I first saw Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre under the best of possible circumstances. No more than sixteen years old, I was marooned in my parent’s basement on a sweltering summer night, sluggishly flipping through the channels. I hit on IFC (Independent Film Channel) and paused on what looked to be a documentary. Two hippies—a handsome boy in denim (Kirk) and a pretty girl in red shorts and a halter top (Pam)—happen upon a folksy-looking home in a desolate Texas outpost. They’re looking to trade for some gas so they can get their van full of friends back on the road. It’s the early ‘70s and droves of aimless young people are filling similar vans, all in pursuit of some murky dream of love and freedom far from the suffocating familiarity of their parent’s homes.
The two climb the porch steps and approach the front door. In a puckish move, Kirk plucks a human tooth from the floor and hands it to his girlfriend: “I’ve got something for you, Pam.” A cry of revulsion: “Let’s go!” She retreats to a rocker in the front yard.
After his repeated knocks go unanswered, Kirk enters the home. A massive figure, clad in a butcher’s apron and a mask made of human skin, lurches into view. Today, Leatherface needs no introduction, having become a veritable icon of backwoods carnage. To my wide-eyed sixteen-year-old self, however, this hulking frame and oafish monstrosity was uncanny, a deft mix of the comical and the malevolent. What was I watching? And who was behind the camera, viewing all of this mayhem with clinical detachment? The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was the first film that made me fear the director more than the villains.
For better or for worse, the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre stands as one of the great cinematic explorations of evil, complete with all of its human foibles and banal outworkings.
Leatherface brings a large hammer down on Kirk’s head. A sickeningly moist thud and then his collapsed body erupts into furious spasms. After a final blow, Leatherface drags his victim into another room and slides a metal door shut. That door bothered me intensely, both for the finality of its slam and its sleek industrial look that belonged in a slaughterhouse, not a home. It also made clear that this gruesome episode was a routine procedure in this place.
Cut to outside. Pam is understandably concerned that her boyfriend hasn’t returned. She rises from the rocker and we move into a low tracking shot that draws our attention to the vast house that has consumed Kirk, now looming ominously before her. Hooper and screenwriter Kim Henkel have stated that they wanted to make a modern retelling of Hansel and Gretel, and this shot has an appropriately fairytale quality, showing us a little girl lost in the woods and wandering into a witch’s house.
Calling out for Kirk, she walks into the house and stumbles into what surely qualifies as one of the most outlandish living rooms in all of cinema. There’s a great abundance of bones that litter the floor and hang suspended from the ceiling like morbid dreamcatchers. The room’s centerpiece is constructed from skeletal remains, either a makeshift sofa or a voodoo altar. A lone chicken clucks and twitches inside a rusty birdcage. As with the sliding metal door, this detail unnerved me. It looked like a poor imitation of a “normal” pet, like some alien agency saw a chicken as interchangeable with a budgie or a parakeet.
The star behind the scenes here is the film’s art director, Robert A. Burns, a strange character whose DIY approach to set design even involved a foray into taxidermy to create one of the film’s opening shots of a dead armadillo smoldering in the Texas heat. In his able hands, the house and its murderous family resemble a perverse inversion of the American dream. Displaced by automation at the slaughterhouse, the members of this idyllic home convert it into their own abattoir, consuming the very society that spat them out.
With mounting panic, Pam tries to flee the man-made hell into which she’s stumbled. A shrieking Leatherface grabs her at the front door and pulls her back into the maw of the house. This time, the fated metal door won’t draw a discreet curtain over the ordeal that awaits his victim. Leatherface carries Pam into a filthy room, the centerpiece of which is a massive meathook. The low tracking shot of Pam’s slender back flashes through our heads as she is mounted on the hook. Gripping the poll in a gesture of futile resistance, she finds the strength to scream when Leatherface takes a chainsaw to her boyfriend’s corpse, now lying prone on a table. This scene, among the most vicious and despairing ever put to film, constitutes the heart of the film. And hardly a drop of blood is visible.
Here we gain some insight into the genius of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, as well as its complex moral vision. Hooper doesn’t assault us with practical effects. To do so would undermine the gravity of the violence being unleashed—and also make the film a good deal less frightening. By contrast, a recent film like Terrifier 3 is filled to the brim with gag-inducing murders, but the intense focus on their practical mechanics dehumanizes the bodies being destroyed and brings them closer to something we’d encounter in a funhouse than a true crime story. By contrast, Hooper’s film refuses to dehumanize victim and villain alike. Instead of pierced flesh, we have the alarming details of Pam’s agonized face, the steel poll she’s gripping, and the rusty bucket below her suspended body.
But the scene isn’t over. With both Pam and Kirk dispatched, Leatherface runs to the living room and looks out the window in a panic, braying like a wild animal. He taps his temples in a frantic gesture as the camera zooms in on his masked face, giving us a clear view of his decaying teeth and frightened eyes. This was not the typical “slasher” to which I was accustomed. He didn’t have the inhuman efficiency of a Michael Myers or a Jason Voorhees. He was sinister, but also bumbling—terrifyingly human. And I felt some sympathy for him.
No doubt, some will wonder what business a film like this has in the pages of a Christian publication. It’s a fair question. My modest attempt at an answer has been to highlight one crucial scene in this remarkable film. Another way of stating the argument above would be to say that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre presents a vision of irreducible evil—acts of such abhorrence and cruelty that they don’t allow for reductionistic explanations. But neither does the film indulge in the temptation to give us an outlandish villain who is basically superhuman, such as we encounter in The Silence of the Lambs’s Hannibal Lecter. For all his savagery, Lecter has more in common with Count Dracula or Darth Vader than he does with someone like Jeffrey Dahlmer. Leatherface and his family, on the other hand, are more familiar. They are human monsters, not fantasy figures.
Hooper would abandon this rich and troubling depiction of human depravity in his slapstick sequel. And indeed, most of the film’s sequels have exchanged a serious exploration of fallen nature for gore and schlock. For better or for worse, the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre stands as one of the great cinematic explorations of evil, complete with all of its human foibles and banal outworkings. On the face of it, this would seem to mark it as unbearable, a grueling test of endurance. But it’s not. In fact, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is disconcertingly captivating.
Part of the reason for that is the stray moments of beauty that intrude on the brutal scenes. Given that the film is centered on torture and mass murder, such a statement risks sounding absurd. How is it possible for a film like this to qualify as beautiful in any meaningful sense of the word? In lesser hands, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre would be a vision of pure contempt as any film that explores moral disorder without compassion is. A film animated by hatred, no matter how skillful its execution, will always be ugly. For all its harrowing subject matter, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a deeply compassionate film that never loses sight of the humanity of any of its characters. Nor does it overlook the austere beauty of its natural surroundings. I’ll never forget the film’s final moments of Leatherface pirouetting with his roaring chainsaw as a brilliant Texas sun burns on the horizon.
