The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

I wrote this essay ten years ago on my favorite horror film of all time. It being Halloween and all, I thought I'd share. To preserve posterity, I didn't make any edits, even though it pained me not to do so.

The Bloodless Birth of the Slasher Genre

“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is a vile piece of sick crap...It is a film with literally nothing to recommend it: nothing but a hysterically paced slapdash , imbecilic concoctions of cannibalism, voodoo, astrology, sundry hippie-esque cults, and unrelenting sadistic violence as extreme and hideous as a complete lack of imagination can possibly make it.

-Stephen Koch (Harper's, November 1976)

Reviews like the one above clearly missed out on the brilliant piece of cinema Tobe Hooper achieved with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The film represents the birth of slasher genre, which has found a recent resurgence in films like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, but ironically, did so with very little bloodshed; a fact that many reviews seemed to overlook. The slasher film, as a horror subgenre, essentially requires a killer who stalks and murders seemingly innocent people (generally teenagers) for motives that are never revealed. The genre is especially effective because audiences never get a sense of the warped impetus of the killer. Although The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the first real ‘slasher’ film, it had no progeny. Its sequels were lackluster and its ideas were used to a more lucrative effect by other people, such as John Carpenter’s Halloween (Bloom 3), but in terms of genre, these two films share a great many similarities.

The killers in both films are hulking figures who wear distinctive masks to hide their faces. The masks resemble twisted versions of normal human faces. In Halloween, Michael Myers has a bleached white mask with hollow, gaping eye sockets and wild hair, which reveals virtually none of his face. Carpenter is able to achieve an eerie moment in the film by simply allowing the bright mask to slowly come into focus in the dark background behind Myers’ primary stalking victim, Laurie Strode. The opening of the movie itself gives viewers a lengthy point-of-view shot from inside the mask, which serves to put us into the role of the murderer, or perhaps to make a philosophical statement about the potential murderer inside of us, and the metaphorical wearing of masks in order to hide one’s true nature. Masks also bring in notions of concealment and revelation, and a sense of an internal, concealed world that will erupt violently (Paul 390).

Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, wears three different masks; all of which are made of human skin. Unlike Myers, Leatherface adopts different attributes and mannerisms depending on the mask he is wearing. The first mask we see him in, when he appears suddenly in a doorway and smashes Kirk’s head with a hammer, is stitched together pieces of human skin which gives him an almost Frankenstein appearance. While wearing this mask of human patchwork, he commits all but the final of his murders. The second is what Hooper called “the grama mask” (2003) and Leatherface wears this grey haired mask while making dinner for his family, allowing him an air of domesticity. The final mask is made from the face of his second victim, Pam, which makes the reaction from her friend Sally at the dinner table all the more horrific. In an interview with Joe Bob Briggs, Hooper said that the inspiration for the mask came from a doctor he knew, who told him that when he was a premed student he went into the morgue and skinned a cadaver to make a mask for Halloween, and he wanted Leatherface to have a different human-skin mask to fit each of his moods (Bloom 10).

Myers does briefly appear without his mask, when a victim tears it from his face in desperation, and in this moment of revelation, he appears to be mentally handicapped. This can be juxtaposed with the fact that Dr. Loomis repeatedly tells the other characters in Halloween about Myers’ mental instability. Leatherface never appears without a mask, but in an introspective moment, the audience does get a close look into his eyes, and a glimpse of his gnarled teeth, and we are led to believe that he may be mentally challenged as well. Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface in the film, said in a recent DVD commentary “the power of the character came from not revealing his, exposing his, nature by revealing his identity” (2003).

Hansen also said that he had done character research at a school for the mentally challenged, and that many of his gestures and movements mimicked the students he had observed. The fact that neither characters speaks during the course of the film also supports the notion of their mental disabilities (although Leatherface’s pig-like squealing may belie some type of intelligence). The torture and murder of animals is a common characteristic of serial killers, and the killers in both films fit that profile, which gives us even more clues about their mental faculties. Not to mention the rather obvious fact that Michael Myers had spent most of his life in a mental institution, only to escape on All Hallows Eve.

The films are more than a warning against the possible danger from the mentally ill. Part of the reason they are so frightening is that they show the atrocities that real human beings are capable of. Supernatural horror films do not inspire the same kind of fear as the ritual disembowelment in Bloodfeast or the gory mutilations inflicted by the “eponymous instrument” of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Prawer 108). The realism inherent in the films is what gives them such a lasting impact on audiences. They will go home and think, “That could really happen.”

Tobe Hooper admits that the inspiration for much of the characterization of Leatherface came from real-life serial killer Ed Gein. The narration by John Larroquette that provides the opening of the film reinforces the idea that it is a true story. It was based on a real person, and shot to further that sense of realism. Many people believed, and still believe, that the movie is entirely true, in part because of its effective cinema verité documentary style. Forry Ackerman, writer and film historian who has watched every nearly every horror film made since 1922, said even his jaded eyes believed the actors were real people (Bloom 4). In a 1988 documentary, Ackerman said “It's a watershed work. It brought a new dimension of reality to horror films.”

Horror films present humans as fallible beings who can easily fall prey to uncontrollable evil impulses (Wright 44). The notion that the average person is capable of giving into these impulses is another way in which the film is frightening. Michael Myers and Leatherface may have begun life normal enough, but there is no reason or justification for the murderous turn they took. Judith Wright says “monsters are the embodiment of human evil” and that “they are three dimensional representations of our uncontrollable will to evil” (45) and while traditional monsters in horror films may have been ghastly creatures unlike anything that has ever (or will ever) walk the Earth, Myers and Leatherface are very much human. They may be characters in films, but they could also be your neighbor or your postman.

Psycho transformed the genre’s formula and instigated the idea of the progressive/subversive character, which we see in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Klinger 80). These “subversive” characters are different from classic interpretations of monsters because they do not involve any other worldly or supernatural elements. Previously, horror films dealt with adult characters either dealing with the terrors of modern science, or faithful commoners facing demonic and supernatural predators, but The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the first horror film in which idealistic suburban teens, distrustful of anyone over thirty, are “terrorized by the deformed adult world that dwells on the grungy side of the railroad tracks” (Bloom 18). This concept of unexamined and mysterious sectors of the world is another typical facet of the horror genre, and it plays off audiences’ fear of the unknown. Those who enter the house never return, but the rest of the group is both curious and terrified to find out what is behind those closed doors.

The Birds set this pattern for other horror films, from Night of the Living Dead to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in which people move out into the world of nature where things go progressively crazy, while the primary narrative drive of the film comes in the form of an ever-increasing escalation (Paul 417). A road trip begins normally but as the group gets farther away from civilization, things begin a downward spiral. As an audience, we begin the film in the van with the group, but slowly we are pushed to the outside of their community, and we can only watch in horror the tragic events that befall them. There are a number of long tracking shots that simply follow the movement of the characters across the screen, giving a voyeuristic point-of-view also employed by Carpenter in Halloween.

There is a shot in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre which begins underneath a swing made from railroad ties, and pans up to track behind Pam as she gets up from the swing and walks across the lawn and into the house to investigate Kirk’s disappearance. Hooper focuses the camera on her bare back (presumably to heighten the horrific audience reaction in the following scene where Leatherface hangs her from a meat hook in the kitchen) and it is one of the most fluid and beautiful shots in the film. There is a similar scene in Halloween when the camera follows Laurie, Annie and Lynda home from school, giving the impression of something sinister watching the girls from just beyond their line of sight.

Low budgets was another aspect that the two films had in common, and many of the choices made by the directors out of sheer budgetary concerns wound up adding pivotal touches to the final product. Carpenter had assistants buy the cheapest mask they could find to use for Michael Myers, and the bleached William Shatner mask they were forced to use has become iconic. Hooper anticipated The Blair Witch Project by 26 years, and he did it without the advantage of cheap video (Bloom 4). The 35mm film generally used at the time was too expensive, so he shot on 16mm, but the grainy and over-sped exposure adds to the documentary feel of the picture.

There was only one wardrobe for Leatherface and after three weeks shooting in the blistering West Texas sun, Hansen said that he was getting more disgusted and horrified reactions from his co-stars on screen simply because of how badly he smelled (2003). Wardrobe cutbacks also meant that Sally only had one shirt, and when Marilyn Burns was chased through the woods by Leatherface, the shirt ripped and the cuts on her arms and legs causes by the sharp branches added to the look of realism, because they were real.

When it comes to bloodied and injured victims in films, the slasher genre has become synonymous with gore. Wes Craven claimed that over fifty gallons of blood was used in Scream, and it is ironic that so little blood is present in the two films that pioneered the genre. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre does show some blood, but for a film about a family of cannibals, one of whom butchers their victims with a chainsaw, the violence is very subdued. Franklin and the truck driver are the only characters who are even killed by the chainsaw, as the other male victims are beaten with a hammer while Pam is impaled on a meat hook. Critics often talk about the excessive gore in the film, saying shortsighted things like “the film provides shock through the maximum exhibition of flesh in the process of being mangled and blood in the process of being spilled” (Prawer 14), but despite its title, it relies more on tone and subject matter to frighten its audience than it does on splattered shock value. Halloween has no blood on screen whatsoever.

In conventional horror films the monster is vanquished at the end, and the survivors will presumably be able to get on with their lives. However, in keeping with the humanity of the killers in both films, and the realism inherent in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, both Michael Myers and Leatherface are left alive at the close of the film. Leatherface suffers a debilitating mauling by his own saw, and Michael is stabbed with his own knife and shot repeatedly, yet when all the smoke clears, both are left alive. This adds to the reality that loose ends cannot always be neatly tied up and that true justice is not always served. It also heightens the fear on the part of the audience because they know that the killer is still at large, and in the case of Leatherface, perhaps still waiting for unsuspecting teenagers to wander into his killing fields.

                   

Works Cited

Altman, Robert. “How Are Genres Used?” Film/Genre. British Film Institute. 1999: 100-22

Bloom, John. “They Came, They Sawed.” Texas Monthly 32.11 (Nov 2004): 1-44.

Buscombe, Edward. “The Idea of Genre in American Cinema.” Grant 12-26.

Grant, Barry ed. Film Genre Reader III. U of Texas P. 2003

Halloween. Dir. John Carpenter. Perf. Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleaseance. Falcon Films, 1978. Videocassette. Anchor Bay Entertainment, 1997.

Kawin, Bruce. “Children of the Light.” Grant 324-45.

Klinger, Barbara. “‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’ Revisited: The Progressive Genre.” Grant 75-91.

Paul, William. Laughing, Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy. New York : Columbia University Press, 1994.

Prawer, Siegbert. Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror. New York : Oxford University Press, 1980

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: A Family Portrait. Dir. Brad Shellady. 1988.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Dir. Tobe Hooper. Perf. Marilyn Burns, Edwin Neal, Paul A. Partain and Gunnar Hansen. Vortex, 1974. DVD. Geneon Entertainment, 2003.

Wright, Judith. “Genre Films and the Status Quo.” Grant 42-50.