#The texas chain saw massacre 1974 story serial
#The texas chain saw massacre 1974 story windows

With windows closed off to approximate night time, temperatures soared to 125 degrees in the house. The fetid mania in the finished scene is palpable. One during which relative insanity set in amongst the cast and crew, culminating in a 30 hour day spent filming the climactic dinner sequence. Shot in Texas during a blistering August in 1973, the production was a famously arduous ordeal. He now had his villains, the iconic weapon and the films salacious hook. However, the creative lightning strike that birthed a legend and subsequent franchise was Hooper imagining a chainsaw he spied in the hardware section of a busy department store being utilized to cut a swath through the throngs of shoppers.

#The texas chain saw massacre 1974 story serial

Transitioning to a feature from his drug soaked student film Eggshells (watch it here), Hooper figured a low budget horror film the easiest way to get a foothold in the industry, a tack having previously worked for the likes of Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich.īeing terrified by tales his mid-western relatives told him in his youth of Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein planted the seeds for the ghoulish family of laid off slaughterhouse workers that would terrorize the hapless hippies in his horror opus. How much of this trenchant subtext first time director Hooper consciously imbued the film with is debatable, but its efficacy and continuing relevance is not. The echoes of the Manson family’s ruinous effect on the peace generation reverberate through every frame and the sordid, predatory impulse inherent in Western capitalism is laid bare by the actions of the central antagonists. But Tobe Hooper‘s 1974 masterpiece uses that as merely the foundation for a multi-layered treatise on the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam cultural schism America was then roiling in. Put simply, it is the cinematic incarnation of the most primal fear mankind experiences, that of being captured and eaten by an animal more vicious than ourselves.Ĭertainly the elemental terror of being trapped, tortured and consumed is grisly fodder enough to base a film around. It has its roots in the bloody chamber archetype, the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale and the literary notion of the Bluebeard. From an aesthetic and narrative standpoint, it is one of the most emulated genre films of the last half century. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a perfect horror film. I think you’re going to like what he brings to the table. He will add a much needed dose of horror coverage to the site, and in ways you might not typically expect when it comes to coverage of the genre. NOTE FROM BRAD: I would like to welcome Matt as the newest contributor. Gunnar Hansen in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre