By most standards it would be a fairly tall order for a film to live up to a title so incendiary as ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’. After all, we live in an era of 'Sharknado' and 'Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter'. So it is a real testament that Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic succeeds in surpassing all expectations to stand as one of the most demented and disturbing horror films ever made, with little of its raw power atrophied by advancing years.
Filmed in searing Texas heat over just 32 days, it maintains an uncompromising tautness throughout its 82 minutes. With a miniscule budget of $300,000, the end result is free of any big studio sheen and instead has a grim aesthetic provoking the feeling that nothing is off limits, that anything could happen; and a detachment resonant of a documentary.
From the very start it works more successfully than perhaps any other film to create an atmosphere of genuine foreboding – the deadpan voiceover warning you of the ‘mad and macabre crimes’ that were discovered, the subliminal flashbulb shots of bodily remains, and the opening close-up of a disinterred corpse, accompanied by discordant and inorganic sound effects that are at once industrial (buzzing and droning) and primitive (sporadic cymbal crashes).
The film’s premise is, by now, lifeless to the point of rigor mortis; although in 1974 the concept of the teen slasher movie had yet to become so drained of its lifeblood (‘Halloween’ was still 4 years away, 'Friday the 13th' 6 years away). A group of young friends arrive in a Texan backwater with the intention of checking on a family grave after a recent spate of bizarre robberies. They encounter a deserted farmhouse and one by one become lambs to the slaughter at the hands of a deranged ‘family’ of lunatics, including the chainsaw-wielding Leatherface (so called for his mask of flesh).
The principal reason for the film’s enduring legacy, not exclusively for its status as a horror milestone, but as one of the finest achievements of subversive American cinema, lies in the intermingling layers of interpretation that can be extrapolated from the superficial narrative.
The first and most obvious reading is to view it in context with the society of the time. By 1974, the Vietnam War was in its death throes, with the tide of public opinion having long since turned along with the steady homeward flow of body bags and reports of hideous atrocities such as the My Lai massacre perpetrated by the very soldiers that were supposed to inspire patriotism.
For years, the news had provided a steady diet of concentrated horror to the American people, and it was this together with events such as Watergate, the Kent State shooting, and the crimes of the Manson family, that symbolised a very definite bludgeon to the head of the wild and free-spirited innocence of the 1960s. It was surely inevitable that such an atmosphere of febrile tension would infect new cinema with a sepsis of brutality, and indeed this was borne out by films such as ‘Last House on the Left’ and ‘The Hills Have Eyes’.
In a sense then, the young victims, with their hippy camper van, flared jeans and New Age ideals, represent the strangers arriving in foreign terrain with good intentions, that are fatally undermined by the crazed hostility of the natives. Are Leatherface and his ‘family’ then, a mirror held up to reflect America’s xenophobic propaganda regarding the ruthless Vietnamese ‘gooks’; are they a stern reminder that, contrary to optimistic belief, barbarism begins at home?
Another interpretation of which I am particularly taken, is that the film is an advocating commentary on the social movement of vegetarianism.
We are introduced to the proximity of the slaughterhouse early on by the hitchhiker who gleefully shares polaroids of his grisly practice, and recounts that the "old-fashioned sledge" is the best method to employ. One of the girls protests “I like meat, please change the subject”, thereby embodying the wilful blindness that the carnivorous masses habitually seek to adopt.
As the horror unfolds, the victims are dehumanised and recast as animals to be slaughtered, and it is through their ordeals that we are invited to consider the suffering of animals to which we attempt to raise the shield of ignorance. They are struck with hammer blows, hung upon meathooks, incarcerated in freezers, chased relentlessly, and in the climactic scene forced to be a party at the family dinner table as the prelude to their own murder.
By anthropomorphising the plight of animals in this way, the notion that they may be oblivious to their impending deaths is forced into a reappraisal. Taken into consideration along with the frequent non-diegetic deployment of swinish squeals and bovine grunting, and it begins to appear like a fairly convincing reading of the film’s underlying moral purpose.
While the overarching influence on the perversities was the serial killer Ed Gein, there is the impression of the family acting out of some kind of insane workman-like obligation, fulfilling a task that cannot be avoided. As the cook (and de facto ringleader) says, “I just can’t take no pleasure in killing. Just some things you gotta do, doesn’t mean you gotta like it.”
Perhaps then, the film is also an extreme analogy for the impacts automation and modern technologies have on traditional working practices, as rural communities are abandoned in favour of the new and most efficient means of production, with scant consideration of the nefarious side effects such a socio-economic shift might inculcate (or, Marxism with chainsaws…)
However you choose to interpret it, ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ is a deeply unsettling and thoroughly worthwhile example of raw cinematic horror. It is a swirling riptide of madness that ratchets up the intensity until finally cutting away in the midst of Leatherface’s demented dance, in so doing, yielding little in the way of redemption or comforting closure. The slaughter for meat must presumably continue…
No comments:
Post a Comment