This review was updated on September 21, 2024
A horror film in the most punishingly literal sense, Tobe Hooper’s DIY shocker has lost none of its single-minded power in the 50-odd years since it was unleashed upon an unsuspecting public. Co-written, produced and directed by Hooper on a budget somewhere in the region of $100,000, the film utilised mostly untrained actors and a semi-professional crew, all working on a punishing seven-days-a-week schedule in blistering heat.
Envisioned by Hooper as a response to all the horrors that were being piped into American homes at the time, from footage of the war in Vietnam to graphic traffic accidents on the local news, the script was inspired in part by the acts of backwoods murderer and grave robber Ed Gein who, like the film’s childlike monster Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) made trinkets and even furniture out of human bones and skin. Entirely spuriously, Hooper’s movie even opens with a claim that the ‘film you are about to see is true’.
The basic plot has been ripped off and riffed on so many times that it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that it’s essentially an extremely nasty Scooby-Doo episode: a gaggle of hippies, led by original ‘final girl’ Marilyn Burns, journey in their beat-up camper van to find their dead grandfather’s now-abandoned homestead, only to stumble across a family of cannibalistic lunatics who proceed to hack them to pieces one at a time.
Though relatively bloodless, the film gets its power from its sheer relentlessness – the scenes of Burns being chased through the woods by the chainsaw-wielding Leatherface seem to last for hours, as does the darkly comic, almost unbearably rancid dinner scene – and from its constant, oppressive and skin-crawling sense of sweltering, inhuman nastiness. As much as any surrealist arthouse flick, Texas Chain Saw feels like a nightmare made real, an inescapable but entirely authentic vision of pure hell.
Find out where it lands on our list of the 100 greatest movies ever made.
What to watch next:
The Evil Dead (1981); The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986); The Cabin in the Woods (2011)