The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at 50: a brutal yet artful shock horror
T he next time you see The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – and if you haven’t seen it, brace yourself accordingly – close your eyes for the first five or 10 minutes and listen, preferably with a good set of headphones. Because as extraordinary and unforgettable as so many of the images are, the soul of the film comes through on the soundtrack, which unsettles you on several different fronts at once. And now 50 years later, when it’s rightly placed on the shortest of shortlists for the greatest horror films ever made, the film’s ambience still blankets American culture, the low hum (and occasional random shriek) of media malevolence.
The first voice belongs, incredibly, to future star John Larroquette, who narrates the opening scroll with newsreel gravitas. “The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths,” begins the narration, which goes on to describe the events as “one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history”. Though director Tobe Hooper and his co-writer, Kim Henkel, drew inspiration from real-life serial murderers like Ed Gein, the scroll is total nonsense with the whiff of verisimilitude, a strategy that many horror films that followed, like The Blair Witch Project, would deploy to similar effect.
From there, Hooper and his sound man, Wayne Bell, accompany closeup of body parts in rigor mortis with creaking effects, the grind of flesh-and-gristle and the piercing pop of flash photography. When those confrontational noises start to abate, in comes the voice of a local newscast on the radio, informing listeners of a cemetery in Texas where dozens of graves have been robbed and worried relatives have been visiting to check on their loved ones’ remains. Films often use TV or radio news to convey narrative information, but it doesn’t stop there for Hooper, who keeps news radio on as an important piece of white noise, with all sorts of banal or shocking stories spilling out.
