Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [74]
But Hooper had little notion of what was going on with the business end of the film. He was less concerned with money than with his future. He even accepted an invitation from Lou Peraino to meet about following up Chain Saw with another horror movie. They met in an Italian restaurant in Manhattan and sat in a private area in the kitchen. “Lou was talking about his new pool table,” Hooper recalls. “He wanted me to do another movie like Chain Saw—but this time, set on an island. The script was impossible, just bad. It was the same thing. Of course now I’ve learned that that’s what you do—on the second picture, you do the same thing.”
Then something strange happened, unprecedented in the history of horror films. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a movie bankrolled by a businessman looking to impress an actress, made by amateurs in Texas, and distributed by members of the mob using money made on the most notorious porn film of all time, suddenly became—believe it or not—respectable. Consider that George Romero refused to see this movie because the title seemed too tawdry. George Romero! Times had changed since Night of the Living Dead became an underground hit. After submitting a print to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, a cagey marketing strategy, Bryanston rereleased the film nationally accompanied by large newspaper ads proclaiming endorsement by the venerable museum. This captured the attention of the major international festivals.
The Berlin Film Festival screened it and passed, but Cannes included the movie in its new directors series two years after it was originally released. Prominent critics started taking it seriously. Rex Reed raved. Roger Ebert called it gruesome but described it as “well-made, well-acted, and all too effective.” Even TV Guide praised it. As was usually the case in the seventies, the horror press had the assessment that would later become the common wisdom. “The movie extends the boundaries of cinematic terror and revulsion to the point where we are forced to redefine the term ‘horror film,’” wrote Paul Roen in Castle of Frankenstein. “I consider myself a hardened observer of horror films, but this one reduced me to a pale and quivering hulk.”
Part of the success must be attributed to the title. It manages to grab your attention and lower expectations at the same time. Every word resonates. “Texas” has always had a cachet, meaning anything beyond the mundane. “ ‘Chain saw’ is the kind of thing that you put in a room and you don’t have to say ‘Run!’” Henkel says. “If we called it ‘The Iowa Chain Saw Massacre,’ it wouldn’t be the same.”
The other major reason for its crossover success was stylistic. Despite its gritty ramshackle design and the lean storytelling that didn’t waste time on backstory, the movie actually reverts back to an older style of expressionist horror, mixed with a new age Texas vibe. The stark noir color scheme juxtaposes the black basement with the burning morning sun. The extreme camera angles bring to mind gothic horror. And the final whimsical spin by Leatherface is like something out of Luis Buñuel. Hooper took his time making this movie, over a year, and much of the impact of the opening and closing sequences was created in the editing room. Like Frankenstein, the movie didn’t cut out development of character. It was possible to find the family of killers eerily familiar. These were monsters you could almost relate to.
Universal signed Hooper and Henkel to a three-picture deal, and they moved to Los Angeles and promptly got to work in an office on the same lot with Steven Spielberg. Hooper was thrilled to be invited to talk with William Friedkin, still high on the success of The Exorcist. “He told me, ‘Hey, kid, the film’s really good. You have a sensibility. That will come in handy,’” Hooper remembers. “‘But let’s get down to the important stuff—the bullshit.’” By that he meant a career in Hollywood.
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