The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
★★★ — The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
There are films you feel obligated to love, and then there's how you actually feel when you watch them. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre sits firmly in that gap for me. It's a classic. I know it's a classic. I'm not here to pretend otherwise. But knowing something is historically significant and genuinely enjoying it are two very different things, and after watching it again recently, I found myself questioning why I'd talked it up so much in the first place.
The first time I saw it I was a young teenager, and there's something about watching horror at that age where the reputation of a film does half the work for you. You're primed to be scared, primed to be impressed, and so you are. You walk away thinking, yeah, that was something. It lodges in the memory. And certain images really do stick, Leatherface's first appearance being the obvious example. That moment lands. It's sudden, it's brutal, and it doesn't apologise for itself. You can see exactly why it left a mark on the genre.
But here's the thing. I watched it again not long ago, this time with my girlfriend, who'd never seen it before. And sitting there with fresh eyes next to me, I started feeling it differently. What I'd half-remembered as a tense, relentless horror film turned out to be, for large stretches, just a woman screaming. And screaming. And screaming some more. For way longer than I'd remembered. The grating quality of it wears you down in a way that stopped feeling like effective filmmaking and started feeling like endurance.
That's my honest experience of it, and I think it's worth saying out loud, because the discourse around this film tends to treat any reservation as a failure of nerve on the viewer's part. I don't think that's fair. You can acknowledge that Tobe Hooper made something genuinely influential, something that rerouted horror filmmaking and gave the slasher genre a grim, grimy template it's been borrowing from ever since, and still come away thinking it's only alright. Both things are true.
It belongs in that strange category of "must see at least once" films where the seeing of it matters more than the experience of watching it. You owe it to yourself to know it. To understand what everyone is referencing, to clock the texture of it, the grotty low-budget look that accidentally became its greatest asset. And then, honestly, once is probably enough. I can't see myself going back for a third viewing with any enthusiasm.
I did have a look at The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) as well, which takes the whole thing in a wildly different direction, and that's worth knowing about if you're working through the franchise.
Three stars. It earns them for what it started, for Leatherface, and for a handful of moments that genuinely unsettle. But if you come to it expecting a gripping horror film that holds up front to back, you might find yourself, like me, a little lost, and very tired of screaming.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1974 | Watched: 2004-03-03
Where to watch
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Tobe Hooper: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)
More from the 1970s: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Here and Elsewhere (1976) · Italianamerican (1974) · Punishment Park (1971)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
