Let me start off by saying, I’m not a really big fan of the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. By the time I saw it, I was in my teens and so much had been discussed of movie for over 20 years that I was expecting something bigger. Instead it was really just another another 1970s exploitation movie.
It happens. You watch movies like In the Heat of the Night and The Sting but are disappointed. They’re good movies. But the way people have raved about them and hoisted them up on a pedestal, you’re expecting something grander. You take out the racial relations and Heat of the Night is nothing more than a police procedural. Would The Sting even be popular if it didn’t star Paul Newman, Robert Redford and Robert Shaw? And that way they got Shaw’s Lonnegan on the scam was much ado about nothing. I’m almost certain Steven Soderbergh used it as the antithesis for the final act of Ocean’s Eleven.
But sometimes it’s the mere fact that the first to do it leaves an impression even if others do it better. In an odd twist, Bob Clark’s seminal Black Christmas would be released in Canada on this same date, Oct. 11, in 1974, but wouldn’t see an American release until Dec. 20 of that year. So Tobe Hooper’s classic pretty much set the ball rolling for the slasher subgenre sooner. The movie had its premiere on Oct. 1, 1974 in Austin.
The plot is very simple yet so many have analyzed it. Five people in their late teens or early 20s are on a road trip to rural Texas in the fictional county of Muerto County. News reports had indicated a cemetery in the area was desecrated with several decomposing bodies set up on a public display. Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) and her brother, Franklin (Paul A. Partain), who’s a paraplegic in a wheelchair, travel to the cemetery to make sure their grandfather’s grave isn’t disturbed.
With them are Jerry (Allen Danzinger), presumed to be Sally’s boyfriend, driving a van and their friends, Kirk (William Vail) and Pam (Teri McMinn). They’re on their way to also stop by an abandoned house where the Hardesty grandfather lived. It’s never explained where they’re coming from but it’s believed to be a more metropolitan area as they are a little sketchy of the locals. It’s possibly outside of the Austin area.
However, they do pick up a hitchhiker (Edwin Neal) who seems a little off but his family used to work at the nearby slaughterhouse where previously Franklin discussed his own family’s involvement with the slaughterhouse, mainly with how they would kill the cows. Things go from bad to worse as the hitchhiker borrows Franklin’s pocket knife to cut his own hand and takes a Polaroid of Franklin asking for $2.
Surprised at his behavior, they refuse to pay him. The hitchhiker snaps, burns the picture and tries to attack Franklin with a straight razor. He is forced out of the van and they speed away from him. But they are low on gas and decide to stop at a rural gas station. The old man proprietor (Jim Siedow) says his station is out of gas as the truck is expected to come later that day or even in the morning. He talks them into purchasing some barbecue he has made.
At the Hardesty house, the couples leave Franklin to try to get out of the van and come in himself. But he becomes angry at them because along with being assaulted by the hitchhiker, he fell out of his wheelchair when they stopped on the side of the road for him to use the bathroom. Kirk and Pam go down to the waters for a swim but Kirk hears a motor engine running from a nearby property and they go to see a generator running.
Realizing the residents must have gas, they look to barter. Instead when Kirk walks in the house to see if anyone is home, he is met with by Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) who knocks him on the read with a metal hammer killing him. The method is similar to the way Franklin was telling everyone about earlier before they switched to the cattle bolt pistols. Eventually, Pam goes in and is attacked by Leatherface who places her on a metal meat hook in the kitchen.
It was Hooper’s intention to make the movie as bloodless as possible and with as little graphic violence in order to secure a PG rating. The way he filmed the next scene has been studied as doing more with less as it’s implied Pam has been placed on a hook so she can bleed out into a bucket underneath her while Leatherface uses a chainsaw to chop Kirk up. No blood is seen but the movie is brutal to watch. In the end, the movie received an X rating that was re-rated R after a few cuts were made. The total run time is just about 83 minutes including credits.
The movie begins with a famous voice-over narration by John Larroquette who was in his mid-20s at the time. It’s considered his first acting credit and Larroquette famously said he was given one cannabis joint by Hooper to record a 40-second track. Larroquette would go on to have fame in the 1980s on the sitcom Night Court where he won four Primetime Emmys for his role as Dan Fielding. During the fifth episode of the sixth season, Dan would be channel surfing when he discovers the woman he is trying to have sex with has a mental problem where she acts out roles of movies and TV shows. When the TV announcer says Texas Chainsaw Massacre is coming up next, Dan quips: “Seen it, already.”
Eventually, all the characters except Sally are killed by Leatherface. A guy I worked with in college asked how dumb is it for people to be killed by a chainsaw. Only Franklin is. Sally is chased by Leatherface and seeks help with the old man at the gas station only to discover he is related to Leatherface and the hitchhiker. It’s also implied it was the hitchhiker who had disturbed the graves.
Tied up, Sally is tortured and mocked by all three who are part of a family that would be called the Sawyers in the sequels. They even cut Sally’s finger so an elderly man identified only as Grandpa (John Dugan) can suck the blood out of it. Hooper films this sequence in a twisted, manic way that we see extreme close-up of Sally’s eyeballs as she freaks out as they mock her for being scared.
Filming the table sequence was problematic as Dugan had refused to sit in the make-up chair a second day. So all of his scenes were shot reportedly in one long 24-hour time frame. Also, since they were filming in an old country house in Texas during the summer, the house wasn’t properly ventilated. Real blood obtained from real slaughterhouses was used and it began to stink. Some cast and crew members would go outside if and when they could for fresh air. Others would go to vomit.
To make everything look real, they used real animal parts that had been discarded from nearby farms and ranches. The chain had been left on the chainsaw and Hansen at one point got the blade about three inches from Vail’s face. Also, Hansen’s costume couldn’t be washws because they didn’t have enough money for another one. So, he had to wear the blood-drenched clothes for days.
Hooper said by the time principal photography had been completed “everyone hated me by the end of production.” People also hated Partain as it’s widely been said that Franklin isn’t much of a sympathetic character especially for a paraplegic. Hansen immediately despised him. However, years later, they reconnected where Hansen was surprised Partain had mellowed. He told Hansen he was method acting so the rest of the cast wouldn’t like him. The two remained friends until Partain’s death in 2005.
When the movie was released, reviews were mixed with late film critic Roger Ebert dismissing it with only two stars. It’s not the best movie and doesn’t have the thrills that Black Christmas has. However, many people have said it helps set the template for the slasher genre in portraying Leatherface as a mostly silent, brutal masked killer and having Sally being the famous “final girl.”
Other people have analyzed it as a commentary on the oil and energy crisis of the 1970s. Others have said that Leatherface and his family are a sign of the advanced technology being used in industrial capitalism. The old man comments how Grandpa set a record for slaughtering 60 cows within five minutes just by bashing them on the head with a hammer. But the closing of the slaughterhouse means the locals don’t have many other options.
So they survive by selling human flesh as barbecue to travelers. Or they turn the travelers into barbecue. But yet the movie has been seen as a condemnation of animal slaughter. The brutality of how Kirk, Pam and Jerry is killed as well as Leatherface and the hitchhiker trying to get the frail Grandpa to kill Sally even though he can barely hold the hammer makes us wonder how animals are killed for human consumption. Leatherface doesn’t see the other people as humans but as meat. Guillermo del Toro said the movie made him give up meat and he become a vegetarian.
There’s also the cultural change in America between rural and metropolitan people. Not just Leatherface, but the people at the cemetery seem to be a little hostile to the younger people possibly coming from a nearby bigger city returning to their rural roots. But the only reason they care is because it’s something personal.
This was a similar theme Deliverance had dealt with only a couple years earlier where the four lead actors were all playing Atlanta-area businessmen yet they were critical of the people of Appalachia. The only thing really different between the mountain men of Deliverance and the Sawyers is the Sawyers eat humans. If Burt Reynolds’ character didn’t kill the man who raped Ned Beatty’s character, both Beatty and Jon Voight’s characters would’ve been killed after the mountain men violated them.
And there’s also the issue surrounding Franklin. It’s ironic he’s the fifth wheel in the group as he’s viewed as a burden. Franklin even questions if Sally really wanted him to come on the trip. Larroquette’s narration specifically refers to him as an “invalid” which is a phrase one might reconsider in using against a disabled person. While the word has been used for years, decades even, it conjures up some concept that Franklin is weak and fragile. But given Partain’s size and girth, it leaves to theory that he has only recently become paraplegic which has made him more bitter and angry because he can’t do much.
Only two years prior, journalist Geraldo Rivera had done the expose on Willowbrook State School bringing the conditions developmentally disabled people as well as those with mental issues are and have been treated. This was also the era in which the late Judith Heumann, who had contacted polio earlier in her life and had to use of a wheelchair since, became an outspoken activist for disability rights. There’s been speculation that Leatherface has the mind of a child and Hansen has admitted he played the character that way.
He only murders Franklin because he sees him as an immediate threat. However, if he or the other Sawyers might have witnessed more how he was treated, they might have welcomed Franklin into their family. A far more disturbing twist would have been if Franklin turns on his family, particularly Sally.
It’s odd that the structure of the script by Hooper and Kim Henkel makes the protagonists one-dimensional and the antagonists more in-depth. Looking at the house the Sawyers live in you have to worry about sanitary conditions only to realize the family structure has changed. There’s the corpse of a woman in the house presumed to be a mother to Leatherface and the hitchhiker. Considering the Sawyers are a more traditional family, they would have presumed all cleaning duties were to be performed by her. When Leatherface dons a woman’s wig and women clothes, it’s possibly he does it either for fun to fulfill a role as matriarch to the old man.
Sally, herself, is less of a final girl, but more the result of pure luck. She only gets free because the hitchhiker unties her. And it’s just her luck that a truck driver is passing by on the road to hit the hitchhiker who has caught up with Sally as she is fleeing. The truck driver (Ed Quinn) manages to throw a metal wrench at Leatherface. And it’s also luck Sally is able to flag down a pick-up truck also passing by and the driver (Perry Lorenz) lets her in the bed, driving away fast.
The sad part is Sally has survived the immediate attack but the trauma along with the physical wounds will last. Sally and her friends may be gullible but they don’t deserve what happens. Later slasher movies would make the victims more detestable and unlikeable. But if Kirk hadn’t gone on the property, nothing bad would’ve happened.
And you don’t have to be a genius to deduce that movies like Deliverance, TCM and Southern Comfort (which has similarities to the former) were all intended as metaphors for the Vietnam War. People who felt they were superior than the locals find themselves outmatched. Even though the locals seem to warn the young travelers of messing around with the old Hardesty house, they don’t pay attention.
Do you think it’s possible that the old man is lying about being without gas if he’s using it on a generator at the old house not far away? It could be a way of determining who he sells barbecue to or if he turns them into barbecue. (Also, I might add the trope of the creepy old person at the run-down gas station seems to have started with this movie.)
You could also argue that Rob Zombie wouldn’t have much of a movie career had Hooper not made this movie. And since it’s the weekend of the Oklahoma/Texas Red River match-up in football, Hooper returned to the story with a sequel in 1986 starring Dennis Hopper that acted more like a dark comedy. It’s set around the OU/Texas game but only Siedow returned. Bill Moseley, a popular actor in Zombie’s movies, would appear as Chop Top, who some say Michael Keaton used as the inspiration for Betelgeuse.
Over the last few decades, more sequels, remakes and reboots have been made. The third movie released in 1990 stars a younger Viggo Mortensen as part of the Sawyer clan. Then, there was Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, which Henkel wrote and direct with two unknown actors at the time in the leads. Maybe you heard of them – Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger?
I remember it was released in the Atlanta area under the title The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It was given a limited release in other cities such as Madison, Wis. and Portland, Ore. This version focuses more on Leatherface’s cross-dressing. It’s been reported that Hooper and Henkel were loosely inspired by the actions of killers Ed Gein (who was known to dig up graves and make furniture out of human remains) and Elmer Wayne Hanley Jr., a teenage accomplice to Texas killer Dean Corll. Originally, the movie had the tag line that it was based on a true story but really only loosely inspired by real incidents.
In the 2000s, Michael Bay through his Platinum Dunes company produced a remake that was released in 2003 that focused more on the violence and gore. Then, there was a prequel to that movie released in 2006 with Larroquette lending his voice as the narrator of both movies. However, both movies were met with negative criticism despite both turning a good profit at the box office.
In the 2010s, Millennium Media attempted to reboot the franchise ignoring all previous entries with a direct sequel to the 1974 original titled Texas Chainsaw 3D released in 2013. It received mostly negative reviews but still managed to be a modest success. However, it’s prequel, Leatherface, released in 2017, was a box-office dud and received most negative reviews as well.
In 2022, Netflix attempted another direct sequel to the 1974 original that was just titled Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The notion was to bring back Sally in a supporting role, but Burns had been dead since 2014. So Olwen Fouere was cast with some people, me included, criticizing the portrayal as a Sarah Connor rip-off. The movie received negative reviews from critics and audiences didn’t care for it. Reportedly the movie was meant to be released theatrically, but test screenings were so bad, the rights were sold to Netflix.
Like I said at the beginning, I’m not a big fan of this movie. I never have been. But I appreciate its place in the echelon of classic horror movies, especially those that were released in the later third of the 20th Century. I feel Hooper and Henkel were hindered by funding and casting choices. Hansen’s role is iconic and the character is terrifying. However, anyone can see Grandpa is obviously some man with a mask on. Neel overacts as the hitchhiker but it works. Yet Siedow never has the terrifying authority his character needs. It may be why he works better in a comedic way in the sequel.
I feel Burns was hired more for her abilities to scream and looked horrified. Her hysterical laughter at the end as she releases she’s survived the ordeal only shows that she’s going to be mentally unstable now for the rest of her life.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 