Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [64]
What many described as a reckless and raw assault on the senses was also, however, a rather nuanced (for horror) portrait of a dysfunctional family and a disappearing class of people. Not the victims from the van; they were not terribly interesting. But the killers who live in the house they stumble upon looking for gas are the real heart of this intense movie. They are cannibals and maniacs but also victims themselves. Laid off from their jobs at the slaughterhouse when the air gun replaced the sledgehammer as the preferred way of killing animals, they are casualties of technological innovation. They are country folk left behind in a modern world. This bizarre family is the reason that if you polled current horror directors about the scariest movie of all time, Texas Chain Saw would win the most votes.
Since the success of the movie, Hooper has said his interest in horror peaked when his first dramatic film bombed and he realized that he needed to do something outrageous to get attention. He has explained that the idea of the killer’s mask comes from Greek tragedy, which is sort of like John Carpenter claiming that Medea inspired Assault on Precinct 13. Doing publicity for the movie, Hooper also claimed that it was really about Watergate. This was all nonsense.
Hooper did not have the cerebral streak of Wes Craven or the artfilm ambitions of Roman Polanski or the business savvy of Herschell Gordon Lewis. What he brought to the project was an unadulterated love of the genre, a talent for editing scenes of intense violence, and a deep understanding of the pleasure of being scared. That proved to be more than enough.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was not the first movie to play upon urban paranoia about backwoods hicks. Nor was it the first to explore the terror of the family dinner table (Bob Clark’s Vietnam zombie film Dead of Night did that quite well), exploit the rumbling terror of a chain saw (The Last House on the Left), or include eating flesh (Night of the Living Dead and its imitators turned that into old hat). But after the first five minutes, the movie begins working like a highly addictive mindaltering drug, and nearly four decades later it remains as potent as ever.
The Exorcist proved that scary movies could be respectable enough to win Academy Awards. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which opened the following year, announced itself with its title as a down and dirty exploitation film designed to shock. Both films, however, were equally important in turning horror movies into mass entertainment, but it was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that elevated the trashy, violent pleasures of making audiences gasp into something approaching high art—just approaching, though, since getting there would ruin the movie’s other pleasures.
Just as George Romero did not set out to make a movie about civil rights and William Peter Blatty surely wanted to avoid the ambiguous ending of Rosemary’s Baby, Tobe Hooper was hardly thinking that the print of his movie would end up in the Museum of Modern Art. As a matter of fact, its success might be the most preposterous story of the entire decade in scary movies. It was possible because of an unlikely collaboration between a few underemployed small-town actors, the governor of Texas, and members of a major Mafia family in New York.
By most accounts, the tale began the same way that the movie ended: with an obsessed man chasing a beautiful woman. The cinematic pursuer was a hulking, retarded psychotic cannibal twirling around while swinging a chain saw. The one in real life was a producer. But they were following the same woman: Marilyn Burns. She was a knockout: long blond hair, tall, shapely figure, and a certain charm that drew attention. Having starred in a few school plays at the University of Texas, Burns really wanted to be in movies, and found a way in after meeting