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Opening with a "true story" opening crawl - a conceited yet commercially successful ploy to attract a broader audience - Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", combined with symbolism as a banned video nasty, resonated with its target demographic, but not so with myopic critics, who failed to recognise the film's underlying social commentary, subtext and technical merits, wrongly deriding it as a threat to decency. Ironically, any onscreen violence therein occurs unexpectedly, most of it bloodless and relatively tame by horror standards; the film's unique ability to disturb and horrify arises purely from its relentless psychological impact, primarily in the use of percussive, screeching sound design, radical camera and lighting techniques, real time and agile, accomplished editing to build a foreboding sense of disquiet and accumulating apprehension. Rather than lulling his audience into a false sense of security, Hooper boldly shocks them outright with a lingering shot of a dead armadillo, Polaroid flashes illuminating desecrated corpses and audible news reports on said debased activity within the area reverberate throughout the credits. In compounding the simmering revulsion and disconcert beyond the film's initial focus on organically ghoulish, jarring imagery, the plot is seemingly unfurled at a largely unhurried pace, enabling the scorched, bleak scenery of Texas and its dilapidated buildings and homes to assume an offensive, downright lurid visual dominion over the tone and mood, eliminating the supernatural and replacing it with the dysfunctional Middle American family as a source of conceivable, unavoidable horror hiding in plain sight, from desiccated grandpas to feather-laden living rooms, the rural life of Texans has never been so disturbingly depicted and yet so startlingly candid. In capturing the foibles of a family affected by the hidden, backwoods element of the USA, Hooper changed the face of horror, ensuring that audiences could not feel assured of their safety; the ordeal endured by the characters herein was a distinct possibility since it was not some fantastical monster from outer space. In terms of originality, the level of violence is depicted subliminally, and therefore so indirectly diffusive and credible that you can hear the bones crunching under feet, smell the feverish hysteria, sweltering heat, rotting flesh, and body odour; dense with pervading aesthetic so fervent and visibly meretricious, the obviously inexpensive production values actually enhance and elevate the frenzied cumulative aura of madness and macabre. Hooper's adroit direction grounds the audience into a dark universe, thus set the template for twisted corporeal artistry, however, since its release in 1973, no other film within the genre has even come close to achieving its uniquely grubby, scabrous look or striking capacity to deeply unsettle and upset.
Sacrilege, impiety and irreverence pervade the atmosphere from the outset; a sudden commencement of splenetic, ominous truculence appears in the form of a hitchhiker picked up by a set of teenagers investigating the aforementioned reports of grave robbing. Upon ejecting the Polaroid-wielding hitchhiker when he turns grievously violent, the teenagers venture on to their old crumbling homestead, leaving in search of a swimming hole and a source of fuel, only to find a family of cannibal ex-slaughterhouse workers. Resplendent in its sun-burnt, permeable, quasi-documentary visual style, the film harnesses the hazy, surreal quality of a nightmare. Hooper's apocalyptic landscape is a dismal wasteland of decay and disuse, both in terms of workers and small businesses; the family who terrorise the aforementioned teenagers are depicted as victims of post-Vietnam industrial capitalism. In a more explicit sense than previous horror films exploring the American underbelly, a portentous, angst-laden ambience surrounds both families in the film; the nuclear unit as we know it is destroyed, replaced with post-Vietnam disillusionment and unemployment. Hooper's attack on contemporary American life is carried to a more logical conclusion than other films of its ilk, such as "Last House on the Left", in its addressing of the collapse of civil order, causality of violence and illegitimacy of authority as being the direct result of post-war malaise. Hooper subverts our preconceived idea of family values, exploring the textbook American Gothic family of the Saywers and presenting them as the hostile inversion of virtue and convention; the grubby, off-kilter kinship group herein represent the patriarchal regression of the nuclear family unit, rendered obsolete by large corporations and technology. In terms of dynamics and gender roles, the youngest son and the film's main source of physical horror, undertakes both male and female household duties, wearing alternating masks for each role composited from the skins of his victims. So efficacious is the character development and nuances in Leatherface's behaviour, interactions with other family members and environment, that upon reflection, he registers as deeply enigmatic, mythical and laconic, akin to Frankenstein's Monster.
Hooper's distinction herein is the assault on the senses that occurs throughout, as well as the intentional, extremely dark, ironic humour utilised to counter and punctuate the visceral aspects of the film, carefully measured so as not to diminish the film's overwhelming intensity. In the involving of the audience on a sensory level rather than intellectual, the film becomes deeply evocative, immersive and imbued with such sheer ugliness that it embodies horror, punishing the viewer in a raw, primal, nerve-shattering capacity. One cannot escape from it, nor does one want to escape; it is a contradictory state of mind that the viewer enters, both repelled and compelled by the chain of life depicted on screen, the jarring prospect of humans in the position of livestock effectively demystifies the brutal process of slaughtering and eating animals, especially when one character is impaled on a meat-hook and another is stunned by a sledgehammer. Every frame oozes with sweat-soaked hopelessness, creating a general feeling of disgust by the time the deranged slaughterer Leatherface chases his final victim with the titular chainsaw onto the dusk-lit road, a pursuit so protracted that it becomes almost unbearable to watch. However, from this seemingly prolonged unease comes sudden reprieve, as the final girl somehow outruns Leatherface and the ordeal concludes with his chainsaw buzzing and waving furiously as a sun set blazes within the frame.
"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is the grittiest and grimiest horror film you will ever see, an experience achingly close to spending the night in a slaughterhouse; encapsulating absurdity in a frighteningly realistic fashion, edifying a menagerie of characters whose way of life is at odds with our own but only slightly differing in our views of what constitutes meat, the film is executed with such spontaneity and verve that its low budget and lack of gore is what separates it from most horror films in that it genuinely horrifies.
