Devotees
of horror recall the original Texas
Chainsaw Massacre (1974) with that peculiar mixture of terror and delight
that distinguishes the genuine student of the form from the mere
shudder-seeking dilettante. Though made by virtual unknowns, most of whom, with
the exception of its director and co-writer Tobe Hooper, are now forgotten, and
on a shoestring budget, the picture earned an enormous amount of money and
attracted a huge international following. More important, it explored new
territory in its genre, blazed a twisted trail through the dark and tangled
forests of fear, guiding the way to a whole generation of imitations,
replications, and sequels.
The latest version, currently one of
the top grossers in the country, pretty much duplicates that now ancient model.
It provides more elaborate production values than the relatively crude and
somewhat amateurish original, thickening the straightforward plot with a hint
of emotional complication and a minimal bit of back story. In keeping with the
advances in audience appetite, it also heightens the sadism, fright, and gore
even beyond the usual levels associated with our enlightened time. The result,
still very closely resembling its grand prototype, obviously pleases large
numbers of moviegoers, a whole new generation eager to witness once again the
terrible trouble young folks could get into back in Texas in 1973.
While sticking closely to the basic
plot and the documentary premise, the new movie changes a few details, mostly
in order to exploit more fully its ghoulish mixture of graphic violence and
sick humor. A party of five young people traveling through Texas in a van pick
up a disoriented girl who babbles incoherently, then pulls out a pistol and
kills herself, blowing a large hole in her head that the camera lovingly and
repeatedly peers through, raising voyeurism to a new level.
Naturally panicked, they stop at
some rough draft of a rural service station-diner-pork butcher to inform the
authorities, a process that leads them to the old house where the famous
Leatherface practices his crude surgeries, and a sadistic sheriff right out of
some nightmare of rural Southern justice.
From its opening moments the movie
throbs with menace, reminding us that suspense consists more of when rather than what, so that the audience will grow ever edgier with anticipation
of the inevitable events they know must follow. In keeping with the conventions
of modern horror, the camera, accompanied by ominous music, dwells on numerous
commonplace objects, investing them with a peculiar power, as if each doorknob or
window or kitchen utensil presented some special danger, creating a world in
which even the ordinary and the everyday seethe with menace.
Following
another tradition, the movie’s moral scheme at least suggests a certain logic
in its extreme punishment for some trivial actions, like picking up
hitchhikers, entering strange houses uninvited, and smoking pot, but mostly
simply for having the bad luck to drive down a particular road at a particular
time and so encountering an inexplicable horror.
Aside from its groundbreaking
depiction in loving and lifelike detail of an entirely new and terribly savage
kind of cinematic violence — mutilation, dismemberment, decapitation,
evisceration, cannibalism, etc. — the original film introduced that now
legendary weapon of choice, the lumberjack’s friend of the title. When
Leatherface once again revs up the old Black & Decker, fans of the genre
should experience a specialthrill,
the frisson of a connoisseur hearing the opening notes of some great symphony,
perhaps. Some sinful pleasures, no matter how bizarre, must be experienced to
be forgiven.
The real subject of both the
original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and
the update remain, however, a more common and pervasive dread than any monster
chopping up and flaying his victims. The movie confronts, in even more
nauseating detail than its surface actions, a disquieting vision of what Karl
Marx calls “the idiocy of rural life.” The picture captures with a cruel and
terrible accuracy the parched fields of Texas scorching under an August sun,
the decrepit trailers, the old automobiles rusting in farmyards, the decayed
barns and mills, the dingy interiors of old, empty houses, the ancient,
concentrated filth of a backyard privy.
The movie exhibits that world with a
special brilliance, making it simultaneously real and repulsive, so that one
can almost smell the putrid meat, the dusty air, the moldy furniture, the old
houses, the rotting carpets, all frighteningly familiar to anyone who’s been
there.
The people who inhabit that world
behave with a hostility and viciousness that belies the Romantic notion of the
nobility of peasant life. They demonstrate in their physical and emotional
reactions to the outsiders the perils of isolation and inbreeding, far more
lethal and terrifying than the brutality of some menace or monster. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre achieves its
true horror in its representation of those characters and their environment. In
comparison to that, the violent hillbillies of Deliverance look like urban sophisticates.
The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre, starring
Jessica Biel, Jonathan Tucker, Erica Leerhsen, Mike Vogel, Eric Balfour, David
Dorfman, R. Lee Ermey; screenplay by Scott Kosar; based on a screenplay by Kim
Henkel and Tobe Hooper; directed by Marcus Nispel. Cinemark Tinseltown; Hoyts
Greece Ridge; Loews Webster; Regal Culver Ridge; Regal Eastview; Regal
Henrietta.
You can hear George and his movie reviews on WXXI-FM 91.5
Fridays at 7:20 a.m., rerun on Saturdays at 8:50 a.m.
This article appears in Nov 5-11, 2003.
