I have a confession to make, boils and ghouls.
Somehow, and I truly have no real explanation for this, up until last night, I had never gotten around to watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
I know. How can I even call myself a horror fan, right? I truly don’t know how it escaped me for so long. I suppose I have to be in the right kind of mood for those slasher type films, and when the mood strikes, I tend to veer more toward the slashers I’ve had more exposure to throughout my life, such as Michael Myers (obviously!), Freddy Krueger, and Jason Voorhees. Leatherface was just someone I never got to know that well over the course of time.
But honestly, after finally viewing the movie that made him a horror icon, I truly wish I hadn’t waited so long.
As much as I enjoy horror movies, I always find it very hard to call one “perfect”, at least by technical standards. No piece of media is without its flaws, and the horror genre, no matter how good the story is, usually tends to play to so many tropes and cliches that you catch yourself muttering “Here we go again...” at least once no matter how much you’re enjoying it.
But such is not the case with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
This is truly the granddaddy of horror/slasher films. Many of the horror tropes we’ve come to know over the years were clearly born in this movie. The strange hitchhiker, the forewarning gas station attendant, kids entering a seemingly abandoned house despite things like bone wind chimes and chainsaw noises...There is just simply no doubt, even after seeing hundreds of horror movies before this, that this movie did it first and did it best.
There is also so much charm to be found in the simplicity of this movie. First of all, is there anything more unsettling than that dark, gritty feeling of a 1970s horror film? Absolutely nothing glamorous is to be found here. It’s all very simple and overall just very real. Honestly, when Leatherface makes his first onscreen kill (RIP Kirk), I was expecting something a bit more bloated and drawn-out, but was pleasantly surprised to see him just get right to the point. And the chase scenes, which I can’t deny tend to get tiresome for me in most slasher films after awhile, were just so realistically done in this, in a way I don’t think I’ve seen before in anything else. Leatherface doesn’t have any freaky way of always moving faster than he should, nor do his intended victims have the annoying habit of stumbling over everything in sight to slow them down. It’s all just incredibly realistic, and that makes it all the more unnerving. There is nothing added here to spice things up, and there doesn’t need to be. This is truly just an honest account of a killer and his victims. No magic, no polish, just a man and his chainsaw.
As much as I love, and usually tend to prefer, characters with a supernatural element to them, at their core, characters like Leatherface are a hundred times scarier because you get the sense that, somewhere out there, people like this could actually exist. It’s not a far stretch that there could be a mentally ill man out there somewhere, with a little bit of butcher knowledge and a chainsaw, just waiting for someone to stumble onto his property in the middle of nowhere. One of my favorite quotes of all time, and my stance on horror in general, really, is this one from Walter Jon Williams:
“I’m not afraid of werewolves or vampires or haunted hotels. I’m afraid of what real human beings do to other real human beings.”
And while that quote can certainly apply to many things, I think it most certainly applies to Leatherface and his family, the first true icons of the slasher movie genre, and arguably, the most realistic.
Stay spooky, my friends. And expect lots more Leatherface in the future.
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