![]() As much by serendipity as design, Texas Chainsaw‘s lack of budget (originally set at a tiny $60,000, but swelling to somewhere closer to the $300,000 mark during editing) is key to that rawness. It’s a raw, ugly film for a raw and ugly era. Instead, Texas Chainsaw offers approximately 80 minutes of largely unbroken, unvarnished fear and loathing: a film that drags horror into the turbulent present of ’70s America, with its Vietnam war anger, Watergate scandal, and fuel shortages. Read more: How Ed Gein Inspired the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Other Horror Movies The luckless Sally (Burns) escapes with her life, but not, we suspect, her sanity. The terrifying Leatherface and the rest of the cannibal family go otherwise unpunished at the end of the movie. Most interestingly of all, Hooper doesn’t give the audience the release of a final confrontation between heroine and villain – the closest we get is when the hitcher played by Edwin Neal is run over by a truck. The disabled, difficult, and ultimately doomed Franklin is an unusual kind of character to see in a horror film of its vintage. Hooper doesn’t make the same links between partying, libidinous youths, and violent death that later movies would create. There’s little of the high school, soap opera relationship back-and-forth between the characters. It’s a car flying down a highway without any brakes a rollercoaster wildly out of control. In Texas Chainsaw, the barrier between the world on the screen and the viewer feels as delicate as plastic wrap, and likely to break at any moment. Read more: The Best Streaming Horror Movies ![]() There’s a certain amount of comfort in knowing that what we’re seeing is all make believe, like a rollercoaster that simulates the terror of a maniac driving down a highway without the accompanying danger. Deep down, we know that we’re watching actors acting and special effects dowsing and splattering across the screen. Even if the audience doesn’t consciously notice as much, there’s a distancing level of artifice in even the goriest of horror flicks. What the long-suffering cast and crew of Texas Chainsaw might not have banked on, as they drowned their sorrows at the wrap party in 1973, was just how the atmosphere of that arduous shoot would feed into the finished movie. Instead, Hooper uses sound, editing, and framing to suggest the violence and bloodletting. Then there’s its other big talking point: how, despite the attention-grabbing title, the movie’s remarkably low on gore. How its intensity and style influenced dozens of other filmmakers and their movies, including Ridley Scott’s Alien. Indeed, Texas Chainsawis now such a horror staple that discussions surrounding it have become well-worn: the initial shock and controversy surrounding its release, particularly in the UK, where the BBFC banned it for several years. Even today, Texas Chainsawis rightly mentioned in the same breath as such boundary-pushing features as Night of the Living Dead, The Last House on the Left, and Halloween. As history now recalls, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, as its title calls it – joined a growing club of low-budget horror movies that changed the genre forever. At one pivotal moment, a special effect failed to work properly so Burns had her finger sliced open for real, so that Dugan’s “grandfather” could lick the blood from the wound as the camera rolled.Īll of this for a movie that, at least in theory, should have shown at a few grindhouse theatres and drive-ins before vanishing without a trace. Marilyn Burns, who played the film’s tormented “final girl,” had it even worse: she was forced to spend hours tied to a chair, covered in fake blood. Several actors, including 18-year-old John Dugan, who plays a catatonic “grandfather,” had to spend hours each day in stifling old-man makeup. ![]() ![]() Funds didn’t stretch to a wardrobe of multiple costumes, so the cast were forced to wear the same filthy outfit day after day in order to maintain continuity. The stench was so bad that some crewmembers were throwing up outside between takes.ĭirected by Tobe Hooper, then a largely unknown 20-something filmmaker from Austin, the film’s painfully low budget only added to the misery. The interior location where much of the film’s third act took place, an old farmhouse outside Round Rock, was dressed with animal bones and blood, which had begun to stink in the broiling Texas air. The heat and humidity were almost unbearable. In the summer of 1973, the cast and crew of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were suffering through what was, by most accounts, a thoroughly miserable shoot.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |