The Startling Intelligence of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" or Tips for Making a Great Indy Film (The Last One is Genius!)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a fearsome reputation. People who haven't seen it, or who don’t like horror films in general, tend to have an impression of it as radically gruesome, filled with on-screen gore in the mode of so many movies that came in its long and influential wake.
It isn't that, exactly. It's something far better, and far scarier. Yes, it's a horror film, and yes, there is a good deal of violence in it – five people die before it's finished. But what stands out now, watching it some fifty years after it was released, is its deep and fascinating intelligence, and by extension the filmmaking intelligence of director Toby Hooper and his co-writer Kim Henkel.
To start off with, what do we mean here by "intelligence"? The question is a far more complicated one than can be fully answered with a cup of coffee on a Friday afternoon, but here are some provisional thoughts.
When I say a film or director is intelligent, I'm often thinking about its technical aspects. There's a very real sense in which art comes down to choices, and intelligent choices on the technical level are those that improve the watchability of a film, making it more fearsome, or funnier, or more endearing, or whatever else the filmmaker would like it to be.
One of the classic examples in this regard comes from the decisions Steven Spielberg made when it turned out that the mechanical shark that had been built for the filming of Jaws – nicknamed Bruce, if I recall correctly – was not working. Because of this minor inconvenience (Oh shit, we don't have a monster for our monster film!) Spielberg was forced to find all kinds of ways to intimate the presence of the shark without showing it; the wonderful success of those ways shows how intelligent he is as a film director.
Or consider the use of the Panaglide stabilizer that John Carpenter used in Halloween. This mechanism (the predecessor of the Steadicam) was a relatively new technology at the time which allowed a camera operator to carry a camera without the telltale jiggling that results from body movement, giving the image instead a smooth, gliding feel. But Carpenter did not simply use this new device in some willy-nilly way; instead, he figured out how to use it to dramatically increase the menace of the film, by imbuing it with a shot-to-shot, ethereally terrifying quality – as if we are participating in the action in some way that is not quite human, is somehow more intense than that – which resembles some of Kubrick's camera work in The Shining, but at a much lower cost. (Although not really our topic today, cost management is often one of the greatest hallmarks of intelligent filmmaking, as I discussed in a piece about Cop Car a while back.)
Beyond camera work, there are the innumerable other technical elements of filmmaking. One thinks of the lurid lighting – using radical color shifts and hypersaturated tones – of Dario Argento's Suspiria, which helps give the viewer a feeling of total and helpless immersion in disturbing world of the film, in which a young woman finds herself in the midst of a coven of witches: we are, in the same way she is, entirely at the mercy of this sinister place, overwhelmed by the pure visual force of it. Or one thinks of that film's extraordinary sound design, which (particularly when it's viewed in a theater with a good sound system) augments the film's visual immersion with a kind of relentless sonic cacophony.
Beyond these technical accomplishments – although intimately connected to them – there are also many ways a film can be intelligent in slightly more abstract ways. These involve its shaping of the story, its insights into the people who propel that story, and the connections of these things to the world outside of the film. In other words, the way a film creates meaning.
And this is where – aided by its deep technical intelligence – Hooper's movie shines.
Released in 1974, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the most important independent films of the 1970s.
Shot on location in Texas, using regional and mostly amateur actors, it tells a story that has now become the stuff of stereotype, but at the time must have felt almost entirely fresh. It opens with a group of five young people driving to out to visit a graveyard. This has been gruesomely vandalized, with bodies dug up and wired together into bizarre sculptures, and two of the kids – Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) and her wheelchair-bound brother Franklin (Paul A. Partain) – are worried that their grandfather's remains might have been disturbed. After reassuring themselves that their grandfather has remained undisturbed, they decide to drive on to visit a decaying old house that used to belong to the Hardesty family, where Sally and Franklin spent time when they were kids.
On the way, they pick up a hitchhiker (Edwin Neal), who comes from a family that worked in the slaughterhouses in the area, before modernization of the industry plunged them into unemployment. He turns out to be pretty bonkers – obsessing over the way the cows used to be killed, and intentionally cutting his own hand with Franklin's pocketknife – so the kids kick him out of their van and continue on.
After stopping at a rural gas station and barbecue joint where the proprietor (Jim Siedow) regretfully informs them that his tanks have run dry, the kids drive on to the decaying Hardesty family manse. There, they split up. Two of them, Kirk and Pam (William Vail and Teri McMinn) set off to find a swimming hole that Franklin tells them about. This is dried up, but they spot a nearby house and go to investigate, hoping to borrow some gas for their van.
This is when, about 35 minutes into the film, the mayhem begins. Kirk and Pam find a human tooth on the porch of this house, but this doesn't dissuade them. Kirk knocks on the door, and when he finds that it's open, enters the house. It's a bizarre place, strewn with animal skulls and strange sculptures built out of bones and feathers.
Still not dissuaded, Kirk ventures inside and, in a fantastically well-constructed sequence, stumbles on a door jamb, just as a massive figure in a bizarre mask lurches out of a hallway. This figure – known as Leatherface because of his mask – hits Kirk in the head with a small sledge, killing him. Outside, Pam begins to wonder what's happened to Kirk. She too ventures inside and falls prey to Leatherface, who hangs her on a meathook.
Soon, Jerry (Allen Danziger) decides that he better go looking for Pam and Kirk. He goes into the house as well, and sees a table where big piece of meat (presumably Kirk) has recently been cut up with a chainsaw. He then finds Pam, still alive, in a freezer…at which point, of course, Leatherface kills him as well. Then follows a fascinating, and signally-important moment. Leatherface, having killed three people, seems distraught, perhaps even anxious about something. He roams around the bizarrely-appointed house, before sitting down by the window to think.
Meanwhile, Sally and Franklin have realized that something is wrong. They decide they have no choice but to go looking for their missing friends, since one of them has the keys to the van. It's now dark, and Sally pushes Franklin along through the brush in his wheelchair, down the path the others have ventured…and then Leatherface leaps out of the bushes with a chainsaw and kills Franklin.
Sally flees. Leatherface chases her with the chainsaw. She runs into the house where the others have disappeared, locks the door behind her, scrambles upstairs, and finds a pair of mummified bodies. Leatherface cuts down the door with his chainsaw and runs up after her, so she jumps out a window and runs again, finally making it all the way to the gas station they stopped at a few hours before.
In a piece of horrifically bad luck, however, it turns out that the gas station owner is not a good guy but one of the bad guys. He subdues Sally, puts her in his pickup truck, and drives her back to the house where all the awful stuff has been happening. At this point, the connections become clear.
The gas station owner has two wayward sons, whom he berates for their stupidity when they show up. The first is the hitchhiker, who has been – against his father's express orders – out desecrating graveyards and building his corpse-sculptures; the second is Leatherface, who has not only ruined the door to their house with his chainsaw when he was chasing after Sally, but has also killed a bunch of kids. There's also Grandfather (John Duggan), a mummified but still-alive old geezer who lives in the attic and whom we took to be a corpse himself when Sally was just up there.
They are, this horrific family, ex-slaughterhouse workers, now out of work. But they've put their skills to use, because the barbecue that gets served in the gas station is made, like Soylent Green, of people. They decide that they're going to let Grandfather kill Sally, because he used to be the best at killing and they want to see him have a go, but he's not strong enough to even hold the hammer up anymore.
As they others are fumbling around to help him, Sally gets free, jumps out another window, and runs to the road with the hitchhiker and Leatherface chasing her. It's dawn. A passing cattle truck runs over the hitchhiker. Sally jumps into the back of a pickup and escapes, leaving Leatherface behind, swinging his chainsaw around in fury.
So how is all of this madness intelligent? Let's get the technical stuff out of the way first. The camera work, lighting, blocking of the scenes, use of locations, sound design, and set decoration are all impeccable. It's a film that should be studied by anyone wanting to make an indy horror film, or an indy film of any sort. The specifics of this are too involved to go into here, but of particular note is the way that the individual techniques – from the first killing, which I noted above, to the way the interior of the killers' house is decorated and shot, to the lighting of the nighttime chase scenes, to the minimalist score and use of background sound – build together to create a precise and idiosyncratic atmosphere. The film has a very particular feel, and it results in large part from really smart technical choices.
I would also be remiss, in this context, not to note the performances of the mostly-amateur cast. They are all very good, and in some sense their achievements seem to me to be epitomized by Paul A. Partain in the role of the wheelchair-bound Franklin. He's strangely mesmerizing. He manages to make the character at once almost impossibly annoying and eminently watchable, insufferable and yet understandable. We dislike him, I think, and yet want to see him on the screen. Like Gunnar Hansen, who plays Leatherface, Partain manages to give an individuality to a character that could easily be reduced to stock; this is one of the key elements that gives the film its particular life. One of the least-frequently discussed elements of good direction is the ability to allow actors to succeed, and the film’s accomplishment in this area are notable.
Moving to a slightly less concrete level, the plotting of the film is extraordinarily successful. It works, in effect, to tell several tales at the same time, and to give these tales a sense of progression from beginning to end. Often in stories, and particularly horror stories, there is an almost deadening consistency in tone. A killer appears, he kills some people, and is either defeated or not. There may be some little mysteries along the way – Who is this killer? Why is he so violent? – but there is no real sense of a world being opened up, no sense of the illumination of something we did not know beforehand that is so central to great storytelling.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre works differently, which is the reason I wrote a rather extended summary of it above. Consider the human sculptures at the graveyard at the start of the film. They work terrifically as an eerie and gruesome opening, setting up the tone. And when the kids enter the house and see similar constructions, we realize that the opening was not simply a one-off scare, but somehow connected to what's going on with these maniacs; this creates plot tension, because it raises a question in our mind: we know we've stumbled into the lair of the person who was responsible for the desecration of the graveyard, but don't yet understand what the hell it's all about.
And then – and here's the wonderful sense of progression – this motif takes a magnificent turn. We realize that these sculptures are the work of an insanely wayward youth (the hitchhiker), whose dad is pissed off because his antics are going to bring the authorities down on them. Suddenly, what has been a straight-edged horror story turns into a bizarre – but recognizable – family drama. Dad is pissed off because his kids are out of control, and old grandpa up in the attic is still somehow the patriarch of the family. The family idolizes him and sings his praises – he was the best killer the slaughterhouse ever had! – even though he's entirely incapacitated and looks like a mummy. There is a kind of antic, gristly comedy in all of this, but also a real, and deep, change in our understanding of what kind of story is being told.
It is not just the story of kids being terrorized, that is, but of a madcap family thrown into dislocation by the economic devastation of the shutting down of the slaughterhouses. Would these monstrous people still be killing and eating strangers if the slaughterhouses were still open? Who knows? But, crucially, they are recognizably human in their concerns, interactions, angers, and dilemmas.
This is what lies behind the inimitable scene of Leatherface sitting by the window, trying to think things through after he's killed the first three kids. He knows he's in a pickle, and he's worried that his dad is going to be pissed off. This insane, chainsaw-wielding killer is wracked with anxiety. He has to clean up the bodies, yes, that much is clear, and he's already begun to do that. But every time he turns around, there's another kid barging into their house, and what the hell's he supposed to do? When he saw the first one, he just hit him in the head with the sledge, because that's what he knows. But then they just kept coming, one after another. So he had to kill them. And man, his dad's going to be pissed. Or will his dad be happy because he got them some more meat for the barbecue business? Maybe? But what if there's other kids out there, and they escape, and bring back someone who gets the family in trouble? Man, his dad's going to be pissed.
What becomes clear, in other words, in this simple sequence with no dialogue, in which Leatherface storms around for a moment and then sits down and we push in to a closeup of his face, is that he is a human being, with recognizable mental processes.
As does so much of the second half of the film, the sequence combines a kind of macabre humor, an astute observation of human interaction, and a deep, penetrating horror. Because it is actually more terrifying that these evildoers are recognizably human than it would be if they were simply the mindless automatons that have come to dominate the stories of this sort in the five decades since Texas Chainsaw was released.
This is intelligent filmmaking. It destabilizes us, leaving us completely unprepared for whatever might be coming next. It allows the film to tell stories of victims and killers that resonate on several levels at the same time. It combines horror with a kind of demented wit, combines insight into actual human interactions with a depiction of our worst nightmares about what humans can become. And it's the foundation on which the movie's much commented-upon thematic material can be built.
One of the most lasting measures of the intelligence of a film is the degree to which one can use it as a topic for discussion of the world outside of the film. This is not to be confused with the pedantry that seems to have overtaken so much of our contemporary filmmaking, in which the movies themselves reduce the discussion to whether or not the audience "gets" the film's political statement; actual intelligence in filmmaking requires, in contrast, a real engagement with complexity.
Intelligent films are not reducible to sloganeering. They cannot be encapsulated by a breathless explainer on a website. They are, instead, closer to what the poet John Ashbery once called "A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern, / As in the division of grace these long August days / Without proof." They suggest, they stir things buried inside of us, they make us feel and think and respond, but they can never be entirely elucidated by language, for they can only truly be comprehended by and in the act of watching them. They are fully complete only in themselves; and yet part of their exact magic is that they can also serve as lenses through which we engage with the riotous multiplicity of the world outside of themselves.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has, over the years, supported a great deal of discussion. If one wants, one can read arguments about the ways that the film is a sly referendum on the politics of animal welfare and the ethics of consuming meat, or that it is about the youthful idealism of the '60s (the kids in the van) crashing into the depressing economic realism of the '70s (the killers), or that it is a morality tale about the downwardly-mobile prospects of aging rural America coming into conflict the upwardly-mobile youth ethos of the new generation.
Yes, it is. But it is also more. It is its own entity, fearsome, sly, terrifying, grotesque, intelligent, and human. Irreducible.
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