The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: Cattle To The Slaughter

Every now and then, I like to go back and revisit the classics, and let me tell you, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is definitely one of the classics. Made in 1974, it falls right between its contemporaries Last House On The Left and Halloween, all films that redefined what was possible in horror. The people who made these films were wrestling with the national trauma of the Vietnam War and the massive social upheaval attending it, and they weren’t especially interested in polite convention or following rules. These were raw, intense films that broke new ground. And I think The Texas Chain Saw Massacre also makes a nice middle ground between the other two films stylistically as well - not quite as unrelentingly vicious and nihilistic as Last House On The Left, but also not as coolly atmospheric as Halloween. It’s a wild-eyed, gonzo film, but one that does its strongest work with mood and pacing, rather than graphic violence.

The film opens with a text crawl and a narrator telling us that what we’re about to see is an account of “one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history.” This is old hat today, thanks to found-footage films telling us that what we’re about to see is, in essence, based in truth. But back then, it was easier to buy into the idea that this was based on a true story (was it? Eh, it was loosely, loosely based on the crimes of Ed Gein, but not in any substantive way). Then the screen goes black, then it flares white, as if a flash bulb is going off. There’s an industrial whine, and the flash illuminates a decomposing hand. Darkness, flash, barely-glimpsed rotting flesh, over and over. Slowly the sound of a news report fades up, a story of grave-robbing and corpse desecration in rural Texas. We’re faced with an arrangement of body parts tied up into a sort of sculpture. This is one of those openings to a horror film that tells us, in essence, that all bets are off.

We cut to a van driving down a rural highway. In the van are Sally, her brother Franklin, Sally’s boyfriend Jerry, and their friends Kirk and Pam. They’re on their way to visit the grave of Sally and Franklin’s grandfather. They want to make sure that his grave wasn’t one of the ones disturbed. Satisfied that his grave is intact, they decide to make a side trip to their grandfather’s old house. There’s a swimming hole nearby, and a swim would be really nice on this sweltering Texas day. On the way, they pick up a hitchhiker. An extremely creepy, off-putting hitchhiker.

From here, things start getting weird. Well, weirder. From the moment the film proper starts, there’s a palpable feel of menace to it, helped along by the very striking opening scenes. Even the scene at the graveyard is filled with men more than happy to help Sally find the grave, their smiles just short of predatory. A drunk leans up against a car, muttering vaguely sinister things about what he’s seen out in the country. Sally and company seem mostly oblivious to it, but the audience is not. Following the run-in with the hitchhiker, they have some trouble finding a place to sell them gas, but they don’t seem overly concerned. But now they’re out in the country. And a lot of things can happen out in the country.

For a film called The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, there is surprisingly little gore or graphic violence on display. It does a lot of its heavy lifting by creating an atmosphere and not backing away from it. The dialogue is naturalistic to the point of being almost mundane, the acting just amateurish enough to make it feel like it might very well not be acting at all. Franklin, who is wheelchair-bound and thus dependent on Sally and the others to help him get around, is childish and petulant. Kirk and Jerry don’t hesitate to make fun of him, there’s a little bit of contempt there. Franklin is quite literally the fifth wheel here, and you get the sense he’s being kind of a drag on everyone else’s fun. When the others leave him behind to explore the grandfather’s old house, he throws a fit that seems both deeply immature and slightly unhinged. It’s not behavior you’d expect from an adult, and it contributes to an overall feeling of strangeness that only escalates.

It was shot on location in rural Texas during record temperatures, and it shows in every shot - the heat and sweat and grime practically radiates off the screen, and the action primarily takes place in dilapidated houses and gas stations that are obviously not sets.  This is the sort of film that really does look like it could be someone’s nightmarish home movies. The soundtrack is largely devoid of music, jettisoning it in favor of ambient hums and clangs and crashes and piercing whines. Even in the quiet moments, everything feels uneasy.

And when it’s not quiet, it’s sharp and excruciating. This is a very well-paced film that knows when to ease off the gas and let things get quiet, so that when it gets loud again it hits even harder. It isn’t predictable - danger can and does appear in the blink of an eye, terrible things happen, and then at least initially it’s over before you can completely register what horrible thing you just saw. But you definitely saw something horrible.

As the film goes on, the breaks between awful things get shorter and shorter, until the last ten or fifteen minutes are just unrelenting, an extended piercing scream. When it does employ violence, it focuses less on the violence itself than the effect that the violence has on its victim. People do not die neatly in this film. They struggle, convulse, moan, beg and cry. I think this is what makes some films more uncomfortable than others - violence without suffering allows for the audience to keep their distance, but suffering doesn’t allow that. Accepting that there’s a real human cost to violence takes it out of the realm of fun and games, and this film knows it. There’s a manic edge to it that relies a lot on constant uncomfortably close close-ups intercut with reactions, back and forth, until you feel cornered. There’s a catharsis to the end that doesn’t feel like the Final Girl triumphant so much as some kind of feral howl in defiance of death. There’s a lot of talk about slaughterhouses, about how cattle were and are killed, lots of shots of cattle and roadkill and bones, as if the protagonists are just another kind of meat. And under a punishing, unblinking sun, a full moon large enough to swallow us whole, and the headlights of a truck that promises nothing good, the film makes its case that that’s exactly what they are.

You can see the effect this film has had on horror in the masked killers of any number of slasher films (given that this predates Halloween), in Rob Zombie’s gritty grindhouse aesthetic, in the constant jump-cuts and industrial soundtracks of the Saw films. Forget the sequels, prequels, and reboots. This is the one that matters.

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