Editorials
‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ Turns 45: Looking Back at How the Horror Classic Was Initially Received
It takes years for a movie to earn its status as a classic, cult or otherwise. The Thing, for example, didn’t become a beloved favorite until years after it infamously tanked in theaters. Similarly, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre disgusted and appalled most critics and audiences upon release- though its catchy title and reputation meant a sturdy box office turnout. Nothing about the movie turned out the way the cast and crew thought it would, particularly the film’s reception. Leatherface actor Gunnar Hansen wasn’t prepared for the way audiences would receive his performance and how that reception would change and grow in the decades since, nor was he prepared for how it would affect everything up to and including his love life.
After The Texas Chain Saw Massacre began its theatrical run on October 1, 1974, in Texas before spreading across the country, discourse over the film got heated. Johnny Carson lampooned the film in opening monologues of The Tonight Show, The London Times lambasted it among many other trades, multiple countries banned it outright, and some of the cast and crew removed it from their resume in hopes of landing future gigs. It was only when critic Rex Reed raved about the film, declaring it the scariest film he’d ever seen, that the ice began to thaw and the tides began to turn. In the 45 years since its initial release, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has shifted from reviled trash to a celebrated work of art. It’s a heralded classic now, but for years it wasn’t easy being Leatherface actor Gunnar Hansen.
If you’ve read Hansen’s novel Chain Saw Confidential, a must read for fans of the movie, then you’re probably familiar with a story near the end where Hansen briefly recalls taking a first date to see his movie. She reacted to the invite warmly, excited about the possibility of dating a star, but the moment she saw Hansen’s Leatherface put his poor victim on a meat hook, well, the night ended with a door shut firmly in his face.
Hansen’s close friend Stephen Harrigan, a University of Texas graduate who went on to become staff writer and editor for Texas Monthly magazine, hilariously recounted his version of events that night for the magazine in honor of the film’s 40th anniversary. The article details how the double date went awry, while also noting that Hansen at least came away with his own fan club that night.
It was for the May 1985 issue of Texas Monthly that Hansen first told of that disastrous first date, in an article penned by Hansen himself. It might’ve been the first date derailed by his turn as Leatherface, but as he put it in the article- penned over a decade after that fateful date- it was hardly the last.
“And, as many others would in later years, she had confused me with the character I had played,” Hansen wrote. “So now when I meet a woman who wants to see the movie with me, I suggest she not see it. It’s just another horror movie, I tell her, the kind I would never go to myself, had I not been in it. I can’t stand horror movies, I say. They scare me. It usually works.”
Tobe Hooper’s seminal film changed horror as we know it, though it’s taken decades to get a relatively clear picture as to how. Even now, there are articles that still proclaim this classic to be one of the goriest ever made, when very little gore actually graces the screen. For Hansen, making the film was hell. So was getting paid on the project. Though he’d have redone it all again in a heartbeat. He wound up moving back to New England not long after, resuming the career that held his heart in the first place; writing. He learned a lot making the film, and grew to be proud of its legacy. Even if creating one of horror’s most iconic characters wound up derailing his love life for a spell after its release.
We often look back at the trajectories of classic films, but sometimes examining how iconic roles affected their actors is just as fascinating. We miss you, Gunnar.
And happy 45th, Leatherface.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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