Within the horror genre, there are certain maxims that have become widely accepted over time, passed along as fact without anyone really stopping to ask whether or not they’re even true. Think of it as the Mandela Effect of horror, a kind of collective false memory that incorrectly tells us Hannibal Lecter greets Agent Starling with “Hello, Clarice” in The Silence of the Lambs (he doesn’t) or that the Freeling house in Poltergeist is built on a Native American burial ground (it isn’t). We operate from the principle that these things are true because we’ve heard them so many times, but a closer look sometimes reveals that our collective memories are false. This will be important in just a minute.
I made the mistake recently of listening to a few minutes of a podcast devoted to arguing why Tobe Hooper is an overrated filmmaker. As Hooper is my favorite director, there are plenty of reasons why I think such a case is ignorant and wrongheaded, but okay. Everyone gets his or her opinion and the world is a rainbow. Not surprisingly, the discussion eventually turned to the tired question of whether or not Hooper “really” directed Poltergeist, which has been debated in horror circles ever since a misguided L.A. Times article created the rumor during the movie’s production. I don’t wish to reopen the debate as to whether or not Hooper was the director (he was); I bring it up only because the argument being put forth here – and for years elsewhere, really – was that Hooper couldn’t have directed Poltergeist because it is so slick, so polished, so stylistically different than The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Okay. Right. This argument presupposes that a filmmaker is incapable of making two films that are different from one another. It also presupposes that Tobe Hooper didn’t make any movies between Texas Chain Saw and Poltergeist, when in reality he directed Eaten Alive and Salem’s Lot and The Funhouse, a movie that is very stylistically similar to Poltergeist. But what bothers me most about this argument is that it mischaracterizes The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as a movie that it isn’t. Here’s where that Mandela Effect comes in: the common wisdom – our collective memory – states that TCM is a gritty, handheld, almost documentary-like horror film, one which stumbles into its greatness almost by accident. This is not true. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a carefully constructed, gorgeously composed, even beautiful film, and the accepted belief that it is anything else is as misguided as the idea that we see the knife piercing Janet Leigh in Psycho. People might say it, but that doesn’t make it true.
In the case of Texas Chain Saw, I get it. The movie is so visceral and has such sweaty immediacy that we remember how it makes us feel and then ascribe a style it seems would match our emotional state: we are so shaken that surely it’s because this is the raw, amateurish work of a madman. I’m as guilty of misremembering the movie as anyone, for years believing that Hooper had used a kind of cinema verité approach to make me feel as claustrophobic and unhinged as I did in my memory. But revisiting the film during its 4K anniversary restoration a few years ago reminded me that Hooper and cinematographer Daniel Pearl made a gorgeous movie. Yes, it was shot for very little money. And, yes, the 16mm film stock used is grainy, especially after the 35mm blowup. But these qualities don’t detract from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s formal elements or the fact that it is, like every Tobe Hooper movie (including Poltergeist), deliberate and beautiful.
The formal craft is on display from its first moments: after a montage of crime scene photos, the movie proper opens on a rotting corpse baking in the Texas sun, slowly pulling back in an impressive crane shot to reveal the barren landscape surrounding it. The shot is complicated but graceful, the composition telling us just what we need to know: there is death out here, and there is nothing else. It’s a grisly sight and one that’s unsettling thanks to the scorched orange color – heat radiating off the screen, practically letting us smell the awful thing we’re seeing – but the entire opening shot is expertly composed. There’s no quick & dirty, run & gun about it.
Or look at what is arguably the movie’s most famous shot, which finds the doomed Pam (Teri McMinn) walking towards the Sawyer house, the camera following close behind her iconic red shorts. Pearl’s camera begins on a closeup of Pam sitting on a swing as she decides to go looking for her boyfriend, then reverses to behind her, traveling underneath the swing and continuing to track her at a low angle in a single unbroken shot. The positioning of McMinn’s legs and the angle leave the house looming large, dwarfing the unsuspecting girl who has no idea just how small she is in the face of certain death awaiting her inside. It’s a fluid, peaceful sequence – the last moment of peace Pam will experience before she’s grabbed by Leatherface, dragged screaming inside the house, and hung to die on a meathook. It’s a great shot, too, one often copied in subsequent horror movies, including by Eli Roth in Cabin Fever and Marcus Nispel in his 2003 remake of Chain Saw.
Consider the equally iconic final shots of the movie, in which Leatherface does his chainsaw dance as a screaming Sally Hardesty escapes on the back of a pickup truck. Pearl shoots Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) against a sunrise worthy of a Terrence Malick movie, the tranquil beauty of nature acting in stark contrast to the animal madness and industrial roar of a killer and his chainsaw. It’s more than just a gorgeous, haunting image, too. On a narrative level, the shot tells us that the dawn has arrived and Sally has survived her long, terrifying night as prisoner of a cannibal family. Beyond that, though, the blazing orange backdrop is there to bear witness: whereas Pearl frames the moon as a dispassionate observer in the earlier scenes of Sally being chased and terrorized, the sun is an active participant, its rays touching down just as Sally escapes. It doesn’t only take her side, however. The sun rises on Leatherface, too, who lives to kill another day, his dance framed against the sun as a kind of duet, the Texas air heating up again and bringing us back full circle to the start of the movie. The days, they go on, and the saw…well, the saw is family.
I could continue to list shots from the film and make a case for why they are beautiful and full of careful planning and intent, not just randomly grabbed on the fly the way so many horror fans seem to remember. There’s no need for it. Just revisit The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and pay attention to how well constructed it is, from the art direction to the photography to the editing, and then tell me again that it’s impossible that the same director was ever able to do the same thing but with a bigger budget and for a major studio. It is the work of a born filmmaker, one who never again made a movie as revolutionary as this one, but whose every subsequent effort shows the same attention to the formal details of filmmaking. The next time someone begins comparing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to a snuff film, ask them when they saw it last, and if that’s an observation they made with their own eyes or if it’s just something they’ve heard enough times that they’ve begun to believe it themselves. It may not change anyone’s mind about who they believe directed Poltergeist, but at least it will force them to come up with a better argument – one that accurately recognizes The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for the masterpiece it is, and not just the one we remember it being.
