The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Directed by Tobe Hooper
Five friends head out to rural Texas to visit the grave of a grandfather. On the way, they stumble across what appears to be a deserted house, only to discover something sinister within. Something armed with a chainsaw.
4 connections found
View:
4 films that influenced The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
What critics say influenced The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Loosely based on the story of serial killer Ed Gein (who would also inspire 1960's " Psycho "), the film takes the viewer into the mouth of unquenchable insanity and madness and refuses to loosen its grip until the final power tool is silenced by the end credits.
If Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” was the premiere slasher movie, Hooper’s film followed that film’s thread to its logical arc of exploitation.
Time has not dimmed the shock value of this seminal classic from director Tobe Hooper that's based on the same real-life case that inspired Psycho.
Typically, Hitchcock's Psycho is referred to as the film that sliced horror history in half along socio-political lines, but for all its subversions of the rules of horror, the film still faithfully presents mainstream American society (as represented by Vera Miles) as the norm.
A band of charmless youngsters ignore all the warnings and stumble across a psychopathic family (closer to Charles Addams than Psycho) in remote farmland.
The first big success story of this wave was George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead, which evoked a country coming apart at the seams even as it portrayed a more threatening apocalypse.
Of course, it's also possible that Leatherface becomes simply the literalization of the impossibility of Sally's situation (the personal shadow to the collective shadow of Romero's horde of shambling zombies from Night of the Living Dead )--a monkey on her back she loves but abhors, embraces but is embarrassed of, and is tied to as intimately as the blood rite in which she finally finds herself the centerpiece.
Along with Night of the Living Dead and The Last House on the Left, it ushered in the modern age of horror in the 1970s.
The phrase also suits this ingenious independent production, a genuine American nightmare that is not only uncompromisingly ferocious but truly original, and as much an art film in its way as another fact-inspired murder movie shot a year earlier by another Texas-connected filmmaker, Terrence Malick’s “Badlands.”
More than the typical rise-of-the-bumpkins horror conceit, it is, along with John Boorman's Deliverance from two years earlier, the classic example of a film that isn't about what it's ostensibly about.