The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

D. Tobe Hooper



Hooper's low-budget, seminal exploitation horror film (with a quasi-documentary feel) was made on a budget of $300,000 - and became highly profitable (approximately $31 million) through its advertising campaign ("Who will survive - and what will be left of them?"). Surprisingly, there was little blood and no close-ups of the fatal blows, although it became the 70's most controversial cult horror film and the precursor of later slasher films. Its unpleasant storyline was loosely based on the real-life Wisconsin serial killer and skin-fetishist Ed Gein - as was Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991). The skillfully-directed film told about a family trio of unsympathetic, cannibalistic, homicidal, ex-slaughterhouse workers/fiends: a Gulf station attendant, a hitchhiker (Edwin Neal), and Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) - who slaughtered college-aged kids (and anyone else) who happened to trespass in their area - and then intended to eat their human flesh and sell the remains as 'sausage'.

The R-rated, painful-to-watch, nightmarish film opened with a sober narration about a crime spree - vandals desecrating graveyards in a remote section of Texas. During a visit to Sally Hardesty's (Marilyn Burns) grandfather's grave, she and her wheelchair-bound, sadistic and fat brother Franklin (Paul A. Partain) and friends Pam (Teri McMinn), Pam's boyfriend Kirk (William Vail), and Sally's boyfriend Jerry (Allen Danziger) investigated her grandfather's run-down, deserted farm. The murders began with the first appearance of Leatherface from behind a sliding door in another deserted house (where there were skeleton bones and human remains strewn about) - he wore a bloody butcher's apron and a mask stitched out of human skin - and wielded a roaring chain saw. The masked man suddenly appeared and sledge-hammered Kirk's head, and then hung a screaming Pam on a meat hook through her upper back. After carving up the dead Kirk with a chain saw, Jerry was also killed with a sledgehammer after discovering a deep-frozen, half-dead Pam in a large chest freezer, and Franklin was slaughtered through his stomach with the chain saw. Running in terror, Sally unfortunately ran into Leatherface's house, where she was soon held captive in the infamous dinner scene (and had her finger cut as a blood-appetizer for the weakened, withered, vampiric and patriarchal Grandfather (John Dugan)). In the film's climax at dawn, a bloody and deranged-looking Sally escaped in the back of a pickup truck and left the killer spinning on the highway with his buzzing chainsaw.

The horror flick deeply divided critics - some praised it for its depiction of deprived, 'off-the-main-highway' rural America and the social effects upon its people. Others deplored it for its effective yet mindless slasher mentality. It was banned twice in France for potentially inciting violence, and for 25 years in the UK.