On Oct. 11, 1974, a 31-year-old film school dropout from Austin released a homegrown horror flick that he just hoped would get Hollywood’s attention. He got his wish. Shot in the blistering summer heat in and around Round Rock, Texas, using a borrowed 16mm camera, a cast of complete unknowns and a mask fashioned from what appeared to be human skin, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre would spin a bargain-basement budget of $140,000 into more than $30 million at the box office, making it — at least for a while — the most successful independent film of all time.
Today, 50 years after it first buzzed into theaters and burrowed its way into our collective nightmares, Hooper’s twisted little regional cheapie has been hailed by some as the greatest horror movie ever made. It has been passed down from one generation to the next thanks to a seemingly endless string of sequels, prequels and reboots. Meanwhile, a pristine copy of the film resides in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art alongside works by Monet, van Gogh and Picasso. How did we get here?
Although Hooper died from natural causes in 2017, I had the opportunity to speak with him a decade earlier. Through a deep and raspy baritone (helped along, no doubt, by a constant string of putrid cigars), Hooper told me that he had flirted with a number of different titles before landing on the instantly iconic Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Early contenders included Saturn in Retrograde, Head Cheese and Leatherface. As for what inspired the film, Hooper recalled a sick and serendipitous thought that popped into his head while shopping in the hardware section of a busy Montgomery Ward department store. He doesn’t know which part of his subconscious it came from, but he imagined grabbing a chain saw from the store’s shelves and using it to slice his way through the crowded aisles to speed up his exit. He added that he was also influenced by Ed Gein, a notorious serial killer suspected of murdering — and skinning — several people in Wisconsin in the 1950s.
Written by Hooper and Kim Henkel, Chain Saw tells the story of five teenagers taking a road trip in a van to visit one of their relatives. After passing by a slaughterhouse (a nice bit of “foreshadowing”), the kids pick up a demented hitchhiker who slices his hand open with a knife and proceeds to terrorize and attack the teens until they finally force him out of the car. Running low on gas, they stop off at what appears to be an abandoned house and begin snooping around. Needless to say, it isn’t abandoned at all. It’s actually home to a family of bloodthirsty cannibals. It doesn’t end well for the travelers.
While this bare-bones set-up sounds like a simple, Lone Star twist on Hansel and Gretel, Hooper’s film is anything but kids’ stuff. With its slow-build suspense, harrowing sound editing, and the indelible sight of a towering madman in a butcher’s apron, a mask of human flesh, and the buzzing power tool of the title, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre becomes a full-body workout of fear and dread. And the anxiety kicks in from the film’s very first scene, as we see the intermittent pops of a camera’s flash, revealing split-second glimpses of gruesome human remains, accompanied by the stentorian voice of a narrator explaining that what we are about to watch — or rather, be subjected to — is “one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history.” We know this is fiction, of course. But thanks to Hooper’s background in documentaries, it feels all too real (even if the narrator’s voice belongs to future Night Court star John Larroquette).
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s path to theaters and drive-ins in the fall of 1974 was hardly a smooth or straight one. The cast mostly included local unknowns — Paul A. Partain, Teri McMinn, Allen Danziger, William Vail and the original “final girl” Marilyn Burns — with 6-foot-4 Icelandic-American colossus Gunnar Hansen as Leatherface. All of them were forced to defer a significant chunk of their meager salaries until the production could land a distributor. That savior would come in the form of the Bryanston Distributing Co., the shadowy, number-fudging backers of the 1972 porn sensation Deep Throat who, unbeknownst to Hooper, were also mired in a heap of legal trouble and were reportedly connected to the mob.
Hooper and company would shoot the majority of the film near Round Rock. They decked out the house that they rented as their primary location with chicken bones, furniture that appeared to be made from skin and other human remains, and a sliding metal door that Leatherface slams shut in what is arguably the movie’s most unshakable moment. As for the movie’s gore, surprisingly, there wasn’t very much of it. Audiences at the time swore that Chain Saw was drenched in blood and viscera, but in fact, most of its carnage is implied. Which is why Hooper was certain that he’d be able to land a PG rating. Unfortunately, he was so good at the art of suggestion that the MPAA branded it with an X. Knowing that this scarlet letter would kill business, Hooper called the ratings board and naively asked how he could get a movie with a woman impaled on a meat hook a PG. Their reply was quick: “You can’t.” It was eventually released with an R.
When I asked Hooper why he chose to leave out the film’s nasty bits and take the more unexpected and primal route of insinuation, he replied, “Blood won’t scare people — that’s not what fear is about. That’s why in Chain Saw, the gore was left to the imagination.” At that point, Hooper paused and took a long drag from his cigar. Then he added, “Of course, it’s far worse there.” Nonetheless, Chain Saw would end up being banned in several countries, including the U.K.
In addition to riling the MPAA, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s lurid, controversial title would end up putting it directly into the crosshairs of the nation’s squeamish and easily offended critics. Not surprisingly, the earliest verdicts were marked by outrage bordering on bile. Still, there were exceptions from those who were willing to look past the movie’s exploitative poster and tagline (“Who Will Survive, and What Will Be Left of Them?”). Hooper’s hometown paper, The Austin American-Statesman, hailed Chain Saw as the most important horror film since George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. And Roger Ebert would praise the film’s technique and talent before writing that it was “as violent and gruesome and blood-soaked as the title promises.”
I was 5 when The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was released. And while I obviously didn’t see it at the time (my parents weren’t monsters!), it still managed to affect me deeply. In the late ’70s, Hooper’s movie had made its way from first-run theaters to the threadbare drive-ins of New England. On Sundays, we would pack into the family station wagon and drive to my grandmother’s house for dinner. The route took us past a rundown fleapit of a drive-in that was a hit with the area’s college students. As we drove past it one day, I saw three words on the half-broken marquee that didn’t make sense to me when put next to each other, but they certainly terrified me: “Texas Chain-Saw Massacre.” On the dark ride home, we passed the drive-in again and I gawked out the window, desperate for a taste of the taboo, and saw Marilyn Burns running through the woods pursued by a masked maniac waving a chain saw over his head. Those scars would run deep. I wouldn’t actually watch the film from beginning to end until nearly a decade later on a rented VHS tape in a pal’s basement rec room. It was the scariest thing I had ever seen — and would ever see.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre would play in theaters on and off for a decade. And over the years, an onslaught of sequels, prequels and reboots have kept it alive in our pop culture. Like the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises, it’s a movie series that is impossible to kill off. Somewhere along the way, this gruesome celluloid artifact was elevated from being the sick and disreputable product of a gutter genre to being a high-art masterpiece (Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick and Ridley Scott all owned 35mm prints of the film). It’s grown into an essential piece of horror-movie history whose late-in-life respectability helped pave the way for a film like The Silence of the Lambs to not only be invited to the Academy Awards but sweep all of its top categories in 1992.
And yet, Hooper’s career would never quite reach the mainstream heights that seemed all but inevitable. Yes, he would eventually graduate to helming a picture for a major studio with 1982’s Poltergeist. But his obituaries were single-minded about his achievements. Before he died, I asked Hooper if this limited view bothered him, and he laughed the question off. If anything, he seemed more disturbed by how people incorrectly assumed he was a sociopath. After all, who else could be responsible for a character like Leatherface?
“People expect me to be not at all what I am,” he said as he stubbed out the butt-end of his cigar. Then, in his low, sandpaper voice, he added: “Look, people still slow down on the freeway when there’s an accident. There’s still that dark fascination. But honestly, if I find a spider in my house, I won’t even kill it. I’ll bring it outside.”
This story appeared in the Oct. 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
English (US) ·