The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
- Oct 26, 2021
- 3 min read
The now late Tobe Hooper was a master of surreal images and always the unreality and horror underneath American life. He was Southern Gothic before it existed. He worked on commercials, educational films and counter culture documentaries before it existed. He was not politically correct, either then or now. Evil was evil and it had to be met and conquered.
He definitely had the visual eye a good director needs and has to have. He was tough, middle-class Southern tough. He was an educated man, the first man to go to college from his family, so he knew the movies and artwork and technical details of putting a movie together.
He made his share of flops, later in the 1980’s and 1990’s. His TV shows are not his best work. He had to stay employed but he hit out quite a few movies that work.
When he was younger, family relatives visiting from Wisconsin told him stories about the horrible, criminal career, then in the recent news, of Ed Gein. Gein was not a very remarkable man, definitely with issues from childhood, but Hooper made one of the horror classics from that historical story.
He was making commercial films and concert films and documentaries at that time. He visited a hardware store one night and the chainsaws fascinated him. Also, at that time, the horrible criminal career of Dean Corrl had just ended with his killing at the hands of a henchman in his native Texas. Hooper was following the news and decided to shoot an economical and popular horror story.
Together with Kim Henkel, he co-wrote in short time a horror tale about the evil, psychotic, Sawyer family and a group of pitiable young people who walk into the family’s house and estate one day. As they say, all hell breaks loose after they arrive at the house where they shouldn’t.
The house has since been knocked down by Texan authorities as a danger to stay in and live in, but you see it in the movie with it’s Southern Gothic look and painting to it. There are no brand name actors in it. He used actors he knew from around the Texan area. Also, only one actress really got a name or career after it in the real movie business, the late Marilyn Burns, who probably has the honor to be the first lady to run away from a monster/slasher in a commercial movie.
The movie carries on with the rich cinematography and the careful use of Texan light and eerie photography as well as a hallucinatory sense of evil in the movie where nothing is going to go well for anyone. As Hooper himself put it, “Everyone has a bad day in the movie.”
The family, as someone once put it in a recent article, are the end of one American Dream and the decline of the Old West into a place of psychotic, modern evil. The young people get hurt in this movie. The movie could be said to be against the idea of the nuclear family, 1970’s style, though Hooper had a moral conservatism in his movies. Jim Siedow became a cult actor because of his role as the horrible, older brother who runs this operation of “making meat”.
The makeup and camera work by Daniel Pearl and John Duggan are almost Hollywood quality. They should have had better work than they actually did but only Hooper and Burns went on to careers on their own, mostly. That’s the way the cookie crumbles in the business. In fact, Hooper got ripped off by the Mafia and their fake movie company, Bryanston, now shut down. Hooper and everyone had to go to the FBI to get their money back.
There was a sequel in the 1980’s, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2” (1987), a good cult movie but not up to the original. The recent sequels and remakes and prequels are not worth discussing. There is something to be said for the originality of the film - the Gothic atmosphere, the demented music and sound effects, and the sense that some sort of evil is going to pop up. Hooper gets this right even in his least movies. He seems to have a sense of a negative forever evil, somewhere, cosmically above his characters and settings, until a heroic and very American tough guy, usually blue collar or middle class comes up to challenge this evil.
John Carpenter is a little in-jokey and more comic than Hooper. Hooper is the more serious director. Like the recently deceased George Romero, he had a sense of some cosmic evil up above the American characters' heads that can be fought back against. Even Stephen King has this sense as well of the decent local man fighting the evil. Hooper’s films are always worth watching. This was a class act and his movies outlive him as the best have. He is directing movies in the heavens forever.
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