The horror classic turns 40 this year, but middle age hasn’t slowed it down one bit. Here’s why the 1974 movie remains totally terrifying. WARNING: Spoilers ahead!
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is back in theaters this week for its 40th anniversary with a newly restored edition that makes director Tobe Hooper's classic slasher look better than ever. Not that it needs the help! Shot for less than $300,000 with a cast of unknowns, the 1974 film helped shape the horror genre and become a huge independent hit. And it's still one of the scariest movies ever made. Here's why it holds up.
It's a daytime story.
Darkness, shadow, and not being able to see what's coming are basic tools of any horror movie. But most of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre's run time is dedicated to the daylight hours, as Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns), her brother Franklin (Paul A. Partain), and their friends Jerry (Allen Danziger), Kirk (William Vail), and Pam (Teri McMinn) travel through a run-down part of rural Texas and have an unfortunate encounter with a local family. The frightening part about Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) isn't that he could be lurking anywhere, but that he's this horrific monster dropped right into the middle of a summer afternoon. When he first appears, it's in a set-up that would seem perfectly innocuous were it not for the sense of apparently unrelated dread that the film's been drumming up — white house, swing, sunny day, and then from out of it comes this figure of dread wearing a mask made of someone else's skin.
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It doesn't need gore to be disturbing.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre manages to convey shocking violence while actually showing very little on-screen gore. Tobe Hooper reportedly had been aiming to get a PG rating, though instead he got an R and a film that was initially banned in the U.K. But the result is a movie that relies on the idea of what's happening without having to show it, and when those ideas include people being placed on a meat hook or gored with a chainsaw, that's plenty. One of the reasons The Texas Chain Saw Massacre holds up so remarkably well is that it has few effects to age poorly. Instead of showing what happens when a sledgehammer hits a human skull, the film focuses on the body twitching in shock after taking the blow, and that ends up being even more disturbing.
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It doesn't give explanations.
There's often a strange movie logic to what gets people in trouble in horror flicks — they're mean or naughty, they pick up cursed objects, they do drugs or have sex, or they're the sacrificial person of color who inevitably dies first. But Sally and her friends don't break any obvious rules of the genre — they even give the creepy hitchhiker a ride, to their immediate regret. And while they're hippie kids in the country, they're not invasive outsiders, as Sally and Franklin's grandparents have an old house in the area. Their fate's so resonant because there's no morality or reason (even in the weirdest big screen sense) attached to it. They're just incredibly unlucky.
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