It may be apocryphal, but apparently when he attended a cinema club screening of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, then director of the BBFC James Ferman said something along the lines of “It’s all right for you middle-class cineastes to see this film, but what would happen if a factory worker in Manchester happened to see it?” This snobbery, and Ferman’s insistence that it wasn’t any one image that kept him from granting the film an X (later 18) certificate but ‘an atmosphere of madness, threat and impeding violence’ kept The Texas Chain Saw Massacre from the eyes of the great unwashed until Ferman’s retirement in 1999.
Since then, Tobe Hooper’s magnum opus (which is not, as many have misattributed it, his feature debut) has had more releases in the UK than I can count. This latest one, the first UK release on 4K disc is the fourth format I’ve owned the film on, but The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is worth it. As it fast approaches its 50th birthday, it remains every bit as primal and terrorising as it ever was.
You know the story by now, but in case this is the first thing you’ve ever read about this film, it finds a group of teens, notably Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) and her wheelchair bound brother Franklin (Paul Partain) driving through Texas to the farm owned by their late grandparents. On the way they pick up a hitchhiker (Edwin Neal) who spooks them. Later, they run out of gas and, looking for help, stumble on Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen); a manchild who butchers people, often with a chainsaw, and wears a mask made from a flayed human face and his cannibalistic family, living on a neighbouring farm.
James Ferman hit on something essential about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in observing that the ‘problem’ with it couldn’t be cut around: it’s a deceptive film. From the beginning, as camera flashbulbs illuminate rotting corpses and skeletal remains, the horror inherent in the images makes you believe that you’re seeing them for longer and more explicitly than you actually are. This carries over into the rest of the film, which spills only a few actual drops of blood on screen (real blood in one moment, because the prop knife that was going to be used for the effect of cutting Marilyn Burns’ finger wasn’t working, so they just cut her) but some viewers would swear to you that they had seen the most brutal and graphic violence.
For me though, the key way that the film is deceptive is in how its various elements take up space in my mind between viewings. The horrific ‘dinner’ sequence, with Sally tied to the chair as Leatherface and family torment her and attempt to get their cadaverous grandfather (John Dugan, who was only 20 when the film was made, and reprised the role in the execrable Texas Chainsaw 3D, 40 years later) to bash her head in with a hammer. The shoot for the sequence was by all accounts a hothouse nightmare, lasting more than 24 hours, and every bit of that claustrophobic heat baked insanity makes it on to the screen. That sequence comes in the last 15 minutes of the film, and probably lasts less than 10, but in my mind it takes up the entire back half of the movie, so pervasive and defining is it within the film.
Much of the screen time, in fact, is spent with Sally, Franklin and their friends, as they travel and encounter mounting craziness. The characters are, to be honest, mostly lightly sketched. Franklin might be the most developed, and Paul Partain’s performance is definitely divisive. The wheelchair bound Franklin whines his way through much of the film, and he can get grating, but having him there does create an undertone to the whole film, because we can see the rough ground beneath the character’s feet, and know that it’s not going to be particularly easy for him to navigate. As soon as we know the kids are in danger, we’re primed to be terrified for Franklin.
It’s hard to say that Marilyn Burns’ Sally is an especially nuanced character. What I think she is most of all is us. This isn’t a latter day horror heroine, getting tooled up to fight the monster, rather, she reacts much the way I suspect most of us would to her situation: by screaming, running, and becoming more than a little unhinged. Burns never seems to be acting, whether it’s in the back and forth between her and the other teens, and especially the prickly interactions with her brother, Franklin or the sheer terror of the last reel. Her laugh as she’s finally driven away from Leatherface speaks not of victory but of a trauma that now seems embedded. It’s the direct inverse of a moment like Samara Weaving emerging from the house at the end of Ready or Not: she’s escaped, but I don’t know that we get the sense that she’ll ever recover.
It’s not exactly a slow burn, because the whole film is just 83 minutes, but Hooper takes his time in getting to the—ahem—meat of the movie. The hitch-hiker sets the nerves jangling early on, but it’s about 35 minutes in, as Kirk (William Vail) and his girlfriend Pam (Teri McMinn) approach the house that a sense of dread really sets in, even as the afternoon sun beats down on them. What follows is one of the greatest shock sequences in all of cinema. Leatherface comes round the corner, bashes Kirk in the head with a mallet, drags his twitching form through the opening and slams a sliding metal door shut. This takes a few seconds, and it completely resets the film.
Up until then, brutality has been implied, but between this and the immediately following sequence of Pam being hung on a meathook (thanks to McMinn’s spectacular performance, one of the most palpably painful moments I can think of in any film) we see what shocking violence is going to be meted out to the cast, the opening crawl having already told us their fates. It’s this moment that most epitomises the gap between the film’s violence and its gore. People will swear to you that we see the meathook going into Pam’s back, that there is a lot of blood, and that’s all in how Hooper shoots it, how editorJ. Larry Carroll assembles it, and the agony of McMinn’s performance. There are several more of these turns in the film, from Leatherface’s shock attack on Franklin, to the reappearance of Jim Seidow as the Cook, when we and Sally realise in the same instant that the person she’s gone to for help is with the people she’s running from, which kicks off the delirium of the last 20 minutes.
I could go through almost the entire film and itemise the moments of Hooper’s genius, but more than anything The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is the sum of its parts. The sequels and remakes, which range from great (Hooper’s own belated and wildly different Part 2) to total garbage (Co-writer Kim Henkel’s The Next Generation, and 2013 remake/sequel Texas Chainsaw 3D) could never, even at their best, recapture what makes this film special: it’s a confluence of timing, resources and inspiration that simply can’t be repeated, and that’s probably why it remains so powerful: it feels like it captured something real, like it tapped a deep seated vein of terror. Confronting it each time you watch the film is still uncomfortable, but for horror fans that feeling is all too rare and special.
★★★★★
The Disc: Image and Sound
The 4K image is nothing short of astounding. Apparently it has been through further restoration since the (exceptional) 4K version that played the London Film Festival a few years back. It wouldn’t be accurate to invoke the cliché that ‘this looks like it could have been shot yesterday’, but that’s only because today’s technology seldom produces anything with this level of texture. Every fragment of detail from the 16mm image shines through (look at the little things, like the individual grass seeds that you can sometimes see as the characters walk through the long grass), but care has been taken to retain the grain structure, without allowing it to swarm the frame. It’s essentially a perfect balance and it’s impossible to imagine it looking better with current technology.
With my basic sound setup, dialogue and effects, from that hauntingly familiar flashbulb at the beginning of the film to the roar of the chainsaw as Leatherface wheels it around his head at the end, are crisp and well balanced. The original Mono mix is present, fully restored, for those originalists who want it, and I’m sure the Dolby Atmos track will shake both your nerves and your speakers.
The Disc: Packaging and Book
The first thing to discuss here is the limited edition packaging. The hard outside case has artwork based closely on the classic Pre-Cert VHS cover. Inside, a digipak holding the 4K disc and 2 Blu Rays has new artwork by Adam Stothard (who provides all the original art for the release) across all three panels showing the film’s climactic moments, as Sally runs from a chainsaw wielding Leatherface. Also included are six postcards with drawings of the main family members, Sally and the iconic close up of Sally’s eye. Three more postcards, with other well known images from the film, were included with pre-orders direct from Second Sight. The near 200 page hardback book contains 15 new pieces of writing on the film, analysing it from all sorts of angles from the delirium of heat to the consumption of meat. It’s a fascinating collection; dense but readable, and sure to give you many new angles from which to watch and consider the film.
The Disc: Extras
If you’ve ever wanted to do a deep dive on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Second Sight provide exhaustive means for you to do so here. First among the on disc extras is a selection of five commentary tracks. New for this release is a track with film writers and podcasters Amanda Reyes and Bill Ackerman, recorded in the house where Leatherface and family live in the film. They get into the behind the scenes aspects, pulling out some information that I hadn’t heard before, as well as discussing the cast and crew and discussing some more academic ideas around the film’s themes. It’s a well balanced track that should satisfy people who just love the film, as well as those who want to dig deeper into it. The other tracks are all archival, from various releases over the years. Tobe Hooper provides a solo track, as well as one with DP Daniel Pearl and man behind the Leatherface mask, Gunnar Hansen. Much of the rest of the cast (Marilyn Burns, Partain and Allen Danzinger) joins forces with production designer Robert Z. Burns for their track, and Daniel Pearl appears for second commentary with editor J. Larry Carroll and sound recordist Ted Nicolaou (later the director of Terror Vision and the Subspecies films, among many others). All of the archival tracks are worth hearing, but don’t be surprised if stories recur in the other extras
The most substantial of the new extras, commentary aside, is the 82 minute The Legacy of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. What it amounts to is a sort of long, collective, critical appreciation from a selection of filmmakers, including people like Marcus Nispel, Adam Marcus, Fede Alvarez, and Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, who have contributed to making later Chainsaw films. It’s probably a little long for what it is, but it’s interesting to hear who particularly subscribes to certain ideas about the film (I don’t know that there’s a theory I hadn’t heard proposed before) and the section on the film’s non-traditional score is especially interesting.
Also included is the 75 minute making of documentary, Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Shocking Truth, from 2000. The age of the interviews, and the additional seven and a half minutes of outtakes, is very apparent, as both picture and sound are pretty rough, but it’s an interesting overview of the making of the film, though it’s disappointing to hear of some bitterness around the business end of the production. It only touches very briefly on the sequels, and I do think there’s room, at some point, for a Never Sleep Again style film to cover the whole franchise in detail.
Flesh Wounds: Seven Stories of the Saw runs 71 minutes and is essentially another collection of interviews. It’s a real mishmash, and I get the sense it’s compiled from unrelated pieces that were found from different sources, but it’s a fun set of vignettes that touch on a lot of different aspects around the film from interviews with hitchhiker actor Ed Neal (weird and very funny) and DP Daniel Pearl (serious, but entertaining on how he ended up shooting the 2003 remake), to pieces on the plastic surgeon who did Grandpa’s make up and the convention circuit. More effective than a weird In Memoriam piece in the middle is an interview with the late Gunnar Hansen, who comes across as warm and funny, if not particularly impressed with the film business, while discussing his life after the film. I wonder if these might have been more effective as separate pieces, but they’re all interesting in their own right.
Alongside these feature length pieces are several new video extras. Behind the Mask is a brief but interesting video essay on the role of masks in horror cinema in general, as well as with reference to Leatherface specifically. Cutting Chainsaw is an 11 minute interview with editor J. Larry Carroll. Grandpaw’s Tales talks to John Dugan, who was buried under all the prosthetics to play the grandfather, for 16 minutes. There are some particularly interesting things I hadn’t heard before in Dugan’s interview, including that he got the job largely because Kim Henkel was his brother in law and that, at least for him, Henkel was more hands on in directing performance, while Hooper handled camera and lighting. The real coup among the newer interviews is the fact that Teri McMinn, who for years didn’t talk about the film, sits down for 17 minutes on her role as Pam. She’s clearly come round to appreciating the film (after some initial reticence over the famous swing shot) and is one of the most engaging interviewees. Finally, production manager Ron Bozman sits down for 16 minutes on the business end of the film.
From deeper in the archives there is an 8 minute house tour with Gunnar Hansen. This is from 1993 camcorder footage, and is even rougher quality than the similar sequence in The Shocking Truth, but it’s interesting through this, the doc, and the sequence in Flesh Wounds, to see the house across almost 30 years. Though not labelled as such, interviews with Tobe Hooper (14 minutes) and Kim Henkel (9 minutes) are clearly taken from the same session as the footage in The Shocking Truth.
If you really want to appreciate the quality of the 4K restoration and transfer, take a look at the 25 minutes of deleted scenes and outtakes. They appear to be drawn from a VHS (they’re in 4:3 and pretty murky) most of these sequences are silent, none, I would argue, essential. Finally among the video extras are the standard collection of advertising spots and a gallery with a mix of stills and behind the scenes imagery, most of them familiar from the documentaries and interviews on the disc.
All told, it seems that Second Sight wanted to ensure that this was the definitive edition of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre by sweeping up every possible extra they could include. I can’t fault them there, but watching a lot of the material in one sitting, you do hear the same stories several times. This perhaps a collection to dip into and savour, rather than binge on, but it all has value.
Summary
The film is a pure masterpiece; perhaps the most finely tuned dread machine in cinema history. The disc, from transfer to packaging to extras, is exceptionally well and lovingly crafted, and almost inarguably definitive. If you have even a passing interest in horror film, this is an essential release.
★★★★★
