31 Days of Halloween Films #18: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
The Lowdown: Five friends (noticing a pattern here?) on a trip to their Grandpa’s cabin (in the woods, presumably), get terrorized by crazy hitchhikers intent on not only murdering them but torturing and terrorizing them as well.
The Breakdown: Another bonafide classic, and the second Tobe Hooper film to appear on my list this year, TTCSM is a special film. Not only did it give us the iconic Leatherface, but it made the grungy, disparate type of horror film a commodity. Films like this one, The Hills Have Eyes and The Last House on the Left all have a very grungy, dirty-low-down feel to them that gets under your skin each time you watch it. There’s nothing more filthy, more wretched than the inhuman husk of Leatherface propping his victim onto a fucking meathook, far as I can tell. There’s an honesty, an almost impossible stark reality to the brutal nature of this film that is unmatched in horror nowadays.
Subtle touches, like when one of our protagonists is knocked out by the big baddie with a hammer, then dragged deeper into the house before slamming the metal door in a violent way suggests an undercurrent of true insanity. The questions keep on coming in Massacre, and we never really get a lot of answers for them. Why, exactly, is this family keeping their fucked up patriarch alive? More importantly, why the fuck is that THING alive? Who thought using nothing but bones was a good way to furnish a living room? The shock value touches do wonders for the film, creating so much tension and suspense that you never feel like you’re settled watching the film.
The Comedown: Massacre is a great old school horror flick. Proving that set design can do most of the work for you in a horror film, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre goes above and beyond similar films of its’ era by keeping the audience on the edge of their seats from the downbeat first moments of the film to the effectively creepy “dance” that the film ends on. You feel with this film, more than a lot of others, that you’re watching real events. It’s the best example of an immersive film that’s not found footage really creating an atmosphere of its’ own. But really, for the gorehounds, Massacre has some of the best, most effective kill scenes in all of horror, enforcing its’ status as a bonafide classic.