Best Movie Ever: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

The Leatherface family sez: "Join us for dinner!"

Tobe Hooper's low-budget rural horror masterpiece The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is my single favorite movie of all time. It appears on every iteration of my personal "Top Films" list and is my go-to answer to the question "What is your favorite movie?" 

I love low-budget films and I love horror films. My love for low-budget film aesthetics dates back to my 1990s independent film fandom, spurred by stuff like Slacker (1991), El Mariachi (1992), Clerks, Go Fish (both 1994), and Gummo (1997) but also via the influence of John Waters, whose films I started watching voraciously in the late '90s and 2000s.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is the pivotal film that won me over to the horror genre. I had seen Halloween and a few other slashers (including Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers and the incredibly weird Sleepaway Camp) before I first watched Tobe Hooper's masterpiece in 2002. I enjoyed those films, especially Halloween, but Texas Chain Saw really showed me what a powerful horror film can do.*

There is something special, something charged and electric and more about TCM. I don't like the phrase "this movie transcends its genre" because that is both technically impossible (if it is a genre film, it is a genre film and it ain't transcending anything) as well as insulting to whichever genre you happen to be talking about. Genre-film lovers should never use that phrase.

I will say instead that TCM is a superlative example of the rural slasher genre. Along with Peeping Tom, Psycho (both 1960), Black Christmas (1974), and Deep Red (1975), TCM helps set the template for the "classic" slasher which fully emerges by the time of Black Christmas or surely Halloween (1978).

As far as the specifically rural slasher goes, TCM is the best of the best -- its only close rivals are Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II (1987), and the intense, well-shot The Descent (2005). Other more distant (but still worthy) runners-up include Motel Hell (1980), Pumpkinhead (1988), Wrong Turn (2003), Wolf Creek (2005), the even better Wolf Creek 2 (2013), and Rob Zombie's underrated Halloween II (2009).**

Despite (or probably because of) its low budget, Texas Chain Saw's camera work is effective and inventive, its mise-en-scene artfully insane. Its performances are all-out. It is tautly edited and incredibly suspenseful. It is, in every aesthetic category, a triumph of scrappy, compelling, no-frills filmmaking.

One of Texas Chain Saw's great strengths is that it trusts its imagery to convey its ideas. The shot compositions and blocking tell the story without the need for dialogue. That said, the dialogue, particularly about the Leatherface family's history in the slaughtering industry ("My family's always been in meat" brags Hitchhiker), is believable as spoken by the characters and simultaneously freighted with deeper thematic implications.

Chain Saw uses many images as "free motifs," that is, as abstract imagery that suggests, rather than outright denotes, meaning. For example, there are several recurring images of circular objects: the sun, the moon, a windmill. To me these suggest cyclical time, prehistoric time, the centripetal energy of the Leatherface family devouring itself. The windmill in particular hints that the Leatherface family is "spinning its wheels" -- see also the generator that endlessly runs, powering nothing. All these circular images rhyme with each other, with certain circular camera movements as when the van pulls into the gas station, and with Leatherface's twirling dance that ends the film. When Sally flees Leatherface, her journey is also circular, from the house to the gas station then back to the house. Circularity abounds.***

Chain Saw's experimental soundtrack contributes much to the film's overall tone of terror. The minimalist score consists of weird pitch-bent tones resembling metal scraping against metal, plus occasional staccato percussion including cymbals and gongs. The diegetic music, especially the plinky little ditty "Fool for a Blonde" by Roger Bartlett is eerie and effective during Hitchhiker's bizarre ride in Jerry's van.

Along this same line, pay close attention to the sound design throughout Texas Chain Saw's opening vignette and opening credits -- it's creepy! -- and note how the radio announcer, whose lengthy report about local grave robbings is important, sound bridges us into the film's first scene in the van.

Hitchhiker sez: "I have this knife -- it's a good knife."

In addition to all its artistic and cinematic virtuosity, I love The Texas Chain Saw Massacre because it is an important cultural document, an ecstatically truthful reflection of early seventies American culture. Written and shot by college-aged youths in summer 1973, the original TCM captures U.S. malaise during the period of our national post-Watergate "nervous breakdown." According to historian Andreas Killen:

In 1973 America was jolted by three shocks, following on one another in rapid succession. First, the war in Vietnam ended in the first-ever military defeat for the United States. Second, the Watergate cover-up unraveled, and the presidency of Richard Nixon became engulfed in scandal and, by year's end, calls for impeachment. Last but not least, Americans were hit hard by a collapsing economy: 1973 was also the year of the Arab oil embargo and the beginning of the long slide into stagflation that lasted until the 1980s. Any one of these events alone would have challenged America's image of itself; together they shook the national psyche to its very core.†

In short, Chain Saw is a succinct, powerful snapshot of that shakedown of the national psyche. Screenwriter Kim Henkel and director Hooper confirm this interpretation on their DVD commentary, explicitly calling the movie a response to the Vietnam war and the Watergate crisis. While all films carry ideological meanings and can be analyzed as reflections of and responses to the cultural concerns of their time, the 1974 Texas Chain Saw is a particularly rich and multi-layered cultural looking-glass. Embracing the tropes of the just-burgeoning slasher genre, Hooper, Henkel and company commit to their project with abandon, infusing their despair and anger over the loss of life in Vietnam and the lies of Nixon into their depiction of the Leatherface family's impotent yet deadly rage against the privileged teenagers who invade their homeland.

Which is probably why I keep returning to the film in my writing. I advise my film studies students not to write about or critically analyze films they are too close to as fans, and I usually follow that advice myself. But The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is an exception: I have published one article about the film and plan to include more Texas Chain Saw analysis in a chapter of my (slowly) forthcoming book.

In that article of mine, "Sympathy for the Devil: The Cannibalistic Hillbilly in 1970s Rural Slasher Films," I point out that low-budget rural slashers like Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre

present their cannibalistic hillbilly "villains" in extremely sympathetic terms and, due to the emerging conventions of the slasher horror film genre to which they belong, may even present the rural killers as the ultimate "heroes" of their scenarios in a way that a critically acclaimed Hollywood studio film like Deliverance does not attempt.†† 

Indeed, in TCM, the teens who intrude upon the Leatherface family property, especially the males, are presented as insensitive, oblivious jerks who think nothing of entering the Leatherface house uninvited. Even wheelchair-bound Franklin, who has a strange affinity for Hitchhiker and an appropriate sense of foreboding about the threat the rural family represents, is so whiny that he drives his sister Sally -- TCM's protagonist and Final Girl -- to distraction. Franklin is easy for the viewer to pity but hard for most viewers to like. Of all TCM's teens only Sally and maybe Pam are relatable.

Meanwhile, despite his violent, psychotic tendencies, Leatherface in particular is shown to be emotionally vulnerable at certain key moments of the film. His two brothers bully and mistreat him when they're all at home together, and the viewer sees Leatherface's fear and worry after the third teen, Jerry, walks into his house unannounced. This provocative, finely nuanced ambiguity about who we're supposed to feel for and root for places The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in the highest echelon of successful horror movies, alongside other masterpieces like Peeping Tom, Psycho, and King Kong.

Leatherface sez: "I'm frightened and upset and deserving of your sympathy."

Beyond singling out The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as my personal favorite film, I am also quite serious (if hyperbolic) when I call it the "Best Movie Ever" -- that is, I would definitely place it on any more "objective" Top 100 Films list I had a hand in creating. Like so many canon-generating lists, Entertainment Weekly's is, in my view, disappointingly light on horror movies, including only seven: Psycho (#5), King Kong (#11), Jaws (#18), Rosemary's Baby (#36), Frankenstein (#55), The Shining (#66), and Night of the Living Dead (#79) -- all of which I'd keep.

But where is Nosferatu (1922)? Vampyr (1932)? Halloween (1978)? Videodrome (1983)? Peeping Tom (1960)? Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (1960)? John Carpenter's The Thing (1982)? Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977)?

John Carpenter sez: "Not a single movie in your Top 100, EW? You're fucking kidding me!"

What about Alien (1979)? Gojira (1954)? Wait a minute, EW, you're really putting The Fucking Dark Knight and Return of the Stupid King on your Top 100 Films list and not Gojira? That's completely fucked up.

Furthermore, any "Top 100 Films" list that excludes The Texas Chain Saw Massacre -- one of the most terrifying, visceral, brilliantly crafted, culturally significant, and influential American horror films ever made -- needs serious revision.

This post is dedicated to the memory of Gunnar Hansen, the original and best Leatherface actor.

Bonus Afterthought: Why the 2003 remake is a worthless abomination. I hate to waste any space at all discussing the 2003 Marcus Nispel Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, a formulaic, boring, worthless piece of shit that completely misses the point of what made the original scary or compelling. Instead of creating truly horrific situations arising from the motivations of the characters, the 2003 version goes for cheap jump scares -- yes, a cat even jumps out at one point -- lots of gore, and improbable, ill-motivated plot twists.

Besides its bland aesthetics, abuse of cattle prod cinema techniques, and crappy plotting, the remake's worst offenses are its decision to give the Leatherface family a surname -- Hewitt, which I guess is supposed to be "funny" -- and to fully explain the hillbilly clan's (hackneyed, pedestrian) behavioral motivations.

You see, in the 2003 version, the Leatherface -- er, Hewitt -- clan kidnaps babies because they want to expand their brood and be parents. Sadly, this is a stupid and disastrous miscalculation on the filmmakers' part, for it makes the Hewitts comprehensible to us in a way that deflates their power to horrify. It completely negates the powerful structural social critique of the original. The 1974 Leatherface clan kills because, as professional meat slaughterers, it is all they have ever known. They have been displaced from their jobs by the advent of the air gun stunner. Their family pride in their profession has been stripped from them, so they just keep on butchering -- now humans instead of cattle.

Their insanity and cannibalism is therefore a logical extension of the core principles of capitalism -- they are simply small business-people doing what they need to to survive.††† The inappropriateness of their choice of raw materials serves as a savage critique of the capitalist system, showing the desperate, horrific lengths to which the economically disenfranchised must resort to survive.

The 2003 version offers no such critique or thematic nuance. It is simply about a family who wants more babies and who isn't horrifying or scary at all. Yawn!

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* Perhaps due to the early influence of Halloween and Texas Chain Saw, to this day I generally prefer slasher and serial killer-based horror films and thrillers. Along this line, let me recommend the raw and terrifying Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) and the criminally under-seen Peeping Tom (1960). And, on the horror-comedy side, Man Bites Dog (1992). And of course Hitchcock's classic Shadow of a Doubt (1943).
** The elephant in the room here is Deliverance, which at least indirectly inspired the rural horror slasher cycle and the figure of the monstrous hillbilly. But that film itself is not precisely a horror film. It's more of a dark male melodrama with higher artistic pretensions than most slashers. Psycho also (again) sets an important precedent for TCM via the rural locale of the Bates Motel. Rural locales, from Dracula's castle to Night of the Living Dead's farmhouse to Them!'s California desert, pervade the horror film.
*** I noticed this circle motif due to reading Christopher Sharrett's "The Idea of Apocalypse in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre." Sharrett says some really smart and insightful stuff in that indispensable article, found in Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film (ed. Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett, Scarecrow Press 2004).
† Andreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America (Bloomsbury, 2006) p. 2.
†† Carter Soles, "Sympathy for the Devil" in Ecocinema Theory and Practice (ed. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, Routledge 2013) p. 237.
††† This idea comes from Robin Wood, in his "An Introduction to the American Horror Film." also found in Planks of Reason (Scarecrow Press 2004). 

Alternate Top 100: 12 Angry Men (1957)

A few years ago, in 2011, the Criterion Collection released a new DVD edition of Sidney Lumet's classic 12 Angry Men. During a recent online Criterion Flash Sale, I bought said DVD and, once it arrived, joyfully re-watched this amazing film.

Courtroom dramas hold a special place in the American cinema. One of my college buddies, who went on to become a lawyer, was always particularly obsessed with Inherit the Wind (1960), Stanley Kramer's dramatization of the 1925 Scopes trial. Many folks consider the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) to be one of the best such dramas ever made. Other key entries in this category include Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Judgment at Nuremburg (1961), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Anatomy of a Murder (1959), A Few Good Men (1992), and Lumet's own The Verdict (1982) starring Paul Newman.* On the comedy side both Adam's Rib (1949) and My Cousin Vinny (1992) are standout courtroom movies.

For me, the original 12 Angry Men (I haven't seen the 1997 remake) stands as the greatest fiction film about the American legal system of which I am aware. It also stands as one of my favorite movies in any genre. I hereby nominate it for inclusion in my "Alternative Top 100," a list of films meant to be added to or swapped into the Entertainment Weekly Top 100 Films list to correct some of its oversights and errors.**

It's pretty much impossible to go wrong with the talented and consistent Lumet's directorial efforts. Indeed, there are other, later Sidney Lumet movies that are at least as good as 12 Angry Men including The Pawnbroker (1964), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976), and The Verdict (1982). But like Duel does for Steven Spielberg and Mean Streets does for Martin Scorsese, 12 Angry Men gives us Lumet at his most stripped-down and lean. The film performs the amazing feat of taking a concept that could be boring and then executing it so brilliantly that it turns out to be a gripping, poignant, all-time masterpiece of the American cinema.

From the outset, Juror 8 (Henry Fonda) stands apart from the others -- that's him at the far right of frame, looking out the window. 

The premise: twelve jurors spend the whole film sequestered in a jury room debating the verdict in a trial the viewer never sees. They stay in that one room and mostly talk. Sounds confining, even dull, yes? It isn't.

For one thing, Lumet and his cinematographer Boris Kaufman frame shots beautifully and keep the camera moving in lots of interesting ways. For example, one of my favorite shots is when one juror unexpectedly changes his vote. The camera tracks along the whole table at a high angle until it finally tilts down for a close-up of the guy who says he's changing sides.

Or there's the long take in which Juror 10 (Ed Begley) is ostracized for making inflammatory, bigoted comments. As he talks, most of the other jurors leave the table one by one and then stand around silently, facing away from him. Lumet and Kaufman shoot the scene mostly in wide shot -- in fact, the camera slowly tracks backward as Juror 10 rants, then tracks back toward the table after he leaves it. Having the crestfallen bigot walk into the foreground while the rest of the jurors stay behind, facing away, makes an extremely powerful visual statement without feeling unnatural in the jury room's confined space. Lumet is a master of staging and blocking.

In fact, Lumet's just flat-out great with actors in general. These jurors mostly just talk and argue with each other, yet the dialogue feels very real and natural and all the key players give compelling, moving performances.

Then there's cinematographer Boris Kaufman, the youngest brother of legendary Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov. Kaufman not only keeps the camera moving in enlivening ways, but also brings a distinct and provocative visual style to 12 Angry Men.

Let's start with the four-plus minute high-angle long take that backs the opening credits and begins the film proper. The shot is a bravura display of both Lumet's ability to block and pace a wordless sequence, and Kaufman's knack for finding the perfect camera placement, shooting from behind an electric fan at one extreme end of the room.

Furthermore, the close-ups and two-shots in 12 Angry Men are unusual, eschewing what cinematographer John Bailey calls the "compressed perspective" of typical Hollywood cinematography of the 1950s. Using wide-angle lenses for his close-ups, Kaufman deemphasizes the background and makes the foregrounded person's face stand out strikingly. As Bailey puts it quite accurately, in 12 Angry Men Kaufman's close-up work "walks that razor edge between it [on the one hand] being arresting and making you feel very present with the shot and [on the other hand] putting you off." ***

Bailey argues that whereas Lumet came from television and large 3-camera studio setups, former documentarian Kaufman was used to shooting close-up to actors, having shown a penchant for tight close-ups in his work with Jean Vigo in the '30s. Therefore much of the film's visual style may be rightfully attributed to Kaufman's contributions.

Nevertheless it is Lumet's amazing facility with actors and his penchant for liberal political advocacy that are most on display here. 12 Angry Men documents more that just a jury room proceeding -- it is a dramatization of the perilous place of hegemonic white masculinity just before the onset of the 1960s. In the 1957 of the film, the women's liberation movements and civil rights movements haven't yet begun in earnest, but the jurors know that their traditional, patriarchal way of life is being threatened.

For example, when Juror 10 goes on his racist tirade, subsequently to retreat into the foreground all alone, his rambling lines "I mean, what's happening in here? I speak my piece and you . . . listen to me. This kid on trial here, his type -- well, don't you know about them? There's a danger here. These people are dangerous" echo the thoughts of a generation who doesn't yet understand that the times are a-changin'. He genuinely expects everyone else to think as he does, to support him, and he is quietly devastated when he realizes his racist beliefs are not shared by anyone else, not when articulated so bluntly.

The anger the film's title alludes to may be superficially about the length of the jury's deliberations, a missed baseball game, or even the kinds of deep personal secrets that emerge over the course of the film. But the jurors' collective anger is really about their being forced to face a changing world in which people of color, like the defendant whose fate they will decide, must be accepted as their peer in a system which still unduly favors white men. The film is, in sum, about structural racism and classism in the American justice system -- a very timely topic indeed.

Lumet scholar Frank Cunningham calls 12 Angry Men "one of [Lumet's] most thematically rich and cinematically evocative films" and writes of the director more generally that

Lumet's union of cinematic technique with literary and thematic moral meaning precisely defines his directorial significance. Lumet may not always move the camera in ways that call immediate attention to his technique, yet his frame is rarely static but usually full, busy with life's detail and flow. Though the camera work is seldom spectacular, its controlled movement is subtle and filled with the movement of human event.†

Indeed, that is the best way to describe it: Lumet's films feel vibrant and alive and urgent in a way that relatively few films do. There is an intelligence and moral purpose behind them, yet they almost never come off as preachy or pedantic. They are tightly crafted, cleverly scripted, and loaded with tension and pathos. They are, in short, gripping films for thinking adults -- the kind of films Hollywood can and should make more often.

As Cunningham concludes,

Lumet refuses to make films that as a group fall easily into categories. Of course, facile categories and theories make headlines, and so the Godards gain more fame than the Frankenheimers, even though work without such theoretical embellishment may possess the greater excellence.††  

I don't entirely agree with Cunningham's pooh-poohing of Godard -- or, by extension, of other directors whose work is genre-based and/or "theoretically embellished" by which I assume he means more self-reflexive and/or formally experimental. That said, I take his point that many critics and cinephiles lavish more attention and praise upon the work of filmmakers with flashier, more easily detectable directorial flourishes. Ultimately, I am in total accord with Cunningham in wanting to laud the work of directors like Lumet -- ones like William Wyler, Michael Curtiz, and Hal Ashby -- who are more subtle in their filmmaking craft and therefore trickier to pin down.

Al Pacino gives a career-topping performance as Sonny in Lumet's 

electrifying thriller Dog Day Afternoon (1975).

Bonus Afterthought: Cunningham places 12 Angry Men alongside Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), Fail Safe (1964), and The Pawnbroker, calling these Lumet efforts "four of the culture's most distinguished films." (p. 1). I agree with him about Pawnbroker, however, for me, the other Lumet essentials beyond 12 Angry Men also include Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976), and The Verdict (1982). Of those, I think Dog Day Afternoon is the single most essential and best -- it is a great thriller, driven forward by incredible performances by Al Pacino and John Cazale.

Lumet films I want to see but haven't include his final film, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), and The Fugitive Kind (1960), an overlooked gem starring Marlon Brando discussed at length by John Bailey in the documentary featurette I cited earlier.

Regarding the aforementioned 1997 remake of 12 Angry Men, I've never seen it. It may be very good indeed for all I know. But I seriously doubt it is as technically and dramatically marvelous as Lumet's lean-and-mean rendition.

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* Of course in Mr. Smith the title character is a senator, not a lawyer, and the drama takes place on the senate floor, yet the film's structure and the content of its pivotal scenes aligns it with the courtroom drama.
** I am not engaging upon this "Alternative Top 100" project in a particularly methodical or organized fashion. I am not (so far) generating my own alternative list nor am I numbering the entries. I am simply naming some films that I think should be on any legitimate list of this kind. See my second footnote here if you want an idea about which titles I would cut from EW's list to make room for my alternative selections.
*** Bailey's remarks about Kaufman's contributions to 12 Angry Men can be found on Disc Two of the Criterion Collection edition of the film, in a documentary featurette called "On Boris Kaufman." His comments on 12 Angry Men's cinematography start around the twenty minute mark of that feature.
† Cunningham, Sidney Lumet: Film and Literary Vision (Second Ed.) (U. Press of Kentucky, 2001), pp. 109, 119.
†† Cunningham pp. 120-1.