A Few Words About A few words about...™ The Texas Chainsaw Massacre -- in Blu-ray (1 Viewer)

[Charles Smith]

Hello,

This is "the big wazoo" ...

As another who was outspoken about being highly annoyed by the kinds of things in the featurette that haineshisway enumerated, I thank you for joining and offering a polite and civilized response. That is much appreciated.

 

[Oblivion138]

Well, I got the new Blu-ray and watched the film for the first time in thirty-nine years. Just to get the easy part out of the way - I still find it a vile film, in subject matter. Sorry. I know horror aficionados love it dearly but vile it remains - for me.

Of course, the obvious thing is that watching it forty years ago is not the same as watching it today - at all. But today it's much easier to appreciate what the filmmakers achieved on their very low budget (which seems to change with whoever is talking on the featurettes). The direction, which I absolutely could or did not want to appreciate back then, is very well done. You must understand, however, the film was shot in 16mm and blown up to 35mm and those release prints looked very bad - that probably either added to the sleazy atmosphere, but it did no one any favors. That's the revelation of this Blu-ray, the photography looks really good here, despite the limitations they faced - because having gone back to the 16mm negative has yielded really good results.

I also have to say, as the film unfolded, I remembered every single minute of it - no surprises - amazing how vivid its been in my memory all these years. And I remember feeling even back then that the film veered into very strange comedy territory with the dinner scene and the "arm"chair did make me giggle, just as it did almost forty years ago. So, not a film I need to really see again, but I'm glad I watched it, which is solely due to this thread and the two or three reasonable people who suggested I do so.

Glad you got a chance to revisit this after all these years. It's definitely not everyone's cup of tea when it comes to the content, but it's nice that you were able to see the artistry behind it this time around. I'll never try to convince anyone that they should like the film...if it's not their thing, it's just not...but I'll always stand up for it as a very well-made film. Much more so than most pictures of its kind, certainly.

Sadly, I don't think Mr. Hooper's subsequent film career really lived up to the promise he showed in TCSM. Indeed, his own sequel to TCSM was not only vile...it was also needlessly juvenile and over-the-top gory for the sake of cheap laughs. The creative spark that drove the original film, with its dark humor, arthouse sensibility, and implied violence, seems dampened in his later work. But all these years later, TCSM remains an ugly, but beautifully crafted, cinematic experience.

 

[bigshot]

I have a question for those who had the original blu-ray release of this... One of the things that bothered me in the first blu was the way the digital grain smoothing was radically different from shot to shot. It looked like they went through the movie, and where ever there was detail, they let the grain stay. But if there was a huge expanse of blue sky or a plain wall behind them, they would dial up the noise reduction to the point where the tone became even with no grain at all. Admittedly, this is the proper way to apply grain reduction, but the difference between s grainy 16mm shot butted up next to one with lots of smoothing was jarring.

Can someone who has the blu-ray do me a favor? In the scene where the girl is approaching the house for the first time, there are a couple of shots with big blue skies. Can someone please take a look at them and see if you can see as much grain in the sky as in other shots in the movie?

thanks!

 

[bigshot]

Sadly, I don't think Mr. Hooper's subsequent film career really lived up to the promise he showed in TCSM. Indeed, his own sequel to TCSM was not only vile...it was also needlessly juvenile and over-the-top gory for the sake of cheap laughs. The creative spark that drove the original film, with its dark humor, arthouse sensibility, and implied violence, seems dampened in his later work. But all these years later, TCSM remains an ugly, but beautifully crafted, cinematic experience.

The reason that TC2 was so over the top was because a lot of dim bulbs in the audience didn't get the shift from terror to black comedy halfway through the film and misunderstood the whole point of the film. So in the second film, he made it perfectly clear that the family were monster clowns and they lived in a horror circus.

I honestly don't understand how people can watch Texas Chainsaw massacre and not start laughing from the point where the dad says "LOOKIT WHAT YOUR BROTHER DID TO THE FRONT DOOR!" The line between horror and comedy is a thin one, but the whole point of this film is the flip flop halfway through. You have to be really dense to take the last half of the film seriously.

 

[TravisR]

I honestly don't understand how people can watch Texas Chainsaw massacre and not start laughing from the point where the dad says "LOOKIT WHAT YOUR BROTHER DID TO THE FRONT DOOR!" The line between horror and comedy is a thin one, but the whole point of this film is the flip flop halfway through. You have to be really dense to take the last half of the film seriously.

For the most part, I take the entire movie seriously. Sure, the Cook and the Hitchhiker provide some black humor (the front door line or the Cook hitting Sally with a broom or the Cook beating up the Hitchhiker for robbing graves) but a few jokes doesn't mean that the second half of the movie is supposed to make a shift to comedy. There's no humor in the scene where Franklin is killed or especially in the dinner scene. To me, the first half of the movie grabs people with the scenes of the kids getting killed off and the second half keeps building on that to the point of the dinner scene where they're just going for the audience's throat. I think anyone laughing at that scene is doing it because they're nervous and laughter is their reaction to that nervous feeling. And for what it's worth, I agree that the sequel is going for black humor rather than horror.

 

[bigshot]

The dinner table scene and grandpa fumbling the hammer are the funniest parts of the movie. This is a black comedy masquerading as a slasher film. Of course you can look at it just as a slasher film and ignore the stuff underneath if you want. Slasher films aren't normally a genre you look to for subtext, so I can understand why people would take the film at face value.

 

[ROclockCK]

The way I saw this film 40 years ago, any of the gallows humour which crept into the last half (and I agree it's there, and recognized it even then) simply reinforced our mounting sense of dread. With every sick-funny detail, it was clear that these people were m-a-d - so completely lost within their insane little world - they were capable of anything. And without the slightest hesitation, restraint, or trace of remorse. The use of situational humour here, however perverse from our POV, still had an internal logic from the family's POV. To them, we are meat; this is normal.

So I think this was a decidedly serious movie, with any twisted laughs along the way merely driving home the degree of madness...the hopelessness...the despair. Which is what ultimately made the heroine's escape attempt so weirdly heroic...an act of pure existential desperation...as in, "I just can't take this anymore. Any fate is better than this!"

 

[Cineman]

The way I saw this film 40 years ago, any of the gallows humour which crept into the last half (and I agree it's there, and recognized it even then) simply reinforced our mounting sense of dread. With every sick-funny detail, it was clear that these people were m-a-d - so completely lost within their insane little world - they were capable of anything. And without the slightest hesitation, restraint, or trace of remorse. The use of situational humour here, however perverse from our POV, still had an internal logic from the family's POV. To them, we are meat; this is normal.

So I think this was a decidedly serious movie, with any twisted laughs along the way merely driving home the degree of madness...the hopelessness...the despair. Which is what ultimately made the heroine's escape attempt so weirdly heroic...an act of pure existential desperation...as in, "I just can't take this anymore. Any fate is better than this!"

I remember audiences laughing many times during the initial theatrical release of TTCM. I also remember audiences laughing several times during the initial theatrical release of Psycho, 14 years earlier. In the case of Psycho, it was, as Hitchcock hoped beforehand and explained later, it was the kind of shared laughter you experience at the end of a roller-coaster ride (or, as Hitchcock would say, a "switchback railway".) First you scream, then you laugh in the recognition that we'd all shared a spontaneous outburst, a group response beyond our control. I remember another moment when 1960 screening audiences laughed in Psycho was when it was decided that Sam would keep Norman busy in the motel office while Lila (Vera Miles) went up to the house to have a talk with his mother. That was different from the earlier, post-shower scene/post-Arbogast stairway scene laughter. It was closer, imo, to the laughter related to dread that you mentioned above. Yet I doubt many first time views of Psycho today would even notice the moment or ever suspect that was a spot where Hitchcock knew the audience would nearly turn to one another and gasp, as if to say, "oh, NO," followed by a group laugh.

One of the great losses in the advent of home video and the consequential decline in revival theaters as a means to introduce older films to a new or younger audience, particularly with regard to shrewd horror films of yesteryear, is we no longer immediately feel, in a visceral way, the how and why a director peppers the horror with a shrewdly placed group laugh here and there. We no longer sit in those kinds of groups to experience an older movie for the first time in that way. Instead, I still read or hear comments on a first viewing of Psycho (almost without doubt a solitary viewing on DVD/Blu-ray in a living room setting), that, "ha, I didn't think it was scary at all. In fact, I laughed after this or that (infamously scary) scene," or after a screening of TTCM to the effect that they thought it "odd" when the tone went comedic or "laughable". When you watch some of these older horror movies for the first time the way most of us watch everything else these days, alone or almost alone in a living room setting on DVD/Blu-ray, you simply cannot be as informed about what the filmmakers specifically intended at this moment or that when they fashioned a movie to generate a powerful group response for strangers sitting in the more formal setting of a darkened theater.

I think your assessment for what triggered laughter in TTCM is spot on. I remember when I, along with everyone else in the theater back in 1974, laughed at the wildly over-the-top craziness, the almost literal definition of grossly disproportional overkill of the 2-shot of Leatherface, this already huge man who could easily kill the slender young blonde girl with his bare hands, chasing her down, the image of him behind her looming larger and larger until it seemed he filled the movie frame just inches away with her arms and blonde hair flailing in total panic and helplessness, not about to kill her with his bare hands, nor a club, a knife or a gun, but with this very big, very loud CHAINSAW! I mean, it is difficult to explain to the largely solitary first time viewers of today why that scene, that shot, generated so much dread, horror and, yes, laughter in the audience at the time. But it did. And it was obviously intended to do so by the filmmakers. But perhaps it is only truly obvious when you are in such a group and experiencing, first hand, why you and the rest of the audience is laughing and why it is exactly the right (intended) response to do so.

 

[ROclockCK]

Indeed. And it's also significant that both of these films have been paid repeated homage and/or outright copied (sometimes shot for shot) in myriad other movies since. Unfortunately, we cannot un-see, un-hear, or un-feel what has already been experienced...we can never get all the way back to that unsullied state when we first grabbed some confections and sat down, gamely daring the filmmakers "So show me!!!"

What's missing today is the original cultural context that Hitchcock and Hooper were not only playing into...and with...but ultimately repudiating via their 'all bets are off' approach. In their day, these were fiercely original - even dangerous - works for both of these filmmakers...and especially audiences...because nothing quite like them had existed before*.

Spoiler

Before Psycho, you NEVER saw the star killed off after 30 minutes! Audiences are left unhinged and disoriented. NOW, anything can happen in this movie. Game changed. Genre redefined.

Spoiler

Before The Texas Chain Saw Massacre you NEVER saw a young woman hoisted onto a meathook and left dangling until dead. Audiences are left unhinged, disoriented, and probably also vomiting. NOW, anything can happen in this movie. Again, game changed. Again, genre redefined.

* I think The Exorcist shares this game changing, genre redefining distinction as well.

 

[chas speed]

I can understand major studios being shocked by the film, but "The Exorcist" had come out a year earlier and was one of the most popular films of that time. "The Exorcist" makes Chain Saw seem almost mild by comparison. I was glad to see Tobe Hooper mention the movie "Seconds" as an influence. Anybody who has seen that film knows that the scene with about 100 different close up shots of Rock Hudson gagged and in a straight jacket screaming his lungs out (all edited in to about 15 seconds of footage) was almost identical to the scene with all the close ups of Marilyn Burns gagged in a chair.

 

[chas speed]

I actually didn't mind it at all. It's really not my kind of film, but Hooper did show some real talent - it's not like a Herschel Gordon Lewis film or any of those shock,shlock guys and this film is nothing like their films. But in the end, you don't know anything about anyone and it just becomes what it is - a nightmarish, crazy film about vile happenings. But for a low budget film, it's clear why it's stood the test of time.

You are more open minded then I am. The movie that makes me foam at the mouth the most was "I Spit on your Grave" and I couldn't sit through that again if you held a gun to my head. As over the top as Chain Saw and "Last House on the Left" are I think most people would admit they can see a little talent in front and behind the camera and many people who worked on those two films had respectable careers, but I just don't see any talent in "I Spit on Your Grave". I will always hate Siskel and Ebert for making that film a "classic".

 

[haineshisway]

I can understand major studios being shocked by the film, but "The Exorcist" had come out a year earlier and was one of the most popular films of that time. "The Exorcist" makes Chain Saw seem almost mild by comparison. I was glad to see Tobe Hooper mention the movie "Seconds" as an influence. Anybody who has seen that film knows that the scene with about 100 different close up shots of Rock Hudson gagged and in a straight jacket screaming his lungs out (all edited in to about 15 seconds of footage) was almost identical to the scene with all the close ups of Marilyn Burns gagged in a chair.

But The Exorcist had a certain - gloss - to it, with name actors. Still, I refused to see it during its initial run - I finally caught up with it years later and liked it very much, save for the spinal thing.

 

[bgart13]

I ended use likeing I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE after reading many negative comments about it from other horror and exploitation a fans. I expected it to be boring and stupid. Instead, I thought it was far from boring and much better made than I'd been led to believe. Similarly for MARK OF THE DEVIL.

 

[bigshot]

I normally don't like slasher films, but Texas Chainsaw has a sly black humor underlying it that makes it much smarter than most in the genre. I remember seeing The Hills Have Eyes and detesting the film, but still enjoyed the experience with the audience in the theater. It was downtown and when the bald cannibal guy spotted the baby in the playpen, a black guy in the back row blurted out. "Oh sweet Jesus! NOT THE BABY!" It was one of the funniest experiences I ever had at the movies.

 

[bigshot]

So I think this was a decidedly serious movie, with any twisted laughs along the way merely driving home the degree of madness...the hopelessness...the despair. Which is what ultimately made the heroine's escape attempt so weirdly heroic...an act of pure existential desperation...as in, "I just can't take this anymore. Any fate is better than this!"

I would refer you to the scene where the oaf gets skinned in Texas Chainsaw 2. That scene is played superficially as horror, and it has some of the most disturbing makeup effects ever, but if you get past the makeup, you realize that the scene is really satire and comedy, making fun of the oaf's lack of appeal to women, punctuated with the obligatory spit. "Aw gee, if I wasn't skinned, maybe we could go out on a date or something... SPIT!" I can cite a bunch of those in Texas Chainsaw 1 too. It's just that the genre was such a shock for the first time, the laughs were overshadowed by the horror. I think Tobe Hooper regretted that it wasn't clear enough and went back and remade the film fixing the things he overplayed the first time, and playing up the things he underplayed. Kind of like the difference between Evil Dead (which is pretty dismal) and Evil Dead 2 (which nails the fun elements of a good horror movie).

Tobe Hooper has a really sick sense of humor, and I suspect only people with similar ones recognize that the horror is actually just the setup for gross jokes. It's a lot easier to tell with an audience because you can see the pacing of the humor in the reactions of the audience. Every time there is a shock, it is followed immediately by by a sick joke... So the audience gasps then immediately laughs. It's a form of humor based on the unexpected. As soon as you start to get used to the horror, a joke comes along and releases the tension with a laugh. Then the horror builds again to another laugh.

Perhaps it isn't as clear on home video, but in theaters with audiences, you can see the expectations getting worked over time and time again with jokes.

 

[FoxyMulder]

Kind of like the difference between Evil Dead (which is pretty dismal) and Evil Dead 2 (which nails the fun elements of a good horror movie).

You didn't like the original Evil Dead, to me it's a classic, in my opinion better than the sequel although i enjoyed that too.

 

[TravisR]

You didn't like the original Evil Dead, to me it's a classic, in my opinion better than the sequel although i enjoyed that too.

I feel the same way about those movies but I think that most people prefer Evil Dead 2 because of its blend of comedy and horror.

 

[chas speed]

I ended use likeing I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE after reading many negative comments about it from other horror and exploitation a fans. I expected it to be boring and stupid. Instead, I thought it was far from boring and much better made than I'd been led to believe. Similarly for MARK OF THE DEVIL.

I did find "I Spit on Your Grave" boring and stupid, but I haven't seen it in 30 years. So I don't consider myself an expert on the film.

 

[chas speed]

But The Exorcist had a certain - gloss - to it, with name actors. Still, I refused to see it during its initial run - I finally caught up with it years later and liked it very much, save for the spinal thing.

It sure did have a gloss to it. I guess it probably cost 50 times more then Chain Saw, but Chain Saw probably had more dolly shots then any $100,000 movie ever made. I'm still not sure how they managed that.

 

[ROclockCK]

I would refer you to the scene where the oaf gets skinned in Texas Chainsaw 2. That scene is played superficially as horror, and it has some of the most disturbing makeup effects ever, but if you get past the makeup, you realize that the scene is really satire and comedy, making fun of the oaf's lack of appeal to women, punctuated with the obligatory spit. "Aw gee, if I wasn't skinned, maybe we could go out on a date or something... SPIT!" I can cite a bunch of those in Texas Chainsaw 1 too. It's just that the genre was such a shock for the first time, the laughs were overshadowed by the horror. I think Tobe Hooper regretted that it wasn't clear enough and went back and remade the film fixing the things he overplayed the first time, and playing up the things he underplayed. Kind of like the difference between Evil Dead (which is pretty dismal) and Evil Dead 2 (which nails the fun elements of a good horror movie).

Tobe Hooper has a really sick sense of humor, and I suspect only people with similar ones recognize that the horror is actually just the setup for gross jokes. It's a lot easier to tell with an audience because you can see the pacing of the humor in the reactions of the audience. Every time there is a shock, it is followed immediately by by a sick joke... So the audience gasps then immediately laughs. It's a form of humor based on the unexpected. As soon as you start to get used to the horror, a joke comes along and releases the tension with a laugh. Then the horror builds again to another laugh.

Perhaps it isn't as clear on home video, but in theaters with audiences, you can see the expectations getting worked over time and time again with jokes.

Perhaps now. Perhaps in measure even 20 or 30 years ago. But not during TTCSM's initial release.

Indirectly though, you are proving my meta-point: that there is no way for any of us to go back to '74/'75 with an erased memory...to a point when there was no Hooper career to put this work into perspective...no home video version(s) to study repeatedly for subliminal clues...no history of peer homage and creative riffing to intellectualize and deconstruct its cinematic mechanics.

What you're describing is a deeper aesthetic appreciation only possible through familiarity plus some distance...which audiences didn't have back then, forced to take this film more at face value. Trust me, during first run, especially in the grungy venues where TTCSM typically played with brackishly processed prints more resembling docudrama 'found footage' than anything simulated since, this film was a far more visceral experience...its mounting dread palpable...its suspense unrelenting. Although most folks weren't literally locked in a screening room like Bruce, we felt similarly trapped within this waking nightmare...with Hooper's sick-funny beats only amplifying the pervasive madness. His upfront deadly serious horror narrative felt as real as reel can be...everything else took a backseat to that primary driver...back then.

Of course, post-modern appreciation has its virtues in terms of detailed study and cultural cross-reference, even the ability to savour the intentionally satirical subtext, but it can never recreate the gut-whallop audiences felt when the film first unspooled. TTCSM exists now on another level entirely - its legacy impact pretty much residing within the province of anecdote only. We all see a different film now...as is the natural progression for any art.

Ya can never go back...