Day 16: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Day 16 of Calloween Movie Month

Content warnings: mild blood and gore, insane amounts of bones, slurs, bones, torture, kidnapping, cannibalism

Recommended?: Yes

Spoilers and discussion of many mentioned topics below. You have been warned.

This is an 83 minute panic attack.



The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is about Sally and her brother Franklin setting out with their friends to investigate the possibility that the remains of their grandfather's grave have been tampered with or stolen. After a detour to their family's old farmhouse, they discover a group of cannibalistic murderers is after them.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (which I'll be calling TCM for brevity) is hard to watch. Unlike the title may lead you to believe, it's not senseless gore porn. It's actually fairly tame in that department. Rather, this film is made with the understanding that the brain is good at scaring itself.

So much fear lies in the ways your mind fills in the blanks and the things it's already naturally scared of. The feeling that you're alone when you look out into the woods. The uncertainty of the trust you put in a kind seeming stranger. Seeing a room full of human bones and wondering how the people they belonged to were killed, and how many must've died to produce them. Seeing human and animal bones mixed in a house that belongs to a family in the meat industry, wondering if what you're eating is really just normal meat. Seeing a weapon brandished but not it's target or the aftermath of the hit. The idea of a chainsaw, something that is made to cut through wood, being used to kill.

This film played on my paranoia and my mind's ability to create gruesome images, that I somehow expected them to be eating right out of Sally's stomach when she wakes up in the dining room. Nothing foreshadowed that, and it never happened, but the image was so vivid in my mind as the old man sucked the blood from her finger and they ate what were surely human sausages.

Something about this feels... evil. It's a thing a lot of the best horror makes me feel and a concept I've been trying to articulate for a long time. (My go to movie examples are Hereditary, Skinamarink, and The Shining.)

I think the thing that makes some movies feel evil is a mix of hopelessness and cruelty. When something feels like it's created its on vision of hell. When it feels like there's no escape from it for either the characters or the audience. When something about it seems to revel in misery and fear.

The long, drawn out scenes of running and screaming and failed attempts at escape. The casual violence that the family treats it's victims and each other with. The enjoyment they all take out of watching Sally struggle, cry and scream. The enjoyment they all take in the idea of killing an innocent person. The knowledge that nothing will make them stop, because they just simply enjoy it. The cramped, close cinematography that feels claustrophobic and entrapping. It ties my stomach into a thousand tiny knots. The second the credits rolled I had to catch my breath.

TCM is possibly the most distilled feeling of horror in movie form.