Along with late Saturday night horror host presentations of classic Universal monster films, my love of the genre took root in the early days of the non-franchise, mom & pop video stores. There were several of those shops my father and I would visit. One was located in the same strip mall I got my hair cut at and that was where I first saw IT. The poster for Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I was 5 or 6 at the time and I recall my mind being thrown into a maelstrom of unpleasant prognostication. What on earth could possibly happen in this movie?!?!? I was simultaneously too terrified to find out and too intrigued to stop thinking about it, which I believe is the precise mathematical equation that explains the allure of horror on an impressionable mind. I didn't dare ask my father to rent it for me for I knew, even at that young age, that request would be summarily shot down.
Fast forward 4 or 5 years, now at 10 or 11 years of age, I still hadn't forgotten about seeing the film, but it had slipped to the back of my to-do list. Then, one sunny summer afternoon, I look through the TV guide (the one that came as a supplement to the Sunday paper back in the day) and see that it is playing on broadcast TV in the middle of the day! Seeing that it was already running, I switched immediately to the station airing it right as it came back from commercial break with a card and voice over explaining that the film was being aired uncut and that viewer discretion was advised. The scene opened up on Sally pushing Franklin in the dark and I was taken aback by how dark, grainy and awful the image looked, like a bad dream being transmitted from a nightmare dimension. I became instantly quite nervous and felt dangerously unsafe even though it was the middle of a beautiful summer day and the sun was shining cheerily through the blinds behind me. Sally and Franklin's hopeless bickering led to a crescendo, then out popped Leatherface into the flashlight's glare and I bolted from my cross legged position in font of the cathode ray, frantically turned the television off and ran outside to play and to forget about such things... for a time.
In the interim, I became well versed with far more graphic films. Dead Alive, Bad Taste, Evil Dead 2 and so on and so forth. But, due to some unutterable and ingrained trepidation, never undertook seeing TCM in its entirety. Jump cut to age 19. I was well into the "sleeping on friends and girlfriends couches while being a jobless bum" phase of my life. I was spending the night at the apartment of my good friend Mr. Salty (nickname) when he and his old lady retired to the boudoir, leaving my insomniac self with his tiny tube TV, creaky VCR and collection of horror cassettes. Among the Full Moon features and other detritus, there was a copy of TCM that even in the year 1996 when I came across it was already certifiably ancient. I don't know what quaint distribution company of forgotten lore released it, but there, alone in the dark, inches away from the sickly glow of a minuscule, hand me down, off brand TV, I decided to at long last watch this much ballyhooed and habitually avoided film.
In retrospect, there was no other way to experience the film for the first time. The diminutive screen and need to keep the volume down due to the late hour compelled me to sit closely and strain to hear, which served only to suck me into the films degenerative web all the more. It felt dream like and mysterious, yet also visceral and punishing. The last 40 minutes was the closest I'd ever seen a film capture a descent into hell up to that point. It didn't feel like a titillating, voyeuristic viewing of a produced piece of entertainment so much as a transgressive intrusion on someones ultimate physical suffering and attendant mental collapse. As soon as it finished, I rewound it and instantly watched it again. Over the next several months, I probably watched the film 30 times myself and another 15 where I forced others to actually sit down and focus on it, cause if there was ever a film that the average person thinks they've seen, but in point of fact hasn't and can't begin to comprehend how horribly powerful and terrifically upsetting it is, it's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I still revisit it at least twice a year and its Herculean strength has diminished little over the decades.
I won't go into the subtext, cinematography and sundry reasons why the film is so majestic. I've expounded a great deal on that in written reviews elsewhere on the web. I would however like to make one final point. I am of the opinion that if you are one of those horror fans that drones on and on about how much you hate torture porn, you have no right being a fan of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Tobe Hooper's TCM is the prototypical torture porn film in the same manner that Halloween and Psycho are the forbears of the slasher film. It is a story of a group of youth's out of their element and captured by a sadistic, inhuman force that gleefully goes about psychologically and physically breaking them down until they eventually kill them. It is the bloody chamber archetype and is perhaps the most primal example of a horror story. The themes and base fears exploited by the core scenario are found everywhere throughout culture from The Passion of Jesus Christ to Hansel and Gretel to Hostel. For the love of god, the last 35 minutes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are Sally Hardesty strapped to a chair, screaming in revulsion, terror and agony as a group of slimy, sweat drenched inbreds paw, poke and prod her. If that doesn't qualify as torture porn, I have no idea what the hell does.
It is one of the most influential horror films ever made and the prime example of a movie being oft imitated yet never duplicated. It is lightning in a bottle. It is a window into hell. It is the diseased heart beating beneath the American dream. It is the one and only, Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
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