![]() Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow and Gunnar Hansen, who respectively portray Sally Hardesty, Franklin Hardesty, the hitchhiker, the proprietor and Leatherface, the main antagonist. The film was eventually passed for UK release in 1999.The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a 1974 American slasher film, directed and produced by Tobe Hooper, who cowrote it with Kim Henkel. They had a problem with the words “chain saw”. It was a slow burn that gathered cult status then became notorious when it was banned by British Board of Film Censors after its initial UK release. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre wasn’t a great success on its first release. The real monsters it seemed were hidden in plain sight on the TV screens, disguised with masks just like Leatherface. Government and the media justified the horrors of war. It was like the TV news reports screened grim footage of the brutal war in Vietnam every night for over a decade. ![]() The Texas Chain Saw Massacre begins with radio chatter reporting graves being robbed and desecrated. It wasn’t just serial killers that inspired Hooper and Henkel. He is currently serving “six consecutive terms of 99 years for his involvement in the Houston Mass Murders” described as “the deadliest case of serial murders in American history.” Brooks was also sentenced to life imprisonment. So this kind of moral schizophrenia is something I tried to build into the characters.Įlmer Wayne Henley was one of two boys (the other was David Owen Brooks) used by serial killer Dean Corll (aka the Candy Man) to lure male classmates and friends to Corll’s house where he raped, tortured and murdered them. He wanted it known that, now that he was caught, he would do the right thing. I saw some news report where Elmer Wayne … said, “I did these crimes, and I’m gonna stand up and take it like a man.” Well, that struck me as interesting, that he had this conventional morality at that point. He was a young man who recruited victims for an older homosexual man. I definitely studied Gein … but I also noticed a murder case in Houston at the time, a serial murderer you probably remember named Elmer Wayne Henley. Though as Hooper’s co-writer Kim Henkel admitted Gein wasn’t the only influence: Both movies use cross-dressing, cannibal serial killer Ed Gein as their source. Hooper’s film is the bastard offspring of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. An open door in a darkened bedroom is more terrifying because of what it suggests. Great horror is what we imagine, not what is made explicit. We believe we see a woman impaled on a hook–but it’s two different shots beautifully edited together by Sallye Richardson and Larry Carroll. Director Hooper excelled at suggesting visceral horror through camera setups and editing. Hailed as the first “slasher” movie there is (surprisingly) hardly any blood on screen. But where these films all followed the genre tropes–gangster movies, attack of the giant beast, or Saturday morning movie serials like Flash Gordon, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre broke new ground and created its own genre. And there was a lot of competition in the 1970s with The Godfather, Jaws, and Star Wars. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was more than just a clever piece of marketing, it was and is one of the greatest films ever made, one of the most influential films ever made.
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