With the documentary-like filmmaking style also comes a frank and matter-of-fact depiction of horror. The score by Hooper and Wayne Bell is also unrelenting and tense, especially during the “dinner scene.” Matter of Fact Depiction of Macabre Depravity Kirk goes inside, swings open a foreboding looking metal door, and Leatherface appears to kill Kirk with a sledgehammer before slamming the metal door–the sound design of the entire scene is horrific. As Kirk keeps knocking on the door, all we hear are strange, pig-sounding noises emanating from the back part of the house. Take the scene where Kirk slowly but surely scopes out the Sawyer family home while Pam angrily sits in a nearby swing. The camera flickers briefly on a decaying piece of flesh and each edit sharply cuts to the next with the sound of the camera. As if that isn’t eerie enough, we are then treated to the sound of a forensic camera taking pictures of desecrated corpses recently dug up at a nearby graveyard.
#Cinema snob the texas chain saw massacre movie#
The movie opens with the most serious-sounding, Edgar Allan Poe-type narration that warns us that what we are about to see is true (well, somewhat, it was loosely based on Ed Gein). The movie also feels creepy in ways that are hard to quantify. The old house in the rural Texas landscape, a gas station displaying questionable-looking meat, the inside of the van, even out on the highway during the film’s legendary final scene–all of these set pieces are real and pure location filming. The movie is also tensely claustrophobic. Creepy, Claustrophobic Atmosphere, Score, and Sound Design This style also makes the horror scenes nearly unbearable once they get going. Hooper films the movie exactly like this, and we can literally feel the heat, discomfort, and everydayness of the locals the van of friends meet along the way towards one of their grandfather’s old properties in the middle of the woods. In the 1950s and 1960s, cinema verité was a filmmaking movement that sought to capture real, everyday footage without any narration or external exposition–a literal moment in time with no regard for the mundane or irrelevant spoiling a story the filmmaker was trying to tell. There is nothing glossy or overstated, gory or well-manicured like you will find in the 2003 remake just a camera capturing a humid van ride around the desolate mid-Texas landscape. We know its a horror movie, if for any other reason than its title, but the film stock and cinematography are gritty, crackling, ultra-cheap, and framed as if we are watching a documentary about traveling hippies. Tobe Hooper’s film may appear odd to those who first view it. What I saw that summer was the single greatest horror film in this history of the medium. And keep in mind there is very, very little blood and gore in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre no, what I had just experienced, and what scared me to a disturbing degree for weeks afterwards was achieved by using pure atmosphere and filmmaking mastery. The only consensus I could make with a 13-year old brain is that what I had just watched was practically a documentary that turned into a snuff film from summer 1973, that had illegally found its way onto the shelves of the horror section at the down-the-road Family Video. But there was something about this quick-running, murky (VHS didn’t help I am sure), and eternally gritty horror film it was almost like surviving a creepy trance that happened to be set in the 7th circle of hell. I say that because some of my friends later found it to be cheesy, but then again, they found Scream (1996) to be scary haha. Maybe it helped that I was a cinephile, even at the age 13, so I was bound to always invest fully in the narrative delivery of the film I was watching at any given time. When I first saw this film, as a kid home alone in a rural country house sometime in the summer of 1996, I have struggled for decades since trying to adequately describe the sheer state of cataclysmic terror this film left me in. With announcement of a revamped version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre hitting Netflix in 2022, and in hindsight of about a million and one sequels, remakes, reboots, et al., there exists the original, 1974 film that started it all.
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