A common line about Tobe Hooper’s original 1974 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is that it’s not as graphically violent as it seems. This has always struck me as the strangest of comments for three reasons: a) Who’s to judge one’s relative perception of a film in the first place?; b) What constitutes graphic violence?; c) Are you fucking kidding?
This is a film whose most memorable image is of a lithe young woman in a halter top being hoisted into the air like a side of beef before having her bare back impaled on a large meat hook, which has been glistening in the frame’s foreground. The line of thought that this is “not as violent as it seems” presupposes that we would need to see the sharp hook pierce the skin and enter the spine for the film to register as fitfully gory. But this heinous act—arguably one of the most shocking in cinema history and a turning point in what could be represented onscreen in American film—is not merely implied. This is not Val Lewton territory, of terror cloaked in shadows and ambiguity. It occurs in front of our eyes, even if her back is turned away from the camera. We are trained on her agonized face, which is far worse than being subjected to a close-up of a faked bit of bloody gristle. It is incredibly, repulsively violent, as much as Janet Leigh’s Psycho shower or little Karen’s matricide by trowel in Night of the Living Dead. There’s no going back.
Visceral and single-minded in its depiction of human beings as little more than sacks of meat just biding time until being serve up on a plate, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is thoroughly discomfiting when it isn’t just plain exhausting. It’s rather amusing that Hooper allegedly left out explicit gore (i.e., full-on images of his characters actually getting sliced, diced, and barbecued) in the hopes that his shot-on-16mm experiment in terror might receive a PG rating; even an MPAA system that was famously permissible at that point in history was not about to deem as family-friendly a film that took cannibalism as its primary subject matter. Talking about what isn’t shown in this film is worthwhile only as a lesson in cinematic construction—that, for instance, head-ringing sound effects, uncomfortable close-ups, and frenetic cutting can make viewers feel like they’re seeing more than they are. When such talk is used as enticement for the uninitiated to watch the film, it feels fruitless, even misleading. It’s difficult to imagine anyone feeling that Texas Chainsaw lets them off the hook.
It’s a testament to how far violence has come in American cinema that Hooper’s wrenching film can be viewed as palatable at all. Chainsaw has been discussed so often and in so many different ways over the years—as a landmark of low-budget horror, yes, but also as a grim satire of the American family, or of the contemporary political landscape (insert Watergate and/or Vietnam references here), or a gruesomely jubilant critique of a soul-devouring industrial capitalism—that its representation of violence has come to seem almost beside the point. Yet as mindlessly brutal as the genre has become, few horror films since have been able to equal its impact, and I think the only honest and direct way to talk about Texas Chainsaw is to acknowledge its shocking horrors. It is a film that stands utterly alone. Though its forebears (Herschell Gordon Lewis’s independently financed and distributed gorehound movies of the sixties) and descendants (the slasher films of the eighties and the aptly nicknamed “torture porn” films of the early twenty-first century) are easily identifiable, placing it within the horror canon can be a bit tricky. It was not part of any movement, and resists being easily slotted into one, even in retrospect. Though a consistently innovative and thrilling film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre falls into one definitive category: the dubiously influential.
Texas Chainsaw was not the only such film of 1974, the sort that only seems comparatively tame because of the decades of bloody films that have come in its wake. Bob Clark’s Black Christmas also points ahead to the soon-to-be-institutionalized slasher film, but is a more atmospheric affair than Chainsaw, trading in well spaced-out shocks and slow burn rather than all-out sensory assault. John Carpenter’s elegant Halloween (1978) is often regarded as the prototypical film of this type, yet four years earlier, Clark deftly orchestrated a neat little holiday mood piece all his own, in which a mysterious killer stalks a group of young women—in this case members of a sorority left on campus during Christmas break. It even features a series of shots from the killer’s POV (realized by the DP mounting a camera on his back and skulking around the set), complete with heavy breathing, which Carpenter would soon co-opt, and before it became a hoary horror convention. Yet unlike “the Shape”—a.k.a. Michael Myers—in Carpenter’s film, this monster speaks; in fact we hear him more than we see him, as he first terrorizes the women as a lewd prank caller, making him a clear precursor to such telephone tricksters as those in When a Stranger Calls and Scream.
Where Chainsaw is all frenetic movement, Clark’s film is a strange model of sangfroid. Shot in chilly Toronto, Black Christmas has a singular ice-cold sensibility that feels even more pitch-dark than Halloween. There’s something about the dead of winter that just rattles more than a crisp autumn night. There’s no denying the essential crassness and misogyny of a film about a mewling maniac picking off defenseless young women one by one, but compared to the films it would spawn a decade later, Black Christmas feels downright refined. In the eighties, by the time Clark had ceased grinding out low-budget shockers and begun applying his superior evocation of tone and atmosphere to period comedies like Porky’s and A Christmas Story (a brilliantly evocative flipside to the proto-slasher in question—both subvert traditional notions of holiday cheer for opposite poles of the laughing/screaming extremities), these bargain-basement Ten Little Indians updates were dime-a-dozen Friday night fare. It goes without saying that the careful attention to mise-en-scène and mounting suspense that makes Clark’s film so memorable, and genuinely scary, was not applied to The Dorm That Dripped Blood (“Where the only thing you’ll learn is how to die!”), The House on Sorority Row, or Splatter University—nor was there similar restraint in terms of depicted violence. But only up against such films would Black Christmas not seem like exactly what it is: artful exploitation. In the film’s signature image, a woman suffocated to death in plastic is placed in a rocking chair and left creepily staring out the house’s attic window. Its serenity is more unsettling than any of the mutilations that would come to define the subgenre, and is all the more violent for the way it lodges into the viewer’s brain forever.
Not technically a horror film, but a cornerstone of cinematic extremity in the seventies, Michael Winner’s Death Wish was in its day the most widely controversial film under discussion here. Upping the ante from 1971’s vigilante action film Dirty Harry, this thriller, which would spawn countless imitators, was the source of much debate upon its release in the summer of 1974. In its tale of an architect (Charles Bronson) taking the law into his own hands to exact bloodthirsty vengeance on the types of thugs that had murdered and raped his wife and sexually assaulted his daughter, many critics saw a feature-length justification for vigilantism as well as a sensationalistic, fear-inciting portrait of urban mayhem. Crime rates in American cities, including New York, where the film is set, were on the rise at the time, so Winner’s film exploited this fact for its ultimately sadistic and politically questionable ends. Bronson’s wronged Paul, once a conscientious objector during the Korean War, seems to enjoy his unlawful revenge tactics as much as the audience is invited to.
Death Wish’s main themes and nonchalant approach to violence have since become so commonplace—not only in its four sequels but also in such distaff remakes as Eye for an Eye and The Brave One and most recently in the Liam Neeson Taken films—that it’s striking to recall how much anger it engendered upon release. (The debate didn’t stop with the first film in the series: take a look at this incredible tear down from British TV upon the release of Death Wish 2, with director Winner blithely chomping on a cigar while he and his film are being accused of glorifying rape and violence.) Today, discussions of the film usually revolve around its inadvertent documentary-like qualities: how it captured the legendary rough-and-tumble New York of the seventies that many contemporary city dwellers have come to fetishize; how it was the more disreputable cousin to the artier Taxi Driver, which would come out two years later.
In Death Wish’s last shot, Bronson, after having been ordered by the police to leave New York because of his actions, looks directly past the camera at some rowdy hoodlums, broadly smiles and aims a finger gun right at us, intimating that he will continue to kill society’s bad guys. It’s an image that slyly looks ahead to the ever escalating, increasingly mindless violence in the glut of testosterone-fueled, revenge-centered movies that would define American action cinema in the eighties. What’s most telling about these intense films of 1974 (we might also include the particularly shocking moments from more reputable films from that year, too: the final shoot-out in Chinatown, the toilet scene in The Conversation, the belly-slicing in The Godfather Part II) is that, despite what they are perceived as showing or not showing, they still have a potent, undiluted effect on the consciousness of moviegoers who’ve seen them.
Michael Koresky is the staff writer of the Criterion Collection, as well as the co-founder and editor of Reverse Shot. His writings have appeared in Film Comment, Cinema Scope, indieWIRE, Moving Image Source, Sight & Sound, and The Village Voice.
