![]() ![]() Hooper isn’t bothered with such niceties -there are no explanations in his film and it’s the more terrifying because of it. The unnecessary 2003 remake fell foul of that great scourge of Hollywood horror, the need to rationalise and explain – it tried to give the hulking Leatherface a motive for his behaviour, a motive which ultimately made him more human and less monstrous. They treat their captives as they would a side of meat (“our family’s always been in meat”) and show no recognition of them as fellow human beings. The horror stems from the characters themselves, their lack of motivation and their apparent lack of guilt over what they do. For a film with a reputation like this one (most of it generated by that once-in-a-lifetime title), it’s surprising just how much restraint Hooper shows in the violent scenes – only in the last ten minutes or so do we see the blood flowing freely. Hooper’s direction is virtually text book exploitation. The audience has no-one to root for and even when we are offered a sort of identification figure, she’s ultimately driven mad by her ordeal. The film turns many of the conventions of the genre on its head – none of the characters in Chain Saw Massacre (and that includes the victims) are particularly likable, for example, and this, perhaps more than anything else, contributes to the uncomfortable atmosphere of the film. ![]() It eschewed the ‘safe’ supernatural horror tradition of Universal and Hammer, opting instead for a dark and dangerous vision of a decaying rural America populated by psychotic cannibals – this was a new kind of horror for the post-Vietnam, post-Manson era. It belongs to the new breed of horror film, as exemplified by the film that inspired Hooper in the first place, Night of the Living Dead. There have been many claims for films to have been the most influential genre product of the 1970s, though The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has surely more right to the title than any other. By the time Hooper transferred the story to the screen, the Gein connection was played down rather in favour of a relentless classic of low budget energy and enthusiasm, Hooper creating one of the cult films of the 1970s. ![]() He was even said to have flayed his mother’s corpse, wearing her skin as a suit while out grave-robbing.Īrmed with one of the truly great titles in the history of the genre (nothing could ever be as grisly as it suggests), Hooper and Henkel utilised many of the details of the Gein case for their roller coaster screenplay. When arrested, his house was found full of human remains, limbs in various states of decay and grotesque household fittings fashioned from human skin. The inspiration behind such diverse product as Psycho (1960), Deranged (1974), Three on a Meathook (1972) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Gein was a lonely psychotic who, in the 1950s, was charged with at least two murders and the mutilation of numerous bodies stolen from the local cemetery. Supposedly deciding after a late night viewing of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) that the way to commercial success lay with a modern horror film, Hooper turned (like Hitchcock and Jeff Gillen and Alan Ormsby before him) to the exploits of Great American Madman, Ed Gein. Tobe Hooper had already made the bizarre, very-much-of-its-time feature Eggshells (1969), before he got his big break with this ground-breaking horror classic.
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