WARNING: This commentary contains spoilers for the film and describes graphic violence.
As a youngster, I was pretty terrified of horror movies. I avoided a lot of the classic '70s-'90s horror movies until I was an adult. That was the period when horror was at its most blood-curdling, I think. Horror's always been a black sheep to a degree, but the modern horror fandom has a sort of sicko element to it that descends from 1970s exploitation. I say this all affectionately, and as a way of getting around to saying I saw The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for the first time as an adult, on Blu-Ray disc, in the Year of Our Leatherface 2022.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, by which I mean the 1974 original (I have not seen any of the others), has a reputation as one of the scariest movies ever made. It earns it. I went into the movie fairly fresh--all I knew about it came from pop culture, so I knew there was a chainsaw involved, and that the "monster" is a hulking man named Leatherface who wears a mask of human skin, a la Ed Gein. I was not really expecting it to be quite as sophisticated as it is. The film is a commentary on the changing society of the 1970s, with the main protagonists a group of young people on a trip to the country, ostensibly to visit the two leads' abandoned family home. In the film it is obvious that the rural economy is in tatters, and the community with it. The topic still feels relevant in 2022, as we fret about the divide between urban and rural, how certain parts of the United States seem like they're living in totally different realities. This was true in the '70s, too. And now, as then, there's a sense of despair pervading the country.
In the film, meat appears quickly as a dividing factor, as one of the traveling youths mentions being vegetarian. This is in the midst of one of the characters graphically describing the slaughter of cattle as they drive past the slaughterhouse that served as the engine for jobs in the community. The contrast between the old way--sledgehammer--and the new--captive-bolt stunner pistol--is, of course, deeply relevant. The villains of the film, Leatherface's family, are obsessed with the old way. Stuck on it. And so when we finally get to the slaughter, it is actually less about chainsaws and more about sledgehammers and meat hooks. The first kill is shot at a distance, an impassive view. Like a nature documentary.
A curious thing about this movie that I didn't expect was how little blood and gore actually appears onscreen. It's famous for being nightmare fuel, one of the scariest movies ever made, and yet it's tailored for a modern PG-13 if we were being technical. Most of the violence is shot at a distance, or framed in a way such that we don't see it. The most disturbing death in the movie happens early, a girl picked up and impaled on a meat hook. Some specks of blood on the wall behind her and a half second shot of an empty bucket underneath her are as graphic as the blood gets, but the actress writhes in a way that feels real, unexaggerated, and it's far more horrifying than if they had shown gore. After watching it, I read that the director had planned filming to aim for a PG rating (which was a more liberal category in the years before PG-13 was added). Not that he expected to get one, necessarily, but he figured it would get him some room for negotiation with the MPAA. They gave the film an X. With several minutes of cuts, he was able to renegotiate for an R.
In the 1970s and 1980s, it was pretty common to give horror films an X rating, usually for blood and gore. But The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is so effective at implying the gore, even without showing it onscreen, that you feel like you've seen it anyway. The whole thing is tense, terrifying. It earns every ounce of its reputation.