Tobe Hooper, director of one of the most influential horror films ever made ''The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'' died 26.august in Los Angeles.
Though his career consisted mostly of obscure TV movies, Hooper's iconic chainsaw-wielding madman and his brood of flesh-eating cannibals not only changed the course of an entire genre but changed the course of the director's career, effectively turning him into one of the most influential filmmakers in modern horror. (1)
In this new, tainted times in which something like this is not done anymore or can be done, at least not in America. This film is there to remind us of the things that Hooper really pioneered into the film - such an explosion of irrational, nightmare, uncontrollable, meaningless (and therefore, terrifying!) violence, yet still filmed by irresistible, timeless black humor is one of those unique moments in the history of the film that we have to keep as little water, or well... blood on the palm. (2)
The film, with relatively unknown Texan actors, turned the horror genre upside down.
Up until its release, horror films largely followed the classic formula: monster + victim = scares; Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Frankenstein are classics, but even Hitchcock's avian killers in The Birds, Mario Bava's witch in Black Sunday, and Roman Polanski's demon child in Rosemary's Baby, offered little variation to the popular horror trope.
But Hooper, like his fellow horror artist George Romero, used cinema as a vehicle for social commentary not only with great subtlety but also with great cruelty. This unflinching savagery reflects what many Americans felt about the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War, including Hooper, and Leatherface, along with his cannibalistic family, were perfect representatives of "the massacres and atrocities" that happened there. In his book Return of the Power Tool Killer, Hooper tells author John W. Bowen about his experience seeing images of the war on TV. (1)
'The lack of sentimentality and the brutality of things...showing brains spilled all over the road. Man was the real monster here, just wearing a different face, so I put a literal mask on the monster in my film.''
What should be especially emphasized is that Hooper manages to create one of the most intensely, the most brutal and extreme of cinematic experiences ever - without resorting to the drastic effects of mask and prosthetics. In spite of such a striking title and all the legends surrounding it, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has less blood than, say, in Poltergeist, produced by Spielberg (!). Just like in the famous scene of murder in Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), the banal display of special effects masters was replaced by far more effective suggestion through the virtuosity of the director himself. No fake bloodsuckers can reach the murderous shock of the first murder, achieved by master timing, editing and choosing the angle of the shot; or the power of the suggestion carried by the morbid chestnut tree in which the next (second) victim is decreed, because after that scene it is quite unnecessary to keep an eye on the details of her fate (2)
The reduced violence was in actuality a dual move by Hooper to attract wary distributors in addition to avoiding a commercial ban. In effect, the artfully shot death sequences actually end up escalating the tension of the film. As Hollinger notes, the premise of the film "sounds brutal in context but isn’t actually that graphic, making for a very sensory-driven experience that relies on the viewer's imagination to piece together images and sounds that are either not shown on-screen or displaced deliberately in the films editing."
Leatherface doesn’t even appear until half way through the movie. What we do see is a group of friends marooned in a strange land, surrounded by a bunch of locals who seem dangerous, to say the least. We feel as unsettled as if we were one of those friends, stranded alongside them. (3)
Just like these edits, Leatherface almost always appears to his victims abruptly from seemingly out of nowhere. These are more than just jump scares because this tension is ever-present once the character is introduced. These murders happen during the middle of the day, subverting the convention of the time (and the present) that evil is strictly pertained to the night. As Hollinger puts it, the film feels so dangerous because “death can come at any time.”
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a slasher before slashers even existed.
According to the Boston Globe:
Before production, Mr. Hansen entered method-acting mode. He visited pigs to perfect his squeal. He spent time at a school for the developmentally disabled. And to build stamina for chasing co-stars with a chainsaw, he started jogging. The actor prepared, and cast and crew decamped to the Hill Country to commit their squalid tale to celluloid. And there, the real suffering began.
(1) No film school, August 27, 2017
(2) The Cult of Ghoul, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(3) No film school, The Keys to Tobe Hooper's Horror in 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'
