#The texas chain saw massacre wiki movie

When Sally takes refuge in the gas station after dark, the radio says it’s 96 degrees. It will even do its part after dark, though moonlight. It wants to beat everything into listlessness. It seethes at youth, greenery, frolicking. She will later discover Franklin’s attack was anticipated in his horoscope, which pointed out, “The events in the world are not doing much either to cheer one up.” The central tenet of cosmic horror is that the universe is indifferent to you but the universe in Texas Chain Saw Massacre is actually “malefic,” as Pam reads.

#The texas chain saw massacre wiki movie

The first dialogue in the movie is Pam’s astrological explanation that the universe is taking a malevolent tilt. Is all of this because things are also horribly wrong on a cosmic scale? The radio broadcast is played over footage of the sun, dark, splotchy, angry, throwing flares at the earth. There are unexplained suicides in Houston, murder and mutilation in Indiana, and a baby chained in an attic in Dallas. On a smaller scale, 29 people have been buried under a collapsed building in Atlanta. Refineries along the Gulf Coast are burning out of control, a cholera epidemic is spreading in San Francisco, and war is breaking out in South America’s oil rich countries. Instead, the news is about civilization falling apart.

At the top of the hour, there’s nothing in the news about Watergate, the ongoing war in Vietnam after the US withdrawal, or the crises in the Middle East that will lead to an oil shortage. This segues into a radio news broadcast, and here’s where Hooper and Kim Henkel, his co-writer, introduce you to their version of 1973. The flash of his photographs and then a harrowing close-up of his handiwork. The opening shots are the hitchhiker’s latest grave robbery. Unlike most trashy horror movies, Texas Chain Saw Massacre opens with canny worldbuilding, which is partly why it reminds me of Australia’s apocalypse movies.

On its face, it’s just a movie about teenagers getting killed. It furthermore has very little in common with the American movies it’s often associated with, like Halloween, Last House on the Left, and Friday the 13th. My overwhelming takeaway is that it’s of a piece with Australian apocalyptic horror from the 70s and 80s, like Wake in Fright, Mad Max, Razorback, The Last Wave, The Long Weekend, Incident at Raven’s Gate, and Picnic at Hanging Rock, all movies that had a profound influence on me growing up. I just watched The Texas Chain Saw Massacre again. It’s been my assertion all along that Tobe Hooper is a terrible director, and although there might be something raw and effective in his first movie, it’s artless trash. I’ve rewatched Invaders from Mars, Lifeforce, Eaten Alive, Funhouse, and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel in the last few years, and they’re all varying degrees of horrible (the conventional wisdom about Poltergeist, which is still great, is that Spielberg actually directed it). Since then, I’ve seen Tobe Hooper’s other movies. Probably in college, sometime around 1990. I’ve spent decades denigrating the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre as artless trash.