The best way to characterize Tobe Hooper's grossly terrifying "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" is as a documentary of horror, horror at its purest. This is not a typical horror film at all - it is an overt nightmare from first scene to last and a complete exercise in terror. No moment in it feel sane, no scene or sequence feels safe or remotely comfortable, and there is no way that anyone can interpret this film as simply frightening. It is not frightening - it is bone-chilling in every sense of the word and a living nightmare far too unnerving to sit through calmly. In the 30 years since I first saw it, that would still describe the experience today to a tee.
The opening narration of the events that are based on a true story (not the case at all) is already tense, with no background music other than the voice of John Larroquette! Then we see glimpses, as if they were snapshots of decomposing bodies and close-ups of body parts. The rest of this grisly opener is in darkness as we hear someone grunting against the presumed sound of chopping of wood, and the cutting of flesh. The next shot is of a rotting corpse wired to a pole as we hear news reports of graveyards being pillaged leaving empty crypts. Ugh, that would be enough for a short film and this is just the beginning of this ultra-feverish nightmare.
Next we get a group of young people in a van as they travel to that mentioned cemetery in the news report - Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) is among the group who wants to know if her grandfather's body is one of the missing corpses. Sally brings her wheelchair-bound brother, Franklin (a bug-eyed Paul A. Partain) who wants to visit the old homestead and has a knife that he can't let go of. Aside from the astrology expert Pam (Teri McMinn), the other two (Allen Danzinger as the bespectacled driver and William Vail as Kirk, Pam's boyfriend) are not quite as memorable though they do their best to catch our sympathies. A normal-looking house is seen in the distance where Pam and Kirk hope to find a nearby pool area to swim in. Let's say the inside of this house is not just a house of horrors - it is a sickeningly depraved-looking house of horrors where skulls, bones, meat hooks and a chicken is seen alive in its cage. Double ugh.
The acting is not top-notch in "Texas Chain Saw Massacre" and it is not meant to be. All the young local Texan actors do well enough in their roles as unintended victims of a cannibalistic family. Even the dreaded and sickly disgusting hitchhiker (Edwin Neal) is not just a monstrosity - he doesn't care about himself as he slices his hand in front of the horrified group. He belongs to the Ed Gein family of sick people that includes an almost meek-looking gas station owner (Jim Siedow) who informs the group that he has no gas - his attempts to smile during the dinner sequence while Marilyn Burns' Sally screams at the top of her lungs will make you shiver with fright (extreme close-ups of Burns' eyeballs are enough to make you lose your appetite). Of course one can't forget Gunnar Hansen as Leatherface, a vicious killer armed with a sledgehammer and a chainsaw who also has the mentality of a child wearing makeup on his leather mask during that dinner sequence, presumably to fulfill a matronly role that is otherwise absent.
"Texas Chain Saw Massacre" was shot in grainy 16mm yet it looks positively marvelous compared to other low-budget horror flicks at the time. The grain never looks too grainy yet just enough to pass for unfettered realism. Director Hooper and cinematographer Daniel Pearl uphold the mystery of what is not seen versus what is, which is almost nothing. Other than one bloody shot towards the end (and the aforementioned hand slicing), there is no visible gore and the film is far more unsettling without it. When one of the female victims is impaled on a meat hook, we do not see the actual impalement. Same with Leatherface's chainsaw tearing two victims apart - even the blood splatter is minimal. Hooper did this with hopes of attaining a PG rating at the time (um, yeah) and almost got the X rating.
After the ordeal is over and Burns' bloodied Sally is safe in a truck passing by as Leatherface tries to catch her, she screams and laughs in unison and it becomes unbearable. She's safe yet Leatherface does his dance with the chainsaw and the film famously ends abruptly. No one feels safe, including us the audience, and there is no sense of relief. The chaos ends...and it lingers. In the annals of late 20th century superior cinematic horror that includes "Psycho," "Night of the Living Dead," "Halloween" and "Rosemary's Baby," the unrelenting "Texas Chain Saw Massacre" is a worthy addition. A real traumatic nightmare of a movie.
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