‘tis the Season: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre - 50th Anniversary Screening

I have other ideas for a theme for this season, but it would be tragic not to celebrate Tobe Hooper’s masterpiece’s 50th anniversary. Seen on the big screen, it’s an unnerving textbook in how to do horror.

It’s also a reminder of why movies are meant to be seen on screen. Sometimes, it’s not just that characters and plot become larger than life, but that you entere a shared dream - or in this case, nightmare - with a group of strangers. In this case, the nightmare begins in broad daylight.

Hooper’s genius is establishing a Texas that a number of us know pretty well; once you get out from the big cities and into the rural areas, there’s a sense of openness in the vista to just about anything, good or evil. Hooper establishes early on that we’ll be open to the latter.

Reports of grave robbers exhuming graves and stacking corpses in various stages of desiccation like totems abound on the news, an early shot is a close up of dead armadillo on its back, rotting in the sun, and indeed, the sun itself seems to be a harbinger of death as much as the disturbed hitchhiker picked up in the van of our doomed Scooby gang. Sorry, spoilers for a seminal classic.

As with Carpenter’s Halloween, Craven’s Last House on the Left, and Raimi’s Evil Dead, Hooper traffics in a startling economy of character and pacing that pays off in establishing the victims as more than mere stick figures for destruction. They are very much almost examples of archetypes of doomed humanity in the face of forces beyond comprehension.

The recurring visual references to the sun evoke a malevolent solar deity, Pam’s reading of horoscopes seems to underscore how little we are in control of our lives, the background noise of news reports about murder and devastation lend a diegetic ground to match the visuals of the spare wasteland through which the group travels. As the story progresses into the night, space becomes more claustrophobic and solar imagery is replaced with lunar. A cosmos every bits as terrifying as anything in Lovecraft envelopes us and we watch stymied as Leatherface slaughters each victim with the same efficient brutality as the executioners of cattle in the nearby slaughterhouse.

We have two couples and the wheelchair bound brother Franklin, Sally’s brother. The boys Jerry and Kirk are nice enough and when they pick up an unsettled and unsettling hitchhiker, we can assume the whole lot are well-intentioned. Nevertheless, it’s with letting the hitchhiker in that a sense of dread established from the beginning of the film, starts to take form. 

The hitcher takes Franklin’s pocket knife and cuts himself, grows agitated when no one wants to buy the Polaroid photo he took of Franklin and then sets it alight with gunpowder and is finally expelled after he draws a straight-edge razor and slices Franklin’s arm. He sticks his tongue out at the van, and smears his blood on it as the group drives away.

This is one of those oneiric moments in film that grow in power after the fact because it informs the mythic and emotional structure of what follows. The hitchhiker is like a malevolent trickster demon or sprite that serves to warn the teens that they’re traveling a path into increasing darkness, despair, and death.

After ditching the hitcher, they’d stopped at a gas station where the owner had warned them not to travel up to Sally and Franklin’s family. In fact, the gas station owner had invited them to stay for a barbecue dinner, but they were adamant about moving on.

Sally and Franklin’s family was in the slaughterhouse business and Franklin recounts how bludgeoning cattle was replaced with the air-pressure bolt method that pops a metal bolt into the cow’s brain much more quickly and allegedly more mercifully. 

The hitchhiker, by the way, found the sledgehammer/bludgeon method more effective and merciful, so I presume everyone just agreed to disagree. Hmmm, barbecue.

Once they do make it to the Hardesty’s vacated estate, a salt box affair as desiccated as any cow carcass rotting in the sun but shrouded in tree and bush, the sense of ill-omen dissipates a little as the four able bodied youngsters drift away from Franklin and joke and cavort throughout the house. Franklin, abandoned, voices his justified discontent and proceeds to explore as much as he can.

Kirk and Pam take off for a watering hole that Franklin points them toward and it’s here that the story begins its second act in earnest. They discover a generator and several abandoned cars, missing a talismanic assemblage of bones and objects through which we see them advancing toward a house. 

Kirk’s dispatch at the hands of Leatherface comes with little foreshadowing and quickly. In a film with mostly natural colors in a regular exposure, Leatherface’s appearance against an intense background of a red wall decorated with animal skulls is the very rendering of a demon from the underworld come to claim its quarry. 

Pam follows a bit later, but has wandered into another room with offal as carpet and furniture comprised of and decorated with bones and skeletal remains. She is apprehended by Leatherface in short order and affixed to a meat hook in front of Kirk’s corpse which Leatherface duly begins dismembering with the titular chainsaw.

I want to be clear about something here; Hooper shows nothing in close-up; perspective is held in medium shots and angles where the body (and later, bodies) obscure the physical act of dismemberment. There is astonishingly little blood on view, though in other scenes, we do see aftermath of often older kills. It’s fascinating that Hooper submitted this film to the MPAA intending to get a PG rating!

Jerry goes in search of the couple and meets his end when Leatherface clocks him as he discovers Pam’s spamming body in a freezer. This leaves Franklin Sally and by now, it’s clear just how close to hell we are. Since Jerry had the keys to the van, they can’t leave and Sally wants to find them while Franklin would rather wait till daylight. 

Of course, they both begin the journey to find their friends and soon enough, encounter Leatherface with chainsaw in a dense thicket. We see Franklin’s demise from behind as Leatherface turns his chainsaw on the invalid and Sally flees deeper into the thicket and once she finds her way out, to the gas station where she is finds the station’s owner. 

I need to pause and say that from this point on, Marilyn Burns turns in one fo the great scream queen performances of all time. She is visibly racked with fear and calling her character “traumatized” would be selling her short. She maintains a heightened sense of exposed terror as if she were exposed ganglia. We also get to see Jim Siedow chomp into his role as Drayton Sawyer, the owner of the gas station as he slugs Sally, ties her up and gags her, puts her in his pick-up and tortures her on the way to…Leatherface’s house.

It’s one of those maniacal performances that matches Colin Clive’s as Renfield in Browing’s Dracula (1931). He’s matched in lunacy by the hitchhiker, who reappears en route to the house. In other words, it’s time for a family dinner.

Hooper leans into the absurdist aspects of this by emphasizing and heightening the actors’ performances. They get louder and crazier the more Sally screams. When we’re all around the dinner table, Leatherface appears in women’s clothing, and grandpa is brought down to suck on Sally’s finger which has been opened to feed him. Grandpa, it seems, was one of the best cattle executioners ever.

Unfortunately, he just can’t hold a hammer like he used to, so every time Leatherface puts the bludgeon in his hand it falls out, and misses Sally’s head as she’s forced over a bucket.

Time is compressed in this last act, but it’s not dinner we’re looking at; it may be breakfast. Once Sally breaks free in the commotion of trying to brain her, she escapes into daylight. She had passed out after her bloodletting and feeding grandpa.

Drayton, by the way, refuses to do any killing; he leaves that to Leatherface and his hitchhiker brother. As it is, Sally flees the house and runs to the highway  with both in pursuit and the hitchhiker is run over by an oncoming truck. The driver sees the chainsaw-armed  Leatherface chasing Sally, grabs a wrench, and attacks him. Leatherface hits the ground and his chainsaw slices into his thigh. Sally, in the meantime, is rescued by a pick-up truck and we end with cross-cutting between her PTSD motivated laughing adn Leatherface dancing with his chainsaw in the morning sun.

Jesus Christ, this movie.

When I refer to the mythic elements in this, or really, any film, what I hope I kind of get across is the sense that we still live in a mystically structured world with archetypes and shadows so ancient as to be timeless. I don’t necessarily mean timeless in the sense of preternatural or primordial, though there is that; but also, timeless in the sense that they exist outside of time and are constantly present and potentially available.

I don’t mean this in a Jungian sense, though that could be applied; but rather how in a narrative sense, these archetypes arise and put to use in a framework like this. 

In almost every culture, there is the visit to the underworld, there is an encounter with great darkness, and there is the hero’s journey. What might be different in twentieth century (and now 21st) storytelling, is a greater emphasis on the debilitating effects such journeys have. Sally will never be the same after this.

We might assume from the opening title paragraphs and John Larroquette’s narration, that Drayton and his family were caught, but that’s a text outside what’s on film; a framing device that locates the film in the recent past, and might lend a sliver of hope that justice was done.

But what Hooper and his co-writer Kim Henkel had in mind was also an indictment about desiccation and rot in U.S. society and political discourse at the time. Henkel pointed to Ed Gein and Elmer Wayne Henley as models for Leatherface, but along with Hooper, has made it plain that the line in the opening about the film being based on a true story was more about how little truth there was in the contemporary government (and media) at the time; specifically, regarding Vietnam, the gas crisis, and Watergate. Henkel also cited infusing characters with a “moral schizophrenia” that manifests in aberrant behavior.

To return to myth, it’s difficult to not see Sally as a kind of Persephone who has escaped from Hades, but who will never be able to fully leave; once in it, she’s defiled by it and it is likely to continue to fester in her psyche.Similarly, perhaps Hooper and Henkel saw what was happening in America at the time as an example of moral erosion of a nation’s psyche. In either case, the result is a remarkable cinematic work. 

Hooper went on to make other films, including the first sequel to his magnum opus, but nothing was ever as genre-defining as this. Poltergeist comes close, but much of his filmography is littered with outright bad movies or flicks that are just “good enough”. Still, to have one or two films in the pantheon is more that most ever get.