The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - Tobe Hooper (1974)
“Things happen here about, they don’t tell about. I see things. You see, they say that it’s just an old man talking. You laugh at an old man, this thing that laughs and knows better.”
A pretty mundane line on page, the above - drunkenly spewed by some sun-blanched drunk towards the film’s beginning - depresses that little button that tells the audience, and Should’ve tipped the victims-to be, that this little Texan roadtrip is not to end in sunshine and flowers. Not that the title wasn’t to the point. Made on a shoe-string budget with mostly amateur actors (shot, then, like porn) this study in terror and dementedly human evil, is phenomenal. The only reason I’ve subjected myself to its visceral hysterics more than once, is that it contains moments that transcend into a kind of… poetics of evil.
There is more than a shiver of genius to this cinematic creature, specifically recalling that original sense of genius as being possessed by some higher consciousness. The soundtrack is unmatched - the sonic, the psychological, equivalent, of nails dragged across a chalkboard. The frequent citing of the sun, that profound entity of perpetual explosion and ungodly temperatures; the scattered logic of seriously twisted home-decorations; the morose consciousness of cattle awaiting slaughter; the (seemingly) arb comment about astrological tidings; and finally the sickeningly, senselessly sadistic reality of the cozy little killer family, seem to quest the bounds of ethicality. ‘Evil just is’. It seems to whisper into your ear. ‘Don’t blame it, don’t try to understand it. Just stay away.’
The film’s resident monster - the gibbering hulk Leatherface - launched the unfortunate careers of dime-a-dozen evil freaks with curious headgear, but the evilest evil lurks elsewhere in the movie…
Excepting the film’s centrepiece, where the unbroken shrieking momentarily re-introduces disbelief (for an ironic reason, since it Is realistic), this is inspired film-making, and, quite literally, breathtaking. But be warned, this be not placid fare.
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