The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 1974

There is no film quite like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, nor will there likely ever be again. Even fifty years on, the creeping, nigh-on sacrilegious aura the film transmits is impossible to replicate, a grimy, shudder-inducing feeling that seems like it’s been beamed in from Hell itself. Director Tobe Hooper, in his second feature effort, with a budget of just $140,000 ($700,000 when adjusted for inflation), would create a work as influential and purely cinematic as anything the horror genre would go on to produce, a lean and brutally experiential descent into animalistic madness and violence.  

Loosely drawing on the murders of serial killer Ed Gein (though its claims of being a ‘true story’ were demonstrably false), the film follows five teenagers who stumble upon a household full of deranged cannibals while road tripping in the Texas backwoods, including the immense, inhuman ‘Leatherface’ (Gunnar Hansen) whose weapon of choice is the titular piece of forestry equipment. Hooper channelled an America transformed by the televisual horrors of the Vietnam War beaming into households night after night to completely refurbish the language of horror cinema, at times approaching the avant-garde in his terrifying montages of meat, humidity and decay.  

The film’s transgressive approach to violence and sadism saw its being banned in territories the world over, adding to the notorious sheen of a film experience not quite like any other. Searing, unforgettable images remain tattooed on the viewer long after the credits roll –  a rotting tooth on the doorstep; the green eyes of Sally (Marilyn Burns, in one of the great ‘Final Girl’ performances) rolling in her head; the sharp glint of the meat hooks; the demonic ‘chainsaw ballet’ of the film’s final scene, and that chilling cut to black. One of the most enduring, staggeringly ‘modern’ classics of the ‘New Hollywood’ era of the 1970s, there will only ever be one Texas Chain Saw Massacre. — Tom Augustine