitchhiker. The very contrast between those two elements is what sets up the film, much more so than the dialogue between the protagonists. Both the clash of cultures (exemplified by the social gap between the hitchhikers and the teens) and the bloody violence that ensues, bursting out to compromise the characters' idyll, are both crystallized by this scene, which serves as a gripping entry point in the narrative per se.

Visceral violence: the switchblade as
America's concealed hunting spirit

As for the central part of the film, it is deservedly renowned for its uncompromising brutality and unforgiving straightforwardness. No cat-and-mouse bullshit. And no compromise made to the protagonists either, no sudden escape route or convenient safe haven. Just the raw desire to hunt down and kill one's prey in a coldly efficient manner which mirrors the director's own cold efficiency at the helm. Long after the hitchhiker was forcefully thrown out of their van, the protagonists' next encounter with the Sawyer family is a very short one. When one of them enters the family domain to inquire about their gas pump, he his swiftly hammered down and dragged behind a sliding metal door by an oversized butcher wearing a leather mask (the iconic Leatherface). It takes scant seconds between the moment where the young man peeks beyond and the moment where the door slams shut, keeping his fate hidden from us. The suddenness of it all will leave the viewer glued into place, unable at first to fully grasp what has just happened because there is no transition, no split-second left for the character to escape. There is only the murderous impulse of the killer, whose swift act of violence precisely mirrors that committed by the film against the viewer. Obviously, the monstrous aspect of the large man, with his grotesque mask made of flesh, also contributes to our unease, but there is only a cosmetic fear that we derive from the sight of him whereas the true violence we experience is that caused by the suddenness of his attack and the total absence of time for us to react, which in turn puts us squarely in the victim's shoes, unable to save ourselves and helplessly falling prey.

At that point, the viewer will wish that he could see what is happening on the other side of the door, but not totally so, as the violence of the execution has left him somewhat disoriented. Then, bang! One is immediately brought beyond the metal door as the victim's girlfriend is easily captured, hung on a meat hook and forced to watch her boyfriend being butchered. All of this is done in what appears to be a flash, a dire, gut-tightening flash during which one is left speechless by the mechanical nature of the executions, the implications of which are too dire to contemplate, namely that humans can be equated to cattle with total indifference. This is demonstrated further when the two final protagonists reach the Sawyer's homestead only to be chased ruthlessly through the woods by a manic Leatherface (which contributes an exhilarating chase scene to an already exhilarating, truly nerve-wracking experience). You see, Leatherface is a dedicated hunter. He does not let his victims evade his reach, nor does he let the pace of the film slow down even for a second. And when he does, it is only when the last of his preys has fallen into pap's laps, leaving her ripe for an unforgettable family reunion.

And while the film has already dispensed a large quantity of unforgettable imagery at that point, there is no previous scene that can compare with the stellar climactic supper scene, wherein poor Marylin Burns has to endure the torments of Hell. There is a reference to that effect in the opening credits of the sequel, but it doesn't quite evoke the sheer power of Texas' final scene, one which deserves recognition and praise even amongst fans of G-rated family fare. Truly, this is a finale for the ages. The grotesque quality of the antagonists, assembled for a family supper in bone-framed furniture, taunting the tied heroine frantically as she looks around in desperation, the camera cruelly lingering on her panicked eyes. It's very simple really: just close-ups of eyes, which the viewer soon sees as highly effective, yet casually underused, assets in tension-building. After all, while screams can only do so much to express terror, the eyes are some of the most expressive human features. As the old saying goes, the eyes are the mirror of the soul. And thus, they also represent the quickest access road through which one can tap into the soul of a victim, witnessing her terror as she does.

Horror is in the eye of the beholder

And while the eye does a great deal to hook us in, with its nerve-wracking gyrations, the splendid art direction and solid screen presence of the antagonists also help this scene stand out as one of the key sequences in horror history. Surrounded by the dried remnants of their victims, the demented Sawyer family engages in a grotesque session of slapstick while their victim struggles to make sense of their carefree ways. And so the three ghoulish stooges make the dining room their stage, with Sally as a forced spectator. And while the painful antics of the three comedians might annoy you with their dated feel, they actually help create a very cruel discrepancy between the desperate feelings experienced by Sally and her captors' childish carelessness, extracted from the subversion of comedy necessary to highlight the casual nature of the massacre. Hence, the killers' fun fuels our most dreaded fear, that of our own death as spectacle. Because while it is Sally's eye that scans the room endlessly, she remains the object of her tormentors' gaze, their guest of honor, their sacrificial lamb. And so the entrapment of her eye within the frame mirrors her physical entrapment within the suffocating insides of the Sawyer residence. It also represents the crystallization of her fear as entertainment, that of her tormentors and that which we derive from the entire exercise. Now, I could spend an entire essay discussing the complex mechanics of the gaze in relation to the notion of spectacle that permeates this scene, but I won't. I will conclude instead by commanding Hooper once more for achieving such an effective, thematically complex horror film with the barest of means. And I'll let the curious reader discover for himself exactly how the final scene climaxes. Suffice it to say that if you get caught thinking that the sight of hulking cross-dresser Leatherface prancing around is the epitome of the grotesque, then the film still has some mean surprises for you... Enjoy!


5/5 Simple but incredibly effective, Texas Chain Saw Massacre is one of the purest expressions of horror ever to grace the screen, proving that budget limitations can reveal themselves to be assets for the truly creative creator

The Funhouse (1981)

Released amidst similarly-themed offerings such as Salem's Lot, Poltergeist and Invaders from Mars, this earnest, but flawed effort in Spielbergian horror puts juvenile imagination at center stage. The elaborate scenery depicting a sleazy traveling carnival and its creepy, libidinous inhabitants possesses all the characteristics of a prepubescent phantasm. The attractiveness of petty scares, the inexplicable fascination for deformity, desperate voyeurism and joyous carelessness typical of youth are all framed with the oblique angles and saturated colors of sweat-soaked suburban nightmares. Unfortunately, since the two parallel tales of a blooming maiden and her monster-obsessed kid brother never successfully intertwine, the prosaic elements of teenage horror eventually overwhelm the would-be dreamlike scares befitting the child's point of view. In the end, The Funhouse is a film that's a tad too adult to constitute a satisfying throwback to the matinees of yesteryear and a tad too childish and conventional to stand as a genuinely disturbing horror experience. And despite several thematic and esthetic similarities with Hooper's earlier (and vastly superior) The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the present film lacks the maddening pace, grinding soundtrack and perfunctory eye close-ups that insured its success. More to the point, it lacks the seriousness of it all, the uncompromising vision necessary to portray the grotesque quality of the disenfranchised as opposed to the normality of the (sub)urban bourgeois. The result is a mildly entertaining film that eludes strict categorization by lack of a definitive personality. Walking the line between the dated candor of classic monster films and the dictates of contemporary teenage slashers, it never manages to take on a distinctive flavor. Depending on your point of view, it will seem either like a rough version of the 1950s horror drive-in or a watered-down version of the ballsy horror from the 1970s. And despite some undeniable qualities (characterization, set design and savvy references), the film is marred by a certain indeterminacy of intentions that makes for an ultimately unsatisfying experience.

A kid's fantasy that puts kids in the back seat

Typically enough, the film begins with a teenage girl stepping into a shower while an unseen maniac is prepping up for an attack in a contiguous room. The girl (Elizabeth Berridge, who later appeared as Mozart's spouse in Amadeus) is the archetypal horror film protagonist. Her brazenly displayed breasts almost seem a burden for her minuscule frame and the soft features of her childish face greatly enhance her vulnerable, virginal look. At once sexualized but innocent, she is a seemingly perfect victim, i.e. one that will undoubtedly elude the villain's clutches. Of course, the present villain, rushing toward the showering maiden on carpeted floors, is only an idle threat. Despite the stalker shot associated with his viewpoint, he is soon revealed as the girl's kid brother, an horror film buff whose idea of a practical joke involves the reenactment of the classic shower scene from Psycho. This early tie-in between the world of horror cinema and the prepubescent psyche, for which reality is almost an extension of the imaginary, makes a strong case for the spectacular, if not purely ethereal nature of the horror genre. Moreover, it acts as a point of friction between the intangible scares contained in the child's mind (the surprise caused by the instantaneous apparition of a knife-wielding, mask-wearing maniac) and the tangible scares of the adolescent mind (the fear of sex tied with the invasion of one's privacy). Unfortunately, it is this very friction which is responsible for the schizoid nature of the film. Its occurring also acts as a condensation (and evacuation) of all the screenwriter's savvy in terms of self-referential statements, leaving us on a downward slope very early on.

The disrobing of Miss Berridge, framed in typically voyeuristic fashion, is merely subservient to the supremely intriguing subjective shot edited in parallel. In this shot, we see an individual wearing black leather gloves who scours through a kid's room full of horror paraphernalia, donning a mask over his camera/face and grabbing a knife with which he proceeds to attack the young woman. This simple shot contains obvious references to the Italian giallo (in the guise of the black leather gloves worn by the offender), Halloween (the mask-covered subjective shot taken from the film's opening sequence) and Psycho (the shower stabbing). Aside from eliciting joyous reactions from knowledgeable film buffs, this helps us situate horror as a self-referential genre deeply rooted in myths and make-beliefs. It also misleads us into imagining a killer which is simultaneously imagined by a kid whose overactive mind becomes the mirror of our own. Horror, in a sense, is fueled not by the presence of something horrific, but through the process of imagining something horrific, which is above all a kid's thing. The more-than-obvious reference to Psycho and the notorious "Did the knife penetrate?" issue is interesting in that regard. In Hitchcock's seminal film, it is the editing of the shower scene which creates the sense of a stabbing, more so than the latex prosthetics of later eras. The knife never penetrates Janet Leigh's flesh, nor is it supposed to look like it is. In typical Eisensteinian fashion, Hitchcock creates the impression of a stabbing rather than the would-be realistic depiction of a stabbing. The result necessitates a certain amount of participation from the audience, namely the involvement of their imagination in the process of acknowledging that a stabbing is indeed taking place in front of their eyes. Here, in The Funhouse's introductory scene, we aren't even asked such an effort as the knife cannot possibly pierce through Berridge's flesh. Its rubber blade actually wavers and bends instead of impaling, leaving the bowels untouched and our feverish expectations unfulfilled. What this goes to show is how far imagination goes in creating the experience inherent to horror cinema. Whether the knife penetrates or not, we have to believe that it does, like the child who imagines himself the slayer of his sister. And the further back our regression goes into the realm of childish imagination, the more liable we are to enjoy ourselves watching this film.

Non-too-subtle shades of Psycho

Unfortunately, the film quickly branches into well-known territory. We learn that Berridge's shower was in preparation for a double date at the carnival, where she is matched with a local bad boy (university football star Cooper Huckabee) out to deflower her. Thus, we are soon acquainted with a bit of cast taken straight out of American Graffiti and the rest of the story plays out like a dark coming-of-age film that pits a young maiden's fear of sex against a backdrop of degenerate depravity. After encountering a bevy of archetypal carnival folks, most of which are truly colorful and eccentric, the four youths decide to spend the night in the titular locale. During their stay, they witness the accidental murder of a foul-mouthed fortune teller by a sex-starved freak protected by the carnival owner, who acts as surrogate father. Despite shades of Frankenstein, the beast never comes across as a sympathetic character. His ordeal , no matter how awful we imagine it to be, is diluted into age-old, static representations of carnival folks. Once his monstrous face is revealed, he becomes no more than a strictly antagonistic creature from filmland and the protagonists' adventure becomes no more than a tedious search for an exit.

During the course of the film, we also follow Berridge's kid brother, whom we can only assume is following big sister to the carnival. After a nasty encounter with a redneck trucker, who draws a shotgun at him, kid finally makes it to the funhouse, where he notices that his sister and her friends have vanished. Although we are led to believe that he is investigating his sister's doings, he never comes to her rescue, watching her from afar without ever choosing to intervene in her affairs. When their parents show up at the carnival to pick up their stray son, he willfully decides not to mention his sister's whereabouts, despite his intimate knowledge thereof. His entire relevance to the story is thus jeopardized and both family unity, as well as the kid's overactive imagination, which could have been the saving grace of Berridge's friends, is relegated to nothingness. If this helps heightening the sense of tragedy within the film, it is narratively inconsistent and it tends to make the imaginary, which was solicited brilliantly in the introduction, completely obsolete. The result is a surprisingly tame and realistic horror venture, which evacuates all supernatural and guignolesque elements within the narrative and thus kill the magic inherent to the genre, and to the specific setting of the film.

Conventionally grotesque: The Funhouse

Despite the decent characterization and superior art direction which breathes life into each of the film's colorful locales, the sluggish pace eventually hampers it to the point of near-boredom. The labyrinthine sets that constitute the funhouse may be sharp-looking, but they offer very little in terms of narrative possibilities, let alone in terms of pursuits. What we get are cramped characters moving as slowly as possible in order to make the most of the limited sets. A case in point is the underwhelming confrontation scene between Berridge's character and the mutant loner, set in the machine room of the old funhouse. Crawling under huge cogwheels and creeping along dusty walls, the young woman seems to be under strict orders predicating theatrical snail walk. After what appears to be an eternity, during which the viewer spots the two congregating wheels that will undoubtedly cause the monster's demise, said monster finally appears from out of the shadows, engaging the protagonist in a sort of arthritic "fighting waltz" that culminates in the monster getting trapped in the railings. Very underwhelming stuff.

Watching this film, one is tempted to suggest that Tobe Hooper has greatly regressed as a director in the seven years between The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the present film. The technical limitations he has to work with (pertaining mostly to the confined locales that act as sets for the most part of the film) are now blatant shortcomings. The pacing is erratic and the politics are weird. But most of all, the whole thing plays on terms so familiar as to often border on the level of soap operas. All of this would indeed seem to indicate some form of regression in the director's work. But the plain truth is that there are now strings attached to his projects, and those strings cannot possibly allow for another relentless, indie-style shocker such as Texas. The reasons being more organizational than mercantile, seeing how the present production follows a very strict formula meant to promote narration over expressiveness. That is why we now have teenagers walking the dotted lines of teenage drama like so many TV high schoolers. That is why the rawness of expression is no more but lost in a sea of prefabricated situations and dreary dramatic issues. The presence of an orchestral score (by John Beal) to replace the grating metal noises from Texas is another example of how the conventional dramatic format has subdued the pure act of affect-creation. What is lost in the process is freedom, or more precisely: independence, from which derives the destruction of narrative shackles and the liberation of raw, gut-churning emotions that allow truly affective horror to appear. Which is something that can be summed up quite vividly by comparing the physical and narrative entrapment of the present film's protagonists, forced to wander through endless stuffy corridors and to face the same doors over and over, and the freedom of Texas' protagonists, surrounded by endless wilderness, which allows them to run, to express themselves with all their bodies, without constraints. Because in the end, the dead-ends that the generic teens of The Funhouse face during the film are the same dead-ends that Hooper has had faced when bringing them to life.

2.5/5: There's enough production values and genuine moments of brilliance here to elevate this entry above the banal slasher banner under which it was sold, but the obligatory comparison with Texas Chain Saw Massacre forced by the presence of many degenerate carnies only helps make its snail pace and overall lack of intensity that more obvious.