It’s a smart move from director Hooper and co-writer Kim Henkel, because this is already unlike anything that horror movie audiences would have seen before. If this is the set up, what the hell is coming next? When he slices his own hand open with a knife, starts a fire in the van and cuts Franklin with a razor, the audience is already reeling. He’s an odd sort, to say the least – a grotesque birthmark on half his face and a personality that hovers between harmlessly sub-normal and dangerously psychotic. En route, they pass the local slaughterhouses and pick up a hitchhiker (Edwin Neal). The kids are investigating whether Sally’s grandfather has been dug up in the grave robbing atrocities and checking out the old family farmhouse, now entirely dilapidated. The film is letting us know that the events that are about to unfold are not even that unusual in 1974 America. Even as we meet the characters – Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns), her wheelchair-bound and whiney annoying brother Franklin (Paul Partain), boyfriend Jerry (Allen Danziger) and friends Kirk (William Vail) and Pam (Terri McMinn) – we hear a radio news report that is nothing but a series of atrocities – death, murder, mutilation and assault. The film continues to set us up to expect the worst. This is the most jaw-droppingly powerful opening in film history. The text scroll and voice over, calmly telling us that bad things are going to happen to everyone in the movie and implying that this is a true story (without ever saying so) give way to camera flashes of decayed body parts and that noise – a discordant, startling sound that is somewhere between an animal squeal and scraping metal.Ĭut to wired up, rotting corpses that remain the most grotesque ever seen on film and a radio report about “grave robbing in Texas” before we then go to the opening titles or solar flares and Wayne Bell’s industrial score (the most vital, unsettling and entirely essential score in cinema history, Bell’s music is nearer sound effect than a traditional score, and is a massively important part of what makes the film work – replacing it would be a crippling act of cultural vandalism). The opening moments of the film are a textbook exercise in setting the audience on edge. No other movie – not even Tobe Hooper’s own out-of-control sequel – comes close to matching the sheer levels of hysteria and madness shown here, and no film so perfectly manipulates the audience from the opening moments, bringing them to such a state of expectation that when the horror actually kicks in, it’s almost a relief. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre takes the reinvented modern-day realism that the genre moved towards in the 1970s and grafts it onto a new form of delirious gothic grandeur, and it is relentlessly, insanely horrifying – and absurdly funny. It’s a film that essentially reinvented the genre, putting into place elements that have long since become clichés (and yet still work with powerful effect here) and offering a structural style that the best of the genre have tried to copy but never quite matched. I could argue that it is the best film of any genre if I felt so inclined. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is the best horror film ever made. If for any reason, you don’t own this film or haven’t seen it, you need to rectify that immediately.
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