The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Who will survive and what will be left of them?
This is another of Britain’s notorious video nasties (although now granted an “18″ certificate) and it is a hard going film. The narration at the start, the use of an ensemble of totally unknown actors and the pseudo-documentary style of filming give it a feeling of being a crime reconstruction rather than a piece of fiction.
Inspired by the American serial killer, Ed Gein (who was also the inspiration for Hitchcock’s Psycho) the film starts with a radio report detailing a recently discovered and extensive grave robbing. The story then follows brother and sister Sally and Franklin Hardesty, Sally’s boyfriend Jerry and two of their friends as they travel to the cemetery to check that the grave of Sally and Franklin’s Grandfather was not one of those that was vandalised.
The trip is going badly right from the start, initially full of relatively minor discomforts and accidents, but getting steadily worse and more unsettling. A lot of these events could have been played for laughs and, in most post Evil Dead films probably would have been. Here, though, they are played straight and work to build an atmosphere that is both tense and ominous.
Eventually, they find themselves low on fuel and in the middle of nowhere where, in ones and twos, they start to fall into the clutches of a family of cannibal rednecks.
From this point on, there is absolutely no let-up and the film becomes relentless in it’s assault on your senses. And it’s this relentlessness that both makes The Texas Chainsaw Massacre such a strong film and which led to it being refused a certificate by the BBFC for so long - there really is no single scene that could be cut to make the film any easier, it really is all or nothing. There is very little gore and the violence tends not to be explicit, relying more on your imagination and on identification with the victims than on covering the screen with blood. But the ongoing pain and terror that the victims suffer combined with the dysfunctional family dynamic of the rednecks make this film a horrifying adrenaline rush right up to the closing credits.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a hugely influential film and one that stands up to repeated viewings. Just make sure you give yourself a couple of hours to unwind once you’ve seen it.
Sunday 12 Nov 2000 | Paul Pritchard | Horror
[…] y, but I have to admit that I found it surprisingly unmoving. Films such as The Evil Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Blood Sucking Freaks are all far more painful to wa […]