Classic Movie Review : The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
The world was a different place in 1974. Not only internet didn't exist (at least not officially), but cable television was still an abstract idea that would only take flight under Ronald Reagan six years later. Therefore, our relationship to information wasn’t the same. We had a common understanding of what could be and couldn't be shown to large audiences then. The Exorcist existed already and had left misery and sleeplessness in its wake, but it leaned on religion to usher itself into mainstream culture.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a different animal. In many respects, it is the first modern horror movie because it changed the meaning of the word itself.
Five teenagers on a road trip through Texas stop by a cemetery to check on the grave of two of the travelers' grandfather's grave after hearing the news of a gruesome incident. On their way back, they pick up a creepy hitchhiker who cuts one of them with a straight razor before they manage to kick him out of their van. The deeper they get into Texas, the more abandoned and rotten everything seems around them and this is not by design. Someone nearby is creating a monument to torture and death.
The Beauty of Death & Decay
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the first movie that I can think of where the protagonist, in the classic sense of the term, doesn't really matter. Unlike their slasher brethren, Sally and Franklin Hardesty and their friends aren't particularly hedonistic or promiscuous. They’re not being punished by Leatherface, they're being hunted because they have trespassed into his territory. Tobe Hooper makes it clear from the first scene with a literal rotting signpost in the cemetery.
Seriously, I'm an atmosphere guy and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre effortlessly creates this open air, daytime mausoleum where death is a foregone conclusion. I'd argue that the set and props also are more important characters than the five traveling kids as they reveal the corrupted cosmic shift they’re about to experience. The most interesting aspect of their lives is that it's about to end and the sun-bleached atmosphere Tobe Hooper created reflects that.
This attention to detail: the rotting animals, the traces of blood, the decaying houses littered with "hunting trophies" have created a contemporary vocabulary for horror movies. I don't know how deliberate any of this was, but horror films have been trying and failing to recreate the grimy feeling of watching he Texas Chainsaw Massacre for five decades now and that feeling is as fresh and pristine watching the film in 2026. It’s not the goriest movie of all-time, but it feels appropriately disgusting.
Kings of the Animal Kingdom
So, if The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not a right wing cautionary tale about abandoning Judeo-Christian values, what is it exactly? What if Leatherface and his siblings didn't have a reason to torture, maim and kill? What if they just did it because they could? If anything transpires from the way they’re behaving is that theyère more animal then men and revel in their power over their environment. The hitchhiker (Edwin Neal) has this great monologue about his brother cooking head cheese and I think this is it. These guys are just predators.
This is what makes The Texas Chainsaw Massacre so queasy to watch even fifty years into its existence. It follows five young people submitted to the unflinching laws of nature, but trying to outrun the inevitable anyway. In the absolute, people like you and I watch horror movies in order to come to terms with our own mortality and not only The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the rules, but it cruelly reminds you that death happens all the time and for unfair reasons in nature.
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Even though some aspect of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre aged and that more disturbing films have been made since, it has endured as a horror classic because of Tobe Hooper's masterful control and the on-screen chaos have created a contradiction that’s impossible to reconcile. It’s the most beautiful ugly movie I’ve ever seen. It’s a raw, bleeding wound that feels natural and inevitable. It’s a film that doesn’t follow any rules because it created them to begin with.
8.5/10
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