The Toothsome Delights of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre"

Horror movies and I have had a contentious relationship over the years. One of the reasons I enjoy movies so much is that I can get really emotionally involved in them and enjoy the catharsis. I usually don't have trouble letting go of the feelings that movies evoke from me, but horror films are an exception. They get to me. As a kid they would give me nightmares and the strange, unpleasant anxiety dreams that lingered in the back of my subconscious mind for years. Sometimes it didn't even have to be horror films. I traced an adolescent neurosis about doomsday prophecies back to a trailer for the 1994 film "Nostradamus," that I had seen in a Taiwanese cinema. There were a few titles like "Poltergeist" and "The Shining" that I loved, but mostly I avoided the horror genre.

It wasn't until I was in college that I could start appreciating anything with much gore and splatter, and not until I started on the road to becoming a cineaste that I started actively acquainting myself with the old standbys that I'd missed in my youth like "Halloween," "Nightmare on Elm Street," and the George Romero zombie films. Sometimes I'd still hit bumps, like the ending of the "Dawn of the Dead" remake that left me creeped out of my head for days. I still find many graphic films difficult, and I confess I still cover my eyes when something pointy is about to meet something squishy. With this in mind, imagine my surprise when I watched a notorious horror movie that I'd been avoiding for years last night, and found myself rather charmed and enamored with it: "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre."

I found nothing scary about "Texas Chain Saw," which is why I think I liked it so much. It's a freak show. The stars of the movie are the bizarre killers - the hitchhiker (Edwin Neal), the shopkeeper (Jim Siedow), Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen), and Grandpa (John Dugan). I had no investment whatsoever in the survival of the attractive young victims, who are so two-dimensional and dull to watch, seeing them killed off one by one is no small relief. Sally (Marilyn Burns), Jerry (Allen Danziger), Kirk (William Vail), and Pam (Teri McMinn) are barely distinguishable from each other. It's only Sally's wheelchair-bound brother Franklin (Paul A. Partain) who stands out thanks to his handicap, and he's not a very sympathetic presence. So rather than feeling dread at the impending deaths, instead there was just a pleasant anticipation.

Sally, Franklin, and their friends are on a drive through the backroads of Texas, first to visit a recently vandalized cemetery where their grandfather was interred, then to look in on the old family homestead. They pick up a hitchhiker who acts bizarrely, first cutting himself and then attacking Franklin. Then they run out of gas in a rural spot, get separated, and eventually come across the home of a murderous cannibal enclave. The primary villain is Leatherface, a big, hulking, silent brute who wears a mask over his face made out of someone else's face, and has a penchant for sledgehammers and chainsaws. His appearance and behavior are so over-the-top, so ridiculous and strange, it's impossible to take it seriously or find it scary. The hitchhiker with the knife at the beginning of the movie is more genuinely disturbing.

Though "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" didn't scare me, I still found it a great watch. Once Leatherface makes his appearance, the film becomes an ethnographical record of the habits and culture of the indigenous American cannibal. We get to see Leatherface's home, decorated with all manner of macabre ornaments fashioned out of the bones and other remains of his victims. There's a nifty looking lamp in the dining room made from the skins of two human faces stitched together, showing the considerable creativity and ingenuity of the maker. The family dynamics that play out among the various cannibals characters is intriguing, especially the clan's reverence for their corpse-like Grandpa. The more gruesome the details, the funnier and more delightful it got.

I have a pretty sick sense of humor, and when faced with the spectacle of Leatherface chasing Sally around in the dark woods with a chainsaw, where Sally's nonstop screaming was consistently louder than the chainsaw, I just had to laugh. Maybe it was the 70s production values, Tobe Hooper's directing style, or the utter vapidity of the main characters, but I found the story so divorced from reality it was easy to sit back and enjoy the carnage. There was no malice or meanness to the horrors, and the killings weren't nearly as drawn-out or fetishized as the ones you see today. I expected something sadistic and gloomy. Instead, I found myself in the middle of a wacky Texan Grand Guignol, and I loved it.