Kids These Days Don't Spend Enough Time In Rural Texas
Is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre still as depraved as it used to be?
The original Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a thing to behold. It’s only eighty four minutes, but it took me almost two hours to watch it, because I kept having to pause it and do something else for a minute to dissolve the tension. Also because of the fact that there were eight ad breaks during it. I was very tempted to chainsaw the Window World guy. However, I got through it, and was, suffice to say, terrified. I’m a wimp about tension, and if Texas Chain Saw had one thing, it was that. Now, it’s already been established that I found this movie scary despite knowing everything that was coming, but I do think it’s important to talk about why.
When Texas Chain Saw came out, it was a taboo of a movie. It had the worst reputation a movie could have. It didn’t have much of a plot, just people being tortured and murdered, and so the only people who could possibly go see it were those who enjoyed torture and murder. It was for the gore freaks, and no one else.
Now, that description of it doesn’t hold up in the modern day. When I watched it, I was honestly shocked at how little gore there is compared to other movies with better reputations. I was expecting to see every little part of the murders, and was surprised when I didn’t. The most gore you see is on Sally, the only one who doesn’t die. You just watch Kirk get dragged into the bone room by Leatherface, you don’t see his death at all. Pam has arguably the most agonizing murder, with her impalement on a meathook and then subsequent chainsawing, but you never see the meathook go through her, or the chainsaw hit her in any other way than the accompanying blood spatter. The most gruesome death is Franklin’s, but even that is mostly just seeing the blood spatter. Because of this, there are people that argue that Texas Chain Saw isn’t a slasher at all.
There are a few criteria a movie must meet to be a slasher. They are as follows:
A Final Girl
Gory kills
A revenge-driven killer
Teenagers being killed
Sexual activity being a leading cause of death
An isolated location
A masked or disfigured killer
Texas Chain Saw, believe it or not, meets all of these criteria.
The first and most obvious is the final girl, Sally Hardesty. The only one who survives, the only one who escapes. She is evidence of the slasher on her own.
The second, perhaps least debated factor, is gore. While Texas Chain Saw may not have that much gore, what is does have is pretty horrid, especially for the time it came out. More on that later.
The third, and most contested in relation to Texas Chain Saw, is the revenge factor. Many claim that there is no revenge in Texas Chain Saw, that Leatherface and the Sawyers kill Sally and her friends just because they were there. To that I say: what about the slaughterhouse? The slaughterhouse being closed by hippie-minded people like these teens put the whole family out of a job and a legacy. To them, these kids just driving around in a van, no jobs, no worries, are the enemy. They’re the people that ruined their family, so they must die.
The fourth item on the list of slasher criteria, teenagers being killed, is a no-brainer here. Sally and her friends are, at oldest, maybe twenty one. They’re probably taking a gap year before college, or some other thing. But they are still kids.
The fifth item on the list isn’t quite met in Texas Chain Saw as much as it is in later slashers, but it’s still there. The first two to die are a couple, and abandon their friends to go swimming together, showing that they care more about their relationship than their friends or their safety. None of the others are shown in a sexual or romantic context, however.
The sixth, and isolated location, is arguably what makes Texas Chain Saw as scary as it is. Sally runs up the stairs of the Sawyers’ home, because there’s nowhere safer to be outside. It’s blind luck that the truck driver shows up when he does to take her to safety. Even when Sally runs for help after seeing her brother killed, she runs right into the Sawyers’ gas station, the closest building for miles. There’s no one to help her anywhere.
The seventh, and final, item on the list is a masked or disfigured killer, a criterium filled by Leatherface himself, whose real face is never seen behind his masks of human skin.
Now that we’ve established Texas Chain Saw as a slasher, I would like to talk for a minute about the gore in it. It’s infamous for it, but there isn’t really much. Carrie, which came out only two years later, is much gorier, but less reviled for it. Texas Chain Saw was the devil’s movie, an unimaginable bloodbath, and for no one but the gore freaks. And yet, even for the time it was made in, it has shockingly little gore. I think that part of the reason people think it’s so bloody is because of the pointlessness of all the murders. Sally and her friends were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and got killed for it. In freezers and on meathooks and by sledgehammers. All horrible ways to die, even if we don’t see them. In some moments, especially if we don’t see them. It’s almost worse in your imagination, with just the sounds.
Texas Chain Saw is a very artsy film, which is made clear in many scenes. The close-up on Sally’s eye as she’s sitting at the Sawyer’s dinner table was the one that stood out the most to me, as well as the masterful tension building throughout the whole movie. The opening shot of the figures made of dug-up bodies from the graveyard is also beautiful in its horror. But the most surreal, artsy sequence in the movie is when they have the Hitchhiker in their van.
The Hitchhiker’s descriptions of slaughterhouses made me feel almost physically ill in a way that no other movie has. His careful slicing of his hand almost made me look away from the screen, just a cut, but the gore I found easily the most disturbing through the entire movie. The thing I found most scary about him, though, was the way he took their picture. I knew who the Sawyers were, and what these kids were getting into, and I could instantly imagine him taking the pictures home to show his family, to make sure they got the right kids. In the age of the internet, the idea of someone I don’t know having a picture of me is terrifying, and I felt that fear in the kids in the van as the Hitchhiker took their picture.
Texas Chain Saw is a famous enough movie that I knew that it spawned a franchise going in. I knew that Leatherface, like many slashers before and after him, became the hero of his franchise instead of his victims. I also knew exactly where the jumpscares were, because I Googled them like a wimp. And yet, I was still more scared by that movie than any others of its kind.
I think this has to do with two things. First, the aforementioned tension building throughout. There are only two jumpscares in the whole thing, but all of it has a sense of dread, of a jumpscare just about to happen, even if they never do. The scene when Sally and Franklin are in the forest looking for their friends was the absolute worst of it for me. Leatherface jumping into the flashlight beam with his chainsaw was almost a relief compared to the torture of waiting and waiting for something to happen.
The second reason why Texas Chain Saw is still terrifying today is because of the sense of isolation. It doesn’t matter that Sally’s screaming as she runs - no one will hear her but the Sawyers. Even when she collapses into the back room of the gas station when she ends up there asking for help, the viewer can tell that she’s not safe there even before Mr. Sawyer comes back and kidnaps her. It’s really a stroke of luck that there was someone on the main highway that early to rescue Sally, that she managed to survive through the night by running. And, as is always the case with final girls, at the very end, it doesn’t seem like she’s the lucky one at all.
Sally’s ride off into the sunrise is a famous visual - this pretty little blond girl, covered in blood, laughing hysterically, or maybe crying. But, again, it’s undercut by Leatherface’s chainsaw dance right after. It’s his franchise, not Sally’s. She has to go live with the guilt that comes from surviving like that, with the memory of watching her brother die horribly in front of her, unable to run to save himself. He gets to stay in the backwaters of Texas, waiting for the next unsuspecting drivers to run out of gas.
Texas Chain Saw could be very easily criticized for many things, but I loved it. It was horrifying in its lack of gore, it’s tension, it’s isolation. These kids are being killed horribly just because they wanted to go see their old house, make sure their grandpa hadn’t been dug up. They aren’t people to the Sawyers, in a way that makes the viewers question why they would even watch this in a fantastic commentary on the purpose of slaughterhouses. Texas Chain Saw has proved its longevity by being a classic not just because it did something new, but because it’s a masterful piece of cinema.