It’s not exactly a slow burn, because the whole film is just 83 minutes, but Hooper takes his time in getting to the-ahem-meat of the movie. It’s the direct inverse of a moment like Samara Weaving emerging from the house at the end of Ready or Not: she’s escaped, but I don’t know that we get the sense that she’ll ever recover. Her laugh as she’s finally driven away from Leatherface speaks not of victory but of a trauma that now seems embedded. Burns never seems to be acting, whether it’s in the back and forth between her and the other teens, and especially the prickly interactions with her brother, Franklin or the sheer terror of the last reel. This isn’t a latter day horror heroine, getting tooled up to fight the monster, rather, she reacts much the way I suspect most of us would to her situation: by screaming, running, and becoming more than a little unhinged. It’s hard to say that Marilyn Burns’ Sally is an especially nuanced character. As soon as we know the kids are in danger, we’re primed to be terrified for Franklin. The wheelchair bound Franklin whines his way through much of the film, and he can get grating, but having him there does create an undertone to the whole film, because we can see the rough ground beneath the character’s feet, and know that it’s not going to be particularly easy for him to navigate. Franklin might be the most developed, and Paul Partain’s performance is definitely divisive. The characters are, to be honest, mostly lightly sketched. Much of the screen time, in fact, is spent with Sally, Franklin and their friends, as they travel and encounter mounting craziness. That sequence comes in the last 15 minutes of the film, and probably lasts less than 10, but in my mind it takes up the entire back half of the movie, so pervasive and defining is it within the film. The shoot for the sequence was by all accounts a hothouse nightmare, lasting more than 24 hours, and every bit of that claustrophobic heat baked insanity makes it on to the screen. The horrific ‘dinner’ sequence, with Sally tied to the chair as Leatherface and family torment her and attempt to get their cadaverous grandfather (John Dugan, who was only 20 when the film was made, and reprised the role in the execrable Texas Chainsaw 3D, 40 years later) to bash her head in with a hammer. This carries over into the rest of the film, which spills only a few actual drops of blood on screen (real blood in one moment, because the prop knife that was going to be used for the effect of cutting Marilyn Burns’ finger wasn’t working, so they just cut her) but some viewers would swear to you that they had seen the most brutal and graphic violence.įor me though, the key way that the film is deceptive is in how its various elements take up space in my mind between viewings. From the beginning, as camera flashbulbs illuminate rotting corpses and skeletal remains, the horror inherent in the images makes you believe that you’re seeing them for longer and more explicitly than you actually are.

James Ferman hit on something essential about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in observing that the ‘problem’ with it couldn’t be cut around: it’s a deceptive film. Later, they run out of gas and, looking for help, stumble on Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) a manchild who butchers people, often with a chainsaw, and wears a mask made from a flayed human face and his cannibalistic family, living on a neighbouring farm. On the way they pick up a hitchhiker (Edwin Neal) who spooks them. You know the story by now, but in case this is the first thing you’ve ever read about this film, it finds a group of teens, notably Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) and her wheelchair bound brother Franklin (Paul Partain) driving through Texas to the farm owned by their late grandparents.

As it fast approaches its 50 th birthday, it remains every bit as primal and terrorising as it ever was. This latest one, the first UK release on 4K disc is the fourth format I’ve owned the film on, but The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is worth it. Since then, Tobe Hooper’s magnum opus (which is not, as many have misattributed it, his feature debut) has had more releases in the UK than I can count.

It may be apocryphal, but apparently when he attended a cinema club screening of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, then director of the BBFC James Ferman said something along the lines of “It’s all right for you middle-class cineastes to see this film, but what would happen if a factory worker in Manchester happened to see it?” This snobbery, and Ferman’s insistence that it wasn’t any one image that kept him from granting the film an X (later 18) certificate but ‘an atmosphere of madness, threat and impeding violence’ kept The Texas Chain Saw Massacre from the eyes of the great unwashed until Ferman’s retirement in 1999.

Kirk the texas chain saw massacre