A Chain Saw At The Edge of Reality

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a truly unknowable, beautiful horror film

There are bits of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre that test the limits of acceptance. Not of “good” taste (The amount of gore shown onscreen is fairly minimal, but the ferocity of the film is such that we frequently Mandela effect it into a total bloodbath,) but of what we know to be true. It starts from before anyone ever sees the film, with iconic posters declaring that it details “America’s most bizarre and brutal crimes” and that “What happened is true. Now the motion picture that’s just as real.” It carries over into the beginning of the film, with the opening credits laid against sunspots and the erupting red glaze of our central star and the scrawl of narration that tells us that what we are about to see really happened to “five youths.” And so it goes on and on. Pam, reading aloud from her astrology book, even comments on the characters’ (and audience’s) ability to grasp what is going on: “There are moments where we cannot believe that what is happening is really true. Pinch yourself and you may find out that it is.”

Depending on who you ask, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was developed from an amalgamation of actual events (The grisly crimes of Ed Gein being the most frequently accused culprit) and experiences (Director Tobe Hooper would frequently tell interviewers a darkly funny anecdote about wondering if he could clear out an annoying crowd at a tool store with a chainsaw.) But the authenticity of Leatherface and his hollering cannibal clan is only the tip of what it means to call the film “real.” Taken at face value, the film fits neatly into one of the most tangible genres there is: The survival horror story.

“Who will survive and what will be left of them?” rang the final tagline on its poster, a rallying cry to all those curious about the most visceral subject matter possible: the destruction of our own human bodies. And there is certainly validity to fitting Chain Saw into that category. Thanks to Hooper’s unstoppable direction, the sweaty, gnarly performances of the cast, and the look of the film, which ranges from odd sun-baked beauty to sudden nightmare realizations, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is just as much of a marathon trial for the audience as it is for the doomed young adults.

But on the opposite end, there remains something completely unknowable about the movie, something cosmic and hopelessly infinite. Sally Hardesty, laughing hysterically in the back of a truck as Leatherface swings his titular weapon in a dance of death, isn’t the neat end implied by the film’s stabs at truth. Instead, it has more in common with something Lovecraftian, like Danforth staring back at the Mountains of Madness and being driven into insanity by what he’s witnessed. I’ve frequently described the discovery of Leatherface’s house by the teens as descending into a “rabbit hole to hell,” less a discovery and more like an Alice in Wonderland trip where the depravity of the imagination is unlocked by falling into it by mistake.

By the time that Sally flees the house, with Leatherface, wearing a full suit and tie and carrying his roaring saw, in hot pursuit, we see that it’s not that far from the highway. More literal horror films make great pains to establish just how far away from civilization everything is, but Chain Saw never does. Sure, it’s not exactly in a suburban center, but the killers’ home is just a simple walk away from where Sally’s grandparents lived (Sally and Franklin had even visited there when they were younger.) They are a drive away from a community and are surrounded by emblems of the cattle industry. The murderous family (particularly “Cook”) complains about gas and the price of electricity. The hitchhiker’s bizarre desecrations of corpses is listed in what seems like an endless report about a crime wave and ensuing misery.

It’s so real and so close that one could touch it, and yet far too close to really be. It rides the line between the material we can grasp and the logic that we can’t. A frequent phrase that’s said whenever a person disappears is that it seemed like the “earth just swallowed them up” - a borderline supernatural admission of futility, that someone can be so close and yet gone like they’d never existed at all. The massive steel door that Leatherface slams shut in his house, one that, a mere step out of the hallway, will lead to be a macabre pattern of odes to death, has always felt like that to me. Swallowed up. Like you were never there. And if you were, like you were never more than meat.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre offers no condolences at its end, no “This is what happened to the killers after Sally made it back to town and told the police her story.” Of course, the film was followed by a line of sequels and remakes, some more connected to it than others, but in a way, its line was never meant to be traced. For to continue it means that it was there at all and that there is a concrete way to find out what happened and repeat it.

There is evidence. As the news report indicates, people have been disgusted and confused by the Hitchhiker’s fleshy, rotting monuments. The man who fled from his truck saw Leatherface attempt to tear through it. The Cook warned the kids to stay away from the old houses, a far cry from the cackling demon that Hooper reveals him to be later. Are they even the same man?

But these are just remnants, like footprints found in the morning outside your window. Who was out there? And why? You cannot see them until you’re trapped with them, the heavy door slamming shut behind you. When Sally manages to escape from the clutches of the brothers and their ancient grandfather and bursts through the window, she pauses in the early light of day as if stunned that there’s even an outside at all.

“There are moments where we cannot believe that what is happening is really true. Pinch yourself and you may find out that it is.”