Director: Tobe Hooper

Producer: Tobe Hooper

Screenplay: Kim Henkel, Tobe Hooper

Starring: Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow, Gunnar Hansen

MPAA: R

Forget the remake. In fact, forget all remakes. Yes, I’m going to come off as some film school snot, reviewing the quintessential film school snot movie, but I don’t care. Until someone delivers a horror movie of this caliber again, we snots will just have to keep on touting the cinematic merits of yore. (Yore? Sure, why not.)

Why do I love this movie? For starters, I was one of those kids. You know the type. The weirdos in your high school science class who wore black shirts sporting death metal bands, who couldn’t stop drawing pictures of gore, who went home every Friday night and popped in a horror flick just to watch the intestines flow. In short, the type of kid with absolutely no friends.

But whatever. In my lonely time I ran the veritable gamut of horror, from the popular (Halloween, Friday the 13th), to the obscure (Monkey Shines, Magic); even to the Italian-style artsy or just plain bizarre (Suspiria, Cannibal Holocaust).

By the time I’d finally gotten around to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre I thought I’d seen it all. Because I’d seen the classics. I’d seen the crap. I knew every cliche, every set-up, and exactly what to expect around every single corner… or so I thought.

Perhaps it was my own complacency that caught me with my pants down. Because despite the titles implications to the contrary, this isn’t a film that goes for the gut; It’s a film that messes with your mind. 

We enter in the standard way, five hippie college-kids on a road trip to… who cares? They never quite make it there, do they? No, but that doesn’t matter either. All you need to know is there’s a hitchhiker, who’s been out in the sun a little too long, who talks about slaughtering cows, talks about his grandpappy, takes pictures of you when you’re not looking, and at some point gouges a cut in his own hand with a straight razor before up and cutting the fat kid in the wheelchair too. 

Then things get weird.

The popular misconception about the film is that it’s nothing but a gore-fest, blood for the sake of blood, and this couldn’t be further from the truth. In actuality, there’s less blood in this than in some comedies. No, this is not to say people don’t die, and it’s certainly not to say they don’t die gruesomely. We just don’t see it. Director Tobe Hooper, in a true stroke of genius, aims more for the use of implied gore over the tired and unimaginative buckets of blood. The result? Not a wimp-out. Actually, through this technique the audience is forced to really imagine what that chainsaw or hammer are doing, every step of the way. They have to create their own mental pictures… 

And it works, perhaps too well. How do I know this? Because it’s not just the people who read the title that mistake it for a gruesomely bloody movie… The ones who’ve seen it think so, too.

This in it of itself might be the film’s true claim to fame, the ability to grab the viewer and show without showing, to the point that one’s own memory recalls the details as being so much worse than they really are, but the mind game doesn’t stop there. It can’t. After all, this is Texas.

This is Texas, and these good ole boys are far from done f***ing with you.

Enter Leatherface. He’s mentally retarded, and talks like a pig. Enter Daddy, who happens to sell human meat. Enter Grandpa, who should be dead, who actually looks dead, but refuses to stop killing. Enter roadkill. Enter furniture made of human flesh. Enter cross-dressing. 

Now sit all this down for a nice family meal, where the guest of honor is a poor blond hippie girl strapped to a chair, and can’t stop screaming. 

What really sets the movie apart for me is its resolution, or rather lack of one. Because even though the heroine just narrowly escapes, you get the feeling her life from this point forward won’t mean so much. She’ll never quite come back. You might not either. Because there is no closure. There is no happy ending… but there’s also no cliched “the killer’s not really dead” surprise. 

There’s just a lone man with his chainsaw, swinging it around. But he’s not mad, and this isn’t some kind of fit. 

I actually think he’s dancing.

The screen cuts to black.

Orgasm.