![]() ![]() Not only in the form of the titular chainsaw, but also in the creeping realization that the aforementioned failing pieces of industrial technology may actually be fronts through which to trap and kill outsiders. Everything is corrupted, part of the mechanized (animal) slaughter that used to make up the town’s economy, but now defines the final few hours of the protagonists’ lives. But as the killings begin, these noises are transformed into harbingers of death. These sounds-a generator struggling to stay on, a van sputtering and running out of gas-begin as seemingly quotidian noises of downtrodden rural life. The mechanical sounds that rumble and squeal throughout the film, essentially comprising the soundtrack, weave the visual components together and change the environment from unsettling-but-harmless into horrid. The airlessness of the world stretches to the outer limits, and as soon as the violence commences, the outside world no longer feels accessible. One look into McMinn’s eyes and it’s quite doubtful that the actress is faking her disgust.Īll of these sensory elements come together to create a cacophony of endless punishment for the characters and the viewer. It is easy to see why: the animal corpses strewn throughout the cannibalistic Sawyer family’s house were all real, borrowed from a local veterinarian, and the lights on set cooked the already-decaying meat while filming. When Pam (Teri McMinn) stumbles into Leatherface’s workshop in search of her missing boyfriend, the skeletal menagerie she finds, rife with chicken feathers and pieces of vertebrae strewn about, is gag-inducing in its realism. From the opening image of a decomposing corpse staged upon a gravestone, it seems as if every other scene features the fetor of hot, rotting meat. It’s also the rare movie to capture stench on celluloid. Instead of hiding in the shadows, everything in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is uncomfortably exposed, like bare skin under a searing sun. Technical decisions added to the oppressive atmosphere as well: Cinematographer Daniel Pearl shot on a fine-grain, low-speed 16mm film that required a great amount of light, thus capturing more light than typical, especially for a horror film. As the camera lingers along the roadside, it captures the heat itself, hovering above the pavement in long dreamy waves. Each frame feels sun-stained, covered in a grime that attaches itself to one’s body. The film is a miasma of the hellish summer heat and everything that comes with it. The filmmaker once told The Austin Chronicle that the reflecting behaviors of sunspots and solar flares influenced the film’s structure, “the way it folds continuously back in on itself, and no matter where you’re going it’s the wrong place.” The oozing red sunspots that make up the title card cast an ominous solar mantle over the nightmarish world the characters enter-maybe they were always a part of it to begin with. Filmed during a Texan heat wave, where the daily temperature averaged 100 degrees, Hooper utilized (and weaponized) the environment to push his film deeper and deeper into madness. A few minutes later, they pick up a hitchhiker off the side of the road.ĭespite its title, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre famously contains very little blood. As if we could not understand such cruelty and carnage being committed by human beings-we surely must be hurtling towards the rapture. It’s a scene that is easily forgotten once we careen into brutality, but it’s significant in a film that provides no answers as to the source of the human depravity it depicts, it is ironically through invoking the esoteric that we feel proximate to some sense of reality. ![]() Sitting in the back of a van full of five friends, Pam reads out loud from an astrology book, explaining to her fellow travelers how the malefic planet Saturn is currently in retrograde, its chances to infect the world with evil maximized. When we are introduced to the soon-to-be-vulnerable youths in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, they are talking about what the stars portend for their trip. ![]()
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