She nearly retches and runs from the room. She moves to an adjacent room and falls, surrounded by feathers, a caged chicken and furniture made of bone and skin. Pam approaches the house, calling out to Kirk. Kirk convulses, Leatherface hits him again and drags him away, slamming the metal door leading to the butcher’s kitchen shut. Leatherface appears and bashes his head with a hammer. Kirk knocks on the door to investigate and heads inside, hearing the squealing of a pig. But that one Saturday afternoon in college, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre did just that, and this scene in particular illustrates precisely why that was. It’s rare that a film with hype, reputation and a strong presence in the greater cultural zeitgeist can manage to live up to its name, with all of the power and impact such a thing implies. This scene, more than most, proves what can be accomplished in the imagination by way of purposeful suggestion as opposed to explicit depiction. Tobe Hooper carries these words to the screen with an adeptness of vision that provides pace and tension to the proceedings, ultimately erring on the side of less-is-more in the gore department, despite the film’s incomparable reputation for excess. Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper’s script is equally perilous, comprised of large, unyielding blocks of text which plot out the actions and demises of Kirk and Pam in agonizing and graphic detail, providing the essential foundation to the scene and its torturous tone. In many ways, it was a defining moment in my horror education and one that will always haunt me and anyone else who bares witness to it.
This scene in particular, and its subsequent dealings with Pam, remained in my mind as the definition of pitch-perfect, harrowingly terrifying cinema throughout the rest of the film and long beyond its conclusion. A believable concoction of a man with the instincts of a frightened child and an inability to recognize his own, or anyone else’s, humanity.įrom the moment he barreled onto the screen with an animalistic squeal, striking and dragging Kirk away as a large, metal door slammed shut behind him, Leatherface emerged as one of the scariest figures I had ever seen onscreen. Leatherface was not some unstoppable force of evil, vengeful ghost, or an undead, machete-wielding hermit in the woods- he was the product of abuse, inbreeding and a world cast aside by society as a whole. It scared me, yes, not because of a clever, supernatural conceit, but because it tapped into something monstrously authentic. It was that rare feeling of deep-rooted recognition that my mind had just experienced something that it would never forget. When all was said and done, I sat in stunned silence. Without knowing anything about it, I felt as though I knew everything about it and my fear to face the thing greatly informed my viewing that fateful Saturday afternoon. This was a vision of terror unlike anything else, a film that made the viewer feel as dirty as the filthy, bone-based decor which adorned every room in the godforsaken manor that the latter half of the film is concerned with. This was iconic horror of the Grindhouse sort, predating Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger, deriving from a time of hyper-realism and documentary-style guerrilla filmmaking. Its reputation had preceded it, of course. Its hard, sweaty realness swept over me, aligning my senses to the sights, sounds, and implied smells of the impossibly distant world the film’s teenagers had found themselves in along with the inconceivable cost of admission.
#KIRK THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE MOVIE#
A movie that begins in flickering, splotchy brightness, so raw and so red that it’s difficult to tell what’s more disturbing: the unsettling Rorschach-test-like visuals or the dark chaos of the disparate soundscape. It’s a film that deals in the sun just as much as it does the lack thereof. In some ways, I think I believed that the bright, midday setting would perhaps shield me from some of the film’s impact. The sun shone in through an adjacent window as I placed the disc in the tray and sat down uneasily.
I was going to watch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). I don’t know why it had to be then but it just felt right. I felt something in the pit of my stomach. But I hadn’t watched it yet, hadn’t even opened the DVD. I had acquired this particular title fairly early on. After a moment, I came upon a shiny, black case marked with sharp silver letters. I perused my burgeoning collection, taking in box art and weighing my mood against the tone of what the images presented. I had been delving into the horror genre and had accumulated quite a few titles that I had still yet to see so this posed the perfect opportunity. As was customary for me at the time, I decided to watch a movie. One afternoon in college, I found myself alone on a lazy Saturday with nothing at all to do.
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