It was shot shortly on a restricted funds with unknown actors carrying the identical sweat-soaked outfits for weeks on finish.
So if “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” had disappeared with out a hint, not many individuals would have been shocked.
Instead, it is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this yr, a half-century during which it has been the benchmark for a subgenre of horror — the slasher film.
“There’s no corner of the earth that you can go to and say the ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ title and not have somebody know what you’re talking about, whether they’ve seen the movie or not,” stated Chase Andersen of Exurbia Films, which owns the rights to the franchise.
“It’s become part of the modern nomenclature. It’s as American as apple pie.”
Just not the type of apple pie that grandma made.
In 1974, director Tobe Hooper come across a formulation that may encourage numerous copycats: a happy-go-lucky group of younger individuals bump into an remoted home occupied by a masked lunatic who proceeds to cut them up with sharp issues.
Leatherface — the lunatic — wields a chainsaw and a hammer to devastating impact, chopping up one man as he sits in his wheelchair, disemboweling one other as a younger ladies watches from the meathook he hung her on, and smashing one man within the head.
“Michael Myers (“Halloween”) wears a mask, you know, Jason (“Friday the thirteenth”) wears a mask. I mean, Leatherface was the first guy to do it,” stated Josh Hazard, who had gathered with different horror followers to mark Texas Frightmare Weekend. “It really set a precedent for how horror movies were going to go.”
If it’s now apparent that “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” was one thing particular, it did not appear as if that on the time.
Actor Ed Neal, whose early look as a wild-eyed hitchhiker presages the violence that’s to come back, informed AFP it hadn’t felt like a genre-defining venture.
“They come in and give me the script. And I go: ‘Get the hell out of here with this,'” he stated. “I thought, well, nobody will ever see it. And here we are.”
Like the latest Netflix word-of-mouth hit “Baby Reindeer,” “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” claims with its opening crawl to have been based mostly on true occasions.
Some audiences actually purchased into that, says Neal, who claims some Japanese followers thought it was a documentary.
“They thought it was real footage. ‘How did they get the camera in there? Didn’t they eat the camera guy?’ I said: ‘yeah, they probably did.'”
The “Massacre” franchise has mushroomed within the final 5 many years, with prequels, sequels, remakes and even video video games.
Still, most followers agree, Leatherface’s 1974 outing stands atop the pile.
“To this day, there’s still not another movie like ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’,” stated Ronnie Hobbs of Gun Interactive, which launched a online game based mostly on the movie final yr. “Even the sequels and none of the remakes can capture that grittiness and that uncomfortableness of the original.”
Perhaps a few of that’s right down to the bare-bones manufacturing, says Andersen of Exurbia Films.
“Having a shoestring budget… they had to get really creative,” he stated. “They didn’t have the luxury of having multiple props or multiple costumes. A perfect example would be Gunnar Hansen when he portrayed Leatherface. He had to wear the same costume throughout the entire shoot, and by the end of the shoot, it smelled really bad.”
Teri McMinn, who performed one in every of Leatherface’s victims, stated the movie’s inventive cinematography and its relative lack of precise bloodshed — a lot of the violence is hinted at, relatively than seen — imply she is happy with her half in cinema historical past.
“This particular one is in the Museum of Modern Art,” she stated, referring to the New York establishment which can also be holding a week-long exhibition on the film in August.
One little bit of camerawork has entered cinematic folklore as true artwork — a low angle monitoring shot that follows her character as she walks as much as the home of horrors.
The actual terror for McMinn on the time was not the gore, however the outstanding place of her bottom on the large display.
“I watched it the first time and I went, ‘oh, my God.’ It was in CinemaScope and Technicolor and I’m just petrified that my mother and my aunt would see it,” she laughed.
© 2024 AFP