The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

"I just can't take no pleasure in killing"

Sorry, guys. I don’t like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I respect it and I get it and I think it achieves its own goals, but I really don’t like it. My dentist may be good at root canals, but I’m not going to sign up to get one for fun. This film is a wonder of visceral misery and terror; so is hitting your own balls with a hammer. I can (and, momentarily, will) acknowledge its remarkable filmmaking achievements while still reviling it as the ur-text of my least favorite tone of horror cinema; for that matter, my least favorite tone of any mainstream cinema of any genre.

You likely know the narrative strokes: A group of road tripping young friends drive through an economically ravaged, rural area of Texas. They pick up a freakazoid hitchhiker who attacks them then gets pushed out of the van. They stop at a gas station which doesn’t have any fuel, so they go exploring. The abandoned house they stumble upon has some real fuckos in it. Bad news all around. Most of the protagonists die, then a bunch of creeps torture the last surviving girl. She witnesses some brutal scenes as she scrambles to escape and screams a whole lot.

So here’s what is uncompromisingly good about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; what I both admire and genuinely appreciate. First, it is 83 minutes long. More films, especially horror films, especially those that have such simple thematic mission statements, should be that short. Second, some of the direction is astoundingly good. My favorite moment might be the unbearably tense tracking shot of Pam (Teri McMinn) slowly entering the house where Kirk (William Vail) was just pummeled by Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen). This was Tobe Hooper’s first feature film, which is astonishing. His instincts for jarring the film’s rhythm and constructing one great shot after another, especially in such a grimy and low-rent production, is astounding.

And one tier down from those achievements are a few things the film does well in achieving its goals, but by achieving its goals results in a film that I like less: Hooper puts its idiotic protagonists, and by proxy its audience, through a wringer of escalating suffering with the precision and intuition of a master. The film jerks you around with one sucker punch after another; never the one you expect, but always brutal. When Leatherface appears for the very first time in a medium shot of doorframe, bashes a dude with a hammer, and quickly disappears, it’s much more jarring and upsetting than a slower boil reveal would have been. It’s a knife twist. In the days before codified slasher tropes, it must have been especially agonizing watching proto-final girl Sally (Marilyn Burns) barely escape Leatherface after her friends all die, then get abducted by the gas station attendant just when she thinks she’s safe. She’s degraded and tortured at a fucked, human remains-laden “family breakfast,” and then chased around on the cusp of death for the film’s final fifteen minutes. It all works terrifically at making me feel shitty.

There is also a punk-rock, my-generation, dismantle-the-system layer to this film that I appreciate. A significant portion of the film is soundtracked to news radio — in fact, the inciting incident of a graveyard getting robbed is presented entirely via narration from a news reporter. The mainstream media and other institutions are floating all around in the airwaves but are powerless to actually help people. I’ve read the take that this film is the angriest reaction to the Vietnam War in all of cinema: headlines and newsreels of civilians slaughtered and pointless bloodshed transplanted to the American landscape and ordinary American citizens. There’s an anti-capitalist bent to the film, as the small town is suffering from a corporation over-automating its vile meat processing plant, sacrificing the jobs of locals who now have nothing to do but sit around and murder folks. And you barely have to squint to see it as a pro-vegetarianism film. Meat and its processing are central motifs, symbols of needless violence. Pam gets impaled on a meat hook and stored in a cooler; the Leatherface clan serves up delicacies of human flesh at breakfast and sustains their gramps with sips of human blood. Meat’s not so cool when you’re the steak, is it, bub?

All of that is interesting, and much of it is well-rendered as subtext. But what makes the film uninteresting is just as striking. For one, there are plenty of storytelling hiccups: The much ballyhooed hitchhiker incident that supposedly turned a generation of people off of picking up hitchhikers? It has no bearing on the characters’ fate. That the guy they picked up ended up being part of Leatherface’s family is pure coincidence. Hooper tries to trick you otherwise with the strange bloodstain and its creepy portent in presentation and the coincidence of the character’s identity, much like Steven Spielberg trying to make you think amphibian DNA and not low salaries and employee morale put Jurassic Park in turmoil. If the group had just gone to a different gas station or declined to explore abandoned houses in their downtime, nobody would have died. The strange man they picked up who slashed at them would just be a strange memory from their road trip. Speaking of the abandoned houses, why would the gas station attendant first warn them of the danger and tell them to stay away, then a couple hours later, in the third act, turn Sally over to Leatherface? Which is it: Is he against the kids’ murder or in favor of it? Make up your mind, dude. (One last quibble: Can you really call it a “chain saw massacre” if only one person dies by chainsaw?)

I know I’m nitpicking in ways I wouldn’t if I actually liked the movie, and there may even be logical explanations to those story problems that I’m missing.  It doesn’t matter. I don’t like this movie. There’s no soul to the scares. The entire Leatherface crew gets no interiority or complexity; and their lack of complexity isn’t even that interesting how The Shape’s is in Halloween. I don’t need a full backstory for every villain in a horror film, but if the baddie’s just going to be a cleaver-wielding haunted house demon, at least shroud him in mystique. Don’t just make him the lowest caricature of unrefined, seedy, depraved white trash.

More to the point, I don’t like this torture porn aesthetic and attitude. The misery and depravity should not be the point of cinema; they should be the side effect of a good scare and good story. Transgressive cinema like this is lazy edge-lord provocation. It tries so hard to needle you that it becomes a bore, assaulting your senses and pulls every trick to make you feel gross and bummed out. No playfulness or mood-setting or mystery. A good spooky story is one that freaks you out in the moment, but you look back on fondly. This isn’t that. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre measures its success by how miserable you are as a viewer. It wins, we lose. So I can respect how good it is at that, and in the right mood I might even be up for enduring it as an intellectual exercise exploring how movies can you make you feel the full spectrum of human emotions, but I still hate this movie and the type of film it represents.

Is It Good?

Not Very Good (3/8)

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Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.