The terror of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre lies in each character being so unceremoniously dealt with - like they're just livestock at a slaughterhouse. It's the kind of body horror that shows how brutally easy it is to turn us all into lifeless meat sacks, rather than reveling in how much drawn-out mutilation a person can handle before expiring. A single crack to the skull of Pam's boyfriend, Kirk, sends the poor hunk into a silent seizure reminiscent of a floundering fish out of water. Leatherface got all dressed up for his dinner date :) Credit: Vortexĭespite the bombastic flashiness of Leatherface's iconic weapon, his most horrific kills are carried out with the quick and quiet precision of a club. In contrast, Texas Chainsaw Massacre keeps you trapped in a mundane, existential disgust over just how fragile the human body you're living in really is. In the modern age of gore horror, popularized by franchises like Saw, the fantastically over-the-top torture of a character scooping out their own eyeball has an almost disassociative effect, numbing the viewer with shock value. In essence, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre reveals the stark difference between horror that prioritizes grossness over goriness. In one of Hooper's most famous quotes on horror (Opens in a new tab), the director insists, "You've got to send a physical sensation through and not let off the hook." And let us off the hook he does not! Hooper's Leatherface instead casually hangs us on a meat hook by our flesh, only to ignore our screams and meander off to deal with something more pressing. But The Texas Chainsaw Massacre grounds viewers in a body horror that's closer to home - and far more disturbing for it. Over-the-top torture porn certainly makes one squeamish. Much like the happy accident that forced Steven Spielberg to barely show the titular shark in Jaws (Opens in a new tab), 1974's Texas Chainsaw Massacre's PG-restrictiveness inadvertently revealed how less can be so much more when it comes to body horror. I don't know if we'll ever get another horror movie where you can so viscerally smell the blood, sweat, and decay wafting off the silver screen. Every subsequent reboot, like the 2003 series (and, in all likelihood, the upcoming 2022 remake) equally fails to capture the original's iconically understated grisliness. But that only resulted in movies with 100% more camp and about 15% of its predecessor's masterfully immersive rancidness. In fact, director Tobe Hooper purposefully shot his first feature film with a PG rating in mind (Opens in a new tab), only for an obviously shook MPAA to slap him with its most explicit label available at the time (later replaced by today's NC-17).Īfter the first film's unmitigated success, Hooper got a free license to amp up the bloodiness as many notches as he wanted in the sequels. Yet despite featuring literal cannibals hungry for innocent teen flesh, the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre was surprisingly devoid of any truly graphic gore. Receiving an X rating in America, it was flat-out banned from several countries, including the UK. Welcome to Thanks, I Love It, our series highlighting something onscreen we're obsessed with this week.Īt the risk of pissing off every gore-loving Saw franchise fanatic or Human Centipede devotee (if you sick freaks even exist), we need to state an undeniable truth: After all these decades, the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre still reigns supreme as the ultimate masterclass in gross body horror.īack in 1974, the beloved slasher was unlike anything audiences had ever seen before.
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