the texas chainsaw massacre (1972)

mvuent

mvuent

Void Dweller
"traditionally, the demonic spirits live in a kind of prison of heat without light" northrop frye

watched this about a week ago and it's stayed in my mind. there's a deep sense of offness and wrongness permeating every moment, even in the beginning, well before the feeling reaches absurd levels near the end. cosmic disharmony. a story not so much about characters as about chunks of meat at the mercy of external forces - the heat of the sun, saturn in retrograde, the unluck of bumping into a bunch of psychos in the middle of nowhere. humanity as barbecue.

could (and probably will) ramble at more length but curious if anyone else has any impressions they'd share. (@sus you end up watching it?)
 
Murphy

Murphy

cat malogen
It set a standard disturbing the mind very few ever got close to - the pig sounds, bird cages with feathers, a lone house looking semi abandoned, dust, sun, the chew of the machine saw firing up, the ‘family’ dynamic, expendables and the ending which I don’t want to ruin but wtf
 
mvuent

mvuent

Void Dweller
they're hippies going on an idyllic farmland trip but it's not the 60s anymore, it's the 70s.

"i see your hair is burning, hills are filled with fire"
"motel money murder madness, let's change the mood from glad to sadness"
"there's a killer on the road, his brain is squirming like a toad . . . if you give this man a ride sweet family will die"

the news collage at the beginning. that sort of thing in the air.
 
version

version

Well-known member
It's the dryness and brittleness that marks it out to me. Everything looks and sounds parched. It's like the entire film has the texture of a dirt road or that ramshackle sliding door in the house. Just thinking about it conjures papery skin, whining industrial sounds, the baking corpse at the start, the tinny radio report. It's like the sun's burned all the low frequencies out of everything and is eating away at the film itself.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Ive seen it but it made no impression on me. Its filtered into the culture to the extent that its already cliche and watching it is entirely superfluous
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Its part of the landscape of american nightmare. Its all over games like borderlands its iconography has been digested
 
mvuent

mvuent

Void Dweller
ver$hy ver$h said:
It's the dryness and brittleness that marks it out to me. Everything looks and sounds parched. It's like the entire film has the texture of a dirt road or that ramshackle sliding door in the house. Just thinking about it conjures papery skin, the whining camera sounds in the living room, the baking corpse at the start and the tinny radio. It's like the sun's burned all the low frequencies out of everything and is eating away at the film itself.
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the opening credits are shots of the sun and maybe underbrush like the areas they get chased through later(?) but all tinted so that everything is just red and black, like the coals in a barbecue. heat without light. hell.
 
version

version

Well-known member
luka said:
Ive seen it but it made no impression on me. Its filtered into the culture to the extent that its already cliche and watching it is entirely superfluous
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I think if you were to watch it again, you might think differently. There's something beyond the masks and chainsaws and murderous rednecks people have stuck in games and other films. None of that really captures it. Like I say, it's the texture more than anything. It's just so raw. It feels like another planet.
 
version

version

Well-known member
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The shoot was littered with problems. From the outset shooting in the Texan summer meant that the temperature on set often rose to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Bad enough on its own, the excruciating heat was exacerbated by the fact that the actors were not the cleanest of souls. For the sake of continuity while filming and in a bid to cut costs wherever they could, the director prohibited any of the actors from showering between takes, or even cleaning their clothes. The time and money that it would cost to provide extra costumes or dry-clean them in between shooting days, was a luxury that Tobe Hooper wasn’t willing to indulge his cast with.

The odour of the cast wasn’t the only smell that the crew had to battle with during filming. In a bid to up the ante and create a chilling atmosphere on set, Robert Burns, the art director, brought in hundreds of pounds of animal corpses in order to decorate the farmhouse set. The corpses, sourced from a local slaughterhouse, soon began to rot and petrify in the Texan summer heat. In an attempt to stave off the effects of decomposition, the art department began to inject the corpses with formaldehyde. However, in one occurrence, makeup artist Dottie Pearl mistakenly injected the chemical into her own leg. An incident that would come to define the haphazard and tense nature of the shoot.

gatamagazine.com

RAW MEAT AND HEAT: THE MAKING OF THE CHAIN SAW MASSACRE — MAGAZINE

More than 50 years after tearing its way into the psyche of America’s public, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre remains one of the most important films to come out from the horror genre.
gatamagazine.com gatamagazine.com

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version

version

Well-known member
kid charlemagne said:
the 2nd one is where its at man
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borzoi said:
this is one of my very favorite horror movies. you can't possibly replicate the first one, it's a slice of hell that comes from some other realm. so you lean into pure entertainment and madcap energy. the layer of filth and grime covering everything becomes neon and bright, the climax goes from a dingy abandoned attic to an entire amusement park. from something blank and evil with no regard for human life to a dennis hopper chainsaw duel. tcm is frankie teardrop, tcm 2 is astro zombies. pure cinema. great film.
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