One afternoon in college, I found myself alone on a lazy Saturday with nothing at all to do. As was customary for me at the time, I decided to watch a movie. I had been delving into the horror genre and had accumulated quite a few titles that I had still yet to see so this posed the perfect opportunity.
I perused my burgeoning collection, taking in box art and weighing my mood against the tone of what the images presented. After a moment, I came upon a shiny, black case marked with sharp silver letters. I hesitated. I had acquired this particular title fairly early on. It was, as they say, a “big” one. But I hadn’t watched it yet, hadn’t even opened the DVD. I felt something in the pit of my stomach. I don’t know why it had to be then but it just felt right. The day had come. I was going to watch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).
The sun shone in through an adjacent window as I placed the disc in the tray and sat down uneasily. In some ways, I think I believed that the bright, midday setting would perhaps shield me from some of the film’s impact.
I was wrong.
It’s a film that deals in the sun just as much as it does the lack thereof. A movie that begins in flickering, splotchy brightness, so raw and so red that it’s difficult to tell what’s more disturbing: the unsettling Rorschach-test-like visuals or the dark chaos of the disparate soundscape. Its hard, sweaty realness swept over me, aligning my senses to the sights, sounds, and implied smells of the impossibly distant world the film’s teenagers had found themselves in along with the inconceivable cost of admission.
Its reputation had preceded it, of course. This was iconic horror of the Grindhouse sort, predating Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger, deriving from a time of hyper-realism and documentary-style guerrilla filmmaking. This was a vision of terror unlike anything else, a film that made the viewer feel as dirty as the filthy, bone-based decor which adorned every room in the godforsaken manor that the latter half of the film is concerned with. Without knowing anything about it, I felt as though I knew everything about it and my fear to face the thing greatly informed my viewing that fateful Saturday afternoon.
When all was said and done, I sat in stunned silence. It was that rare feeling of deep-rooted recognition that my mind had just experienced something that it would never forget. It scared me, yes, not because of a clever, supernatural conceit, but because it tapped into something monstrously authentic. Leatherface was not some unstoppable force of evil, vengeful ghost, or an undead, machete-wielding hermit in the woods— he was the product of abuse, inbreeding and a world cast aside by society as a whole. A believable concoction of a man with the instincts of a frightened child and an inability to recognize his own, or anyone else’s, humanity.
From the moment he barreled onto the screen with an animalistic squeal, striking and dragging Kirk away as a large, metal door slammed shut behind him, Leatherface emerged as one of the scariest figures I had ever seen onscreen. This scene in particular, and its subsequent dealings with Pam, remained in my mind as the definition of pitch-perfect, harrowingly terrifying cinema throughout the rest of the film and long beyond its conclusion. In many ways, it was a defining moment in my horror education and one that will always haunt me and anyone else who bares witness to it.
Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper’s script is equally perilous, comprised of large, unyielding blocks of text which plot out the actions and demises of Kirk and Pam in agonizing and graphic detail, providing the essential foundation to the scene and its torturous tone. Tobe Hooper carries these words to the screen with an adeptness of vision that provides pace and tension to the proceedings, ultimately erring on the side of less-is-more in the gore department, despite the film’s incomparable reputation for excess. This scene, more than most, proves what can be accomplished in the imagination by way of purposeful suggestion as opposed to explicit depiction.
It’s rare that a film with hype, reputation and a strong presence in the greater cultural zeitgeist can manage to live up to its name, with all of the power and impact such a thing implies. But that one Saturday afternoon in college, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre did just that, and this scene in particular illustrates precisely why that was.
THE SCENE
Kirk knocks on the door to investigate and heads inside, hearing the squealing of a pig. Leatherface appears and bashes his head with a hammer. Kirk convulses, Leatherface hits him again and drags him away, slamming the metal door leading to the butcher’s kitchen shut. Pam approaches the house, calling out to Kirk. She enters, looking around uneasily. She moves to an adjacent room and falls, surrounded by feathers, a caged chicken and furniture made of bone and skin. She nearly retches and runs from the room. Leatherface reemerges squealing and grabs her as she attempts to escape, carrying her into the kitchen. He hangs her from a meat hook. He retrieves a chainsaw and sets to work carving Kirk who is laid out on the counter before her.
THE SCRIPT
Excerpt taken from the script ‘TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: LEATHERFACE’ written by Kim Henkel & Tobe Hooper.
THE SCREEN
To his surprise the front door is unlatched and opens wide under his blows. He peers down what in the gloom appears to be a long narrow chute like hallway.
The shot is wide, the stairs are in the foreground and Kirk stands in the rectangle of bright sunlight cast through the door to the rear of the frame. He calls out several times meeting only silence in return— that is, aside from the consistent rumble of the generator off in the distance. The sense of gloom the screenplay calls for is very much present in the pervasive darkness of the space, as though a cavern-like domicile housing some dangerous carnivore in the wilderness.
The screen cuts back to Pam, sitting on a bench in the bright, inviting sunlight, uncertain and unwilling to join Kirk at the door. In keeping with the narrative, Kirk ignores her apprehension and pushes forward, his curiosity and certainty blinding him to his own mortality.
The script goes into detail describing the space, the stuffed animal heads which cover the wall from floor to ceiling. It calls for deer, elk, moose and bear and various other game animals and also the heads of domestic animals, a cow, a pig, a horse and a goat and a number of heads too small to be distinguished at a distance. The description reads somewhat absent-minded, as if the scribe is recording their own stream of consciousness as opposed to a carefully projected narrative. It adds an element of chaos to the reading which serves to further inform the danger.
Onscreen, these details are difficult to take in right away. The image cuts to a reverse angle of the house, showing a room at the end of the passage adjacent to the stairs. Up a small, wooden ramp, through the door and against the back wall are the ornamental beast heads described in the script. When the image cuts back to Kirk, it’s a close-up, his face more intrigued than afraid. As the script notes, Kirk is delighted, he pokes his head into the hallway for a better look.
Hooper employs a shot-reverse-shot strategy that suggests that Kirk is having a kind of conversation with the house, beckoned in by its strangeness and yet repelled by the telltale signs of death and decay. As the edits bring the viewer closer and closer to the room in increasingly tightening shots of the skulls upon the wall, an odd squealing, like that of a pig, drifts through the space. Unmentioned in the script until Leatherface’s reveal, it’s the sound that seems to bring Kirk’s curiosity to a boil. Silhouetted in the doorway, he makes one last feeble attempt to call over Pam before finally entering the house.
Kirk is disappointed that she is unwilling to join him, hesitates briefly then darts into the house and down the hallway.
Kirk hurries down the hall. Then, in a medium close up shot that echoes the reverse angle of the room seen earlier, he trips and nearly falls over an elevated wooden ramp. A form emerges from behind the door, a huge, dark figure only visible for a second. The image cuts to a low angle close up of Kirk, staring up at the figure wearing a look of slight surprise and cloudy confusion. The moment allows the audience to soak in Kirk’s naiveté, much like that of an innocent animal about to be bludgeoned, as he catches a fleeting glimpse of a horrible leathery mask.
The image lands on the sledgehammer grasped in Leatherface’s large hands, it tracks with the hammer as he raises it high. Then again the image cuts to wide-angle as the powerful arm flashes downward and Kirk is struck a terrific blow square on the forehead. The action is blunt and quick. No fanfare, no buildup, just a smooth motion which brings Kirk to the ground in fits. His body begins to twitch and jerk, prompting the camera to cut to close-ups of Kirk’s red-streaked face, his sporadically spasming torso, and quivering legs, all the while blood pooling beneath his skull.
The image cuts to a wide shot once more, Kirk and Leatherface somewhat small in the back of the frame, and the hulking man again raises his sledgehammer: The sledge is raised slowly, high in the air and then plummets, smashing a final terrifying blow to Kirk’s head. The script moves from here back to Pam, on the bench outside, so detached from the horror and so embalmed in her own sense of innocent beauty that she’s written to be plucking wildflowers.
The film, on the other hand, holds on Leatherface long enough to see him pull Kirk’s limp body aside and throw both of his hands onto the door frame, dragging the entryway’s thick, metal sheath shut and blocking the room from view. The action is accompanied by a low toned droning sound, a reverberating bass that breaks the utter silence in a menacing, perilous way.
Not picking wildflowers, Pam remains on the white bench outside. She calls for Kirk and upon receiving no answer, she stands and approaches the house. In one of the horror genre’s most famous shots, the high angle camera tracks with her, following under the bench and over the tall grass as she steps carefully forward. The house looms ominously larger and larger with each passing step. The camera halts when she reaches the stairs, her full body coming into frame as she assumes the position against the screen door that Kirk had been in just moments before. The exemplary shot carries with it a sense of knowing, of dire consequence and voyeuristic cruelty, the viewer shepherding the lamb to the slaughter.
She arrives at the doorway and is suddenly timid. She leans across the threshold and calls softly.
Although Pam’s approach mirrors Kirk’s, the shot composition is totally different. Something has changed in the space. Its mysteries are less inviting and more intimidating. Instead of carefully composed static wide-angle shots, the camera switches to POV handheld photography, following Pam into the house with visual malice. Unlike Kirk, Pam pushes forward in spite of the place’s haunting threats, determined to find Kirk.
This stylistic pivot is amplified when Pam stumbles into a room adjacent to the hall. Again, the script takes a great deal of time to describe the space, saying that it is choking with furniture… constructed of combinations of bone, metal, wood and some sort of thin leathery substance. The screenplay allows Pam to take her time recognizing the place for what it is, before a chill wet horror begins to well up inside her. It culminates in the reveal of a major set piece, a many-legged doll, life-size and comprised of various human components, a totem that leads Pam to her breaking point.
What the screenplay takes several large blocks of text and pages to describe, the film boils down to a handful of seconds of frenzied realization. Pam trips and falls into the space, landing in a cloud of feathers, teeth and bone fragments. The camera is anarchic, moving and zooming in an effort to assail the senses of both the character onscreen and the viewer with the world of the people who dwell in that house. A human skeleton decorates a large wooden bench. A skull crowned with feathers and a large horn through its mouth hangs from the ceiling. Bone, teeth and dried flesh lie on tabletops and weave together to form a grisly craft room, ultimately relishing death and decay as emotionally stunted, artistic expression. Pam dry-heaves, screams, and runs from the room, having seen all that she needs to see to confirm the feeling that had arisen in the pit of her stomach since first she laid eyes on the house.
Back in the main hallway, the script and the screen catch back up to one another as The main door at the end of the hall slams with a thundering crash and there is a hysterical, high pitched, pig-like squeal. In a series of cuts, screams and squeals, Leatherface bolts after Pam. He doesn’t move slowly with confidence or caution, but runs, full tilt, as though he were just as afraid that Pam might get away as she is certain she will be caught. Therefore they both scream in terror, which is perhaps one of the scariest aspects of all.
The script describes her instantaneous capture in another run-on sentence with an emphasis on Leatherface’s raw force:
He wraps one long powerful arm around her body clamping her arms to her sides and lifts her into the air and with the other arm he forces her head back almost to the point of breaking her neck and she can only struggle weakly and gargle raggedly against the brutal force closing her throat.
Once more, the words pour out like water from a downspout, leaving a disarming feeling born of structureless design that serves to ratchet up the danger pervading the whole endeavor. Pam’s futile flailing does nothing to dissuade Leatherface’s hulking arms as he carries her back through the hallway. It is here that the script confirms what was only assumed previously, as Pam sees Leatherface’s mask up close.
The face of the hood is human but shriveled and leathery. The hair is human hair.
The brutality of the realization comes alive through the eyes of the poor girl falling victim to its implications, the words carrying a pitch-black tone and dramatic heaviness that bursts through every grainy frame onscreen. The first shot of the kitchen features the meat hook large in the foreground, looming grimly as Leatherface hoists Pam into the air. The place is described as a completely outfitted butchers shop and kitchen. The shot settles in a wide-angle, Kirk’s body lying motionless on a table in the center of the room with the three meathooks lining the wall behind. Leatherface fastens Pam onto one of the hooks, the camera cutting between the established wide shot of the kitchen and a close up of Pam’s pained face, droplets of dried blood splattered across the wall behind her.
She feels a smooth warm prick and she is free high in the air impaled on the brutal steel of a meathook.
After this, Leatherface goes about his business in an oddly casual way. Juxtaposed against his squealing and frantic capture of the girl only moments before, this seems like an entirely different person. He pokes Kirk with a fork and drops it in the sink before attending to his chainsaw. The camera zooms in on the chainsaw slowly while Pam struggles and whimpers on the hook, surveying the scene and staring down at her dead lover. The script calls for her throat to fill with blood, insinuating a bloodier visualization in general. The film keeps the focus on the character’s expression and sounds, evoking imaginative disgust that is far more visceral than the alternative.
A close up of Leatherface as he raises the chainsaw assuredly provides the viewer a window into what little confidence he has. He is a butcher. This is a job the man knows how to do. He’s good at it. He relishes that sense of skill, of accomplishment. The camera zooms in, just before he puts the machine to his intended purpose, and he wets his lips, showing a set of yellowing, malformed jaws and one more time reminding viewers of his grotesque level of excitement. Then, he sets to work on Kirk.
In the script, He strips Kirk’s body of its remaining flesh and lays it on a huge butcher block while Blood pours from Pam’s mouth. On the page, he refrains from turning on the chainsaw until the very end of the scene. In the film, a wide shot depicts Leatherface in the center of the frame, standing before Kirk and lowering his chainsaw into the boy’s flesh. As he carves, Pam screams in hysterics. The camera zooms in slowly on Pam, less interested in the slicing of skin, meat, and bone and more focused on the dark impact of such a reality on one who had minutes before been blissfully oblivious to such evils.
The final, concluding image of the scene stands in solitary support of such an idea, holding on a weathervane outside of the house as the sounds of agony play somewhere inside. Distant echoes that are all but harmless, incoherent background noises in the vast expanse. No one will hear them. No one will come. What is normal in that place will remain so and continue to, reminding that safety is a construct easily eroded, especially for those who trust in it most.
The last scripted line in the scene is, The chain saw changes pitch as it bites into Kirk’s flesh. Something we have all heard, it seems, can sound very different when the context of its use alters. Like one’s perspective of a quaint country home, or a hot, sunny summer’s day… all is never fully what it might seem— chain saws included.
THE BLOODY CONCLUSION
“I’ve argued with people, denying that it was a true story and, you know, I’m saying it now and I’ve said it for a long time, it will never go away [the belief] that this is true,” director Tobe Hooper said on his commentary track for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre found on the Blu-ray release. “Perhaps it was a small piece of a jigsaw puzzle that is in some way infused with reality.”
I can’t recall what I did before or after my screening of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that fateful Saturday afternoon in college. That’s the thing about movies, especially those of the deeply effective variety, they make a mark on you in time and space. A tangible mental impact that solidifies the details of where you were when the thing first hit. My journey into the horror genre was littered with experiences like that, moments that will stay with me for the rest of my life.
Starting with a dense, thought-provoking screenplay, detailing every last ounce of the gritty world the screen would go on to explore, the filmmakers crafted an unforgettable vision of undiluted terror. And yet it was by allowing the creation to continually evolve that led to some of its most iconic elements, proving that planning and detailed execution are only components of a more complex whole.
For example, in the scene detailed above, there was at least one last-minute change that had a fundamental impact on the whole. Tobe Hooper says in his commentary, “I needed something else, I needed something to button the scene up with. So I had everyone take a couple of hours break while Bob Burns built the door… it was needed and it was done on the spot… [the scene] needed that exhibition of power.”
The crucial impact of the sliding metal door aside, one of the film’s most famous shots was also an unplanned addition. It was only after the crew had filmed all of the storyboarded sequences for the day that Director of Photography Daniel Pearl suggested to Tobe Hooper that they attempt a tracking shot under the bench and approaching the house. In an additional commentary track found on the disc, the two discuss the fight they had to wage to get the shot included, an argument which led to threats of dismissal, quitting, and cuts which might have dismantled the entire production.
Still, for all the spontaneity, much was also built and acquired for the sequence. Tobe Hooper said in his commentary, “I wanted it as cluttered as possible”. Art Director Robert Burns built the iconic yard swing from scratch out of railroad ties, using the same materials to construct the mechanism from which Leatherface hung Pam. “[Robert] would go out and collect bones, anything dead that he could,” Tobe Hooper recalled in his commentary, “and the teeth were all real, they came from a dentist friend of Bob’s”.
The scene is as merciless and immovably callous as the film which surrounds it, offering a window into the sort of place and people most of us would rather not know existed. It’s chillingly realized on the page and executed with striking elegance onscreen, capturing grotesquery with striking beauty.
It’s a sequence and a film that embodies what it is that I love about horror. No genre is more uniquely positioned to offer the sort of gut-punch that horror can pitch. A dose of abhorrence in the living room as the waning Saturday afternoon light fades in the west, presented with precision and care. A singular darkness packaged in the stead of providing humanity a safe, artistic, and thoughtful way of examining the other side of the coin that we so rarely allow ourselves to consider.
It’s a Saturday I’ll never forget. A movie I’ll always carry with me. A scene I’ll never stop thinking about. And as aggressive as it can be at times, what I appreciate most about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is what it has the ability to conjure in the imagination. As Tobe Hooper puts it in his commentary when asked why he left so much of the origin of Leatherface’s character unexplored, “[because] you’re going to come up with something much better”.
And as the credits rolled and the dregs of the Saturday afternoon sunlight landed at my feet all those years ago, my mind started to wander, consider and do just what Mr. Hooper was talking about. Whether it washes he asserted, better than what he might’ve come up with, I can’t say. But what I can tell you is, I didn’t stop thinking about it for quite some time. Hell, maybe I never will.
So, I suppose what I’m saying is, the next time you find yourself alone on a Saturday with nothing in particular to do, reach for one of the “big” ones. You never know what you might soon discover that you’ll never forget.
