100 Scariest Movie Moments: #5 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

The summer after my sophomore year of college, I made a trip to Texas for a few weeks. A friend of mine actually begged me not to go because she had just seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and was convinced I would be killed by Leatherface. I know that sounds silly, but it does tell you just how much this particular film can affect people.
 

With many of the films on this list, I find myself struggling to write enough for a review. With this film however, I find myself trying to decide what I actually need to say and what can be cut. (An early version of this review contained a rant about why the movie Cry Wolf bombed, just for some perspective.)  This is a film that affects everyone who sees it, and the mystique surrounding it is as great as the film itself.

This movie came out shortly after Black Christmas, when the slasher film was still in its infancy. As such, it’s often noted for not featuring many of the staples of the genre. Only one of the four protagonists is unlikable at all, and his constant whining is offset by the fact that he’s confined to a wheelchair. There’s fairly little blood and gore (reportedly Tobe Hooper wanted a PG rating), and the killer’s motives aren’t extensively explored. (Although we get more information about them than we did in Black Christmas, which made the killer’s identity and motives a complete enigma). The killers are also made out to be quite human. Even Leatherface, while strong, never shrugs off a gunshot or ploughs through an army the way Jason Vorhees routinely does.

The single most subtly bizarre thing in the movie is probably that the victims actually have a plot-relevant reason for traveling to the place of their deaths, rather than being “on vacation” or having some other half-assed reason to travel out to the middle of nowhere. Several graves have been robbed in a small, rural cemetary. So a girl named Sally (Marilyn Burns), her wheel-chair bound brother Franklin (Paul A Partain) and their friends Jerry (Allan Danzinger), Kirk (William Vail), and Pam (Teri McMinn) go to make sure their grandfather’s grave is still intact. The local gas station is out of gas and they don’t have enough to get home. So they decide to stay overnight at their grandfather’s house. Once there, they realize that the house next door has a gas generator, and they decide to send one of their group to ask if the residents could spare some gas to get them home.

Obviously, they quickly fall victim to Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen), the mentally retarded vanguard of a family of cannibals. From that point on, the movie becomes an exercise in tension. By the end of the film, four of the five are dead, and the final survivor is likely insane. However, despite the low body count, not one death is wasted. One is stretched out to emphasize the suffering (the victim first impaled, then locked in a freezer to die of cold or suffocation), one is quick to emphasize surprise (the titular “chainsaw” murder), and the other two seems designed specifically to fall between these two extremes (killed with a hammer). So the movie uses the deaths perfectly to hit every button we have, rather than throwing everything at us to see what sticks.

The most famous scene is the dinner, at which the final survivor is tied to a chair, and tormented by the family. This scene is one of the most perfectly horrifying I’ve ever seen. All the characters communicate their roles flawlessly, and the villains actually seem to have no concept that what they’re doing is wrong. Leatherface doesn’t have the mental capacity to understand. Drayton (Jim Siedow), the older of his brothers, seems to see murder as a duty. Nubbins (Edwin Neal), the younger, sees it in the same way a child might see frying an ant with a magnifying glass. And then there’s “Grandfather” (John Dugan), who is so feeble that there’s literally no way to get a read on him or how much of what’s going on he even understands.

A lot of modern horror seems to shy away from using the ‘Other’ as the thing to be afraid of. I can understand this sentiment, as many in today’s world are afraid of inciting hatred against those who are different (a sentiment I fully share). Still, it’s kind of hard to deny that the ‘Other’ is effective as a way to induce fear. And the threats presented in the top five films on this list (in descending order) are, rednecks, an insane person, a demon, an alien and a shark. (I know it’s a spoiler, but this list is over a decade old anyway).

Leatherface makes an excellent ‘Other,’ and it’s hardly fair to expect one of the scariest movies ever made to be politically correct. I didn’t watch this movie to get a treatise on why rednecks deserve respect and compassion. And anyone who hasn’t seen this film and can handle it definitely should. It’s a part of cinema history.