The director Tobe Hooper who died Saturday at 74 will always be remembered for one spectacularly terrifying low budget horror film and thats because it happens to be one of the most uncanny movies ever made. When The Texas Chain Saw Massacre appeared on the landscape in 1974 the film instantly became famous though relatively few people saw it just hearing that title made you feel like you had. The films very existence was designed to give you a shudder.
Yet for those who did venture out to experience it those numbers grew impressively as time went on Texas Chain Saw turned out to be something nearly unimaginable a haunting and indelible dream of terror in the form of a meat hook exploitation film. It was the wildest nightmare that the movies had ever seen all built around the image of Leatherface a mentally disabled grunting mute psycho wearing a mask of human skin that he never took off chasing people around with a giant buzzing phallic power tool that was as much an instrument of torture as it was a weapon of death. The film presented itself as a true story and it had the raw atmosphere of a found object a kind of primitive documentary suspense film. A key element of the horror was the sense that it was all really happening right in front of you or that it had in fact actually happened.
Yet the ultimate reason that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre emerged as such a landmark movie, one that just seemed somehow to have appeared is that it was made with a precision and suspense, a luridly exacting reverie fear quality that was nearly classical in its execution. And that was all because of Tobe Hooper. Working with the cinematographer Daniel Pearl it was the first feature for both of them Hooper framed shots with a shivery stateliness that came right out of Hitchcock and implied that the action we were watching was being hovered over by an unseen presence. Call it what you will the spirit of existential darkness, or maybe just evil. But it was that feeling that presence that low budget horror films almost never succeeded in conjuring. They had the desire but not the technique.
Texas Chain Saw did. It was a full-blown and fully accomplished masterpiece of nightmare cinema as shocking as Psycho as haunting in its visual and dramatic language as Rosemarys Baby or The Exorcist. Hooper born in Austin in 1943 was a vintage child of the 60s and he had more than a desire to scare you he had a vision. It was one that grew out of the counterculture and out of the even Wilder West that was the early 70s a world in which all the old codes of behavior had been knocked askew and cast aside and no one knew what if anything was going to spring up in their wake.
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