This Week In Retro: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

October 1974: Who will survive and what will be left of them?

by Diamond Feit

As a father and former English teacher, I've had to answer a lot of grammatical questions over the years from children—and a fair number of adults—who expected me to offer definitive answers. I always do my best to placate their many inquiries but the older I get, the more I realize the impossibility of serving as any kind of authority when it comes to language. With millions of English speakers messaging one another at all hours of the day, who am I to tell someone that a single correct method of communication exists?

Once you throw pop culture into the mix, things become even more muddled. The word inception carries very little ambiguity in its standard definition: "The establishment or starting point of an institution or activity," according to Google Docs. Yet ever since an eponymous motion picture opened in the summer of 2010, lots of people use that word as shorthand for "layers inside of layers."

This goes beyond simple grammar, of course, as a work of fiction can permanently impact how we view certain people, animals, or objects. Decades of warped Western fiction have convinced Americans that geisha are just kimono-clad call girls. The novel and blockbuster film adaptation of Jaws transformed sharks into a terrifying aquatic threat, even though they rarely attack humans and never do so intentionally.

One year prior to Spielberg's horror classic, a much smaller yet no less impactful picture premiered in Austin in October of 1974. The opening narration implies the events of the film actually took place, but director Tobe Hooper and co-writer Kim Henkel penned an original tale—one only loosely inspired by real-life fiends such as Ed Gein. More significantly, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre permanently reframed the titular tool as the ultimate murder weapon.

The morbid tale begins with ghastly closeups of a decayed corpse, exhumed as part of a recent graverobbing spree according to the police. News of the crime lures Sally and Franklin Hardesty to town; the youngsters arrive with three friends to investigate if their grandfather's remains might be amongst those disturbed. An encounter with a manic hitchhiker leaves them shaken up as he enthusiastically recounts anecdotes from the local slaughterhouse and slashes his own palm with a knife.

After striking out at a local gas station run dry, the five swing by the former Hardesty homestead for a trip down memory lane. Franklin boasts of a nearby swimming hole that splits the group in two; the hopeful skinny-dippers get distracted when they hear a gas-powered generator running on a nearby property. The young couple gambles that the strangers might spare some fuel but no one answers at the door. They let themselves in and discover the residents don't take kindly to trespassers.

When Sally's boyfriend Jerry also heads off to the mystery house and doesn't return, she and Franklin grow tired of waiting back at the van. The two reluctantly retrace their friends' footsteps when a masked giant armed with a chainsaw carves up Franklin. Sally flees but finds no allies as the masked man, the gas station owner, and the hitchhiker are all in cahoots, even calling themselves a "family." They take her into their home for a macabre dinner party where Sally doubles as guest and likely main course.

If you've never seen The Texas Chain Saw Massacre I won't give away the finale, but I hope my summary thus far conveys just how little it resembles the slasher movies that would dominate horror cinema in the 80s. In fact, it doesn't even resemble its own title, with only one person falling victim to the now-infamous logger's appliance. For me, the scariest kill of the film actually involves a sledge hammer, but I guess The Texas Sledge Hammer Massacre just doesn't carry enough menace.

Despite its reputation as "gruesome and blood-soaked," as Roger Ebert once wrote, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre takes its time setting the mood and letting us relax with the five youths on their road trip. The first half takes place entirely during daylight hours and you can really feel the Texas heat as the sweat-soaked actors deliver their lines. The opening, the hitchhiker, ominous radio broadcasts, and the dilapidated state of the homes we see on-screen all cooperate in communicating to viewers that something is very wrong here, even if no immediate danger presents itself.

It took me years to find the courage to watch famously violent flicks like Friday the 13th and Halloween, but I continued to put off viewing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, afraid that I couldn't bear to sit through scene after graphic scene of chains tearing through flesh. Yet Tobe Hooper deliberately refrained from such displays; when poor Franklin gets buzzed, viewers only see his killer and spurts of blood. As sound designer Wayne Bell explained in a 2018 interview, "All you needed was one or two moments of scare and the rest you could just imply, often through sound."

Speaking of sound, the film's atonal score by Hooper and Bell also helps to maintain the tension as it mostly consists of odd noises and percussion. Bell later described their work as "playing that line between music and sound. We would create ideas with sound and only in the editing process did it come together as what you hear in the film." It helps that a chainsaw itself makes so much noise, adding its own grinding and sputtering to the already droning soundscape.

While hardly the first ever instance of a chainsaw threatening a human being in fiction, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre absolutely codified the machine as a nasty instrument of torture and death. Theatrical revivals and imitators bolstered the film's status as a cult hit, and once the slasher genre proliferated during the VHS era, a 1986 sequel kicked off a franchise focused on the masked maniac Leatherface.

A 1983 game for the Atari 2600 based on the movie let players take control of Leatherface; the simplistic graphics render him as a man with one head, two legs, no arms, and a rather phallic chainsaw jutting out from his torso. Players race against a rapidly depleting fuel gauge to kill as many people as possible before the gas tank empties and the game ends. 40 years later, a more faithful game adaptation pits survivors against the killer family in an asymmetrical showdown.

Beyond these two official examples, the video game world welcomed chainsaws into the fold as deadly weapons decades ago. The original DOOM gives players a chainsaw to slaughter demons up close and personal. Fighting games like Time Killers and Darkstalkers include chainsaw-wielding characters. As the Resident Evil series pivoted from straight horror to more action-adventure, chainsaw enemies have represented high-priority threats for nearly 20 years now.

With The Texas Chain Saw Massacre now a half-century in the past, it remains both a horror staple and a horror outlier as its influences can be felt far and wide yet the original film defies expectations. It's light on gore, it takes its time, and Leatherface acts nothing like later slasher icons—even though "masked man with a chainsaw" has become the default stereotype for a psycho killer.

Indeed, a scan of mass market depictions of madmen shows a curious confusion, combining Jason's hockey mask—or his burlap sack—with Leatherface's contraption of choice. Mr. Vorhees may have the more iconic look, but thanks to Tobe Hooper chainsaws have far more cultural cache than the humble machete.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.