"All the strands come together, like purse strings around the throat. Here are a couple of snippets from reviews of the time that capture the effect the film had on a contemporary audience: " The Texas Chain Saw Massacre made me feel trapped in a nightmare with my eyes open, running in glue trussed like a live lobster poised over the pot." I'd give almost anything to experience such cinematic freshness and terror today. And right now, from a modern viewpoint, after exposure to all of the films it helped shape and that have looked to take the genre to greater extremes, you really can't hope to imagine just what it felt like to see The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for the first time back in the mid-to-late 70s. Even three years on there'd been nothing to adequately prepare me for this. Secondly, the film itself scared the living shit out of me. First, that the cinema – whose name I cannot remember – actually had seats located behind sizeable pillars from which you couldn't actually see the screen. I remember two things distinctly about that screening. One of first films I hunted out was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which was still playing at a number of cinemas around the city. About three years later I'd got into film school, and every couple of weeks would travel up to the capital to see as many movies as I could before the last train back to Bournemouth (I'd usually reach my bedsit at about 3am). I was too young to legally see the film on its initial release, and although I was by then quite used to making myself look older and bluffing my way in to X-certificate films, the thought of travelling up to London to do so and being successfully challenged on unfamiliar turf required considerably larger gonads than I possessed at the time. Presumably working class Londoners were seen as being more resilient than their counterparts elsewhere back in the 1970s. In an unusual exception, it was cut by approximately 30 seconds and granted a London-only release by the Greater London Council with what came to be known as a GLC-X certificate. To protect these easily influenced working-class minds, the BBFC refused to grant the film a UK release. James Ferman, the then newly appointed secretary of the BBFC, is reported to have said after LFF screening, "It's all right for you middle-class cineastes to see this film, but what would happen if a factory worker in Manchester happened to see it?" ** Heaven forbid. The British censors were not so impressed. Its first UK screening was at the 19th London Film Festival, where it became the subject of argumentative discussion between the audience and a trio of critics who went on stage to defend the film, including Nigel Andrews of The Financial Times, * but was still named by the festival as 'Outstanding Film of the Year'. It was a shock to the senses, a cinematic gut-punch that left audiences reeling and that upset self-appointed arbiters of morals and taste in just about every country on which it was unleashed. There was nothing you could watch to prepare you for what you were about to sit through. Like The Exorcist before it, the film came out of nowhere, not as the latest work in a developing sub-genre. It is, I would suggest, nigh-on impossible for a modern audience to appreciate the impact Tobe Hooper's seminal low budget horror favourite The Texas Chain Saw Massacre made on its release back in 1974. Crazy retarded people going beyond the line between animal and human." "It's a film about meat, about people who are gone beyond dealing with animal meat and rats and dogs and cats.
Just a few of the reasons why I still regard The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as one of the greatest, most ground-breaking horror films in the long history of the genre, by Slarek
Thus if you've not seen the film and intend one day to do so, I'd hop forward to the disc coverage by clicking here. In order to do this I've chosen to explore the film on a scene-by-scene basis, which means that the review is absolutely littered with spoilers, and even includes details of how the film ends. That this is not a review aimed at newcomers to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,īut a personal reflection on what it is that so thrilled me about the film,īoth when I was first exposed to it back in the late 1970s and how it continues to astonish even today. The main review and disc details by Slarek are joined by a first viewing recollection by Camus.
#Edwin neal interview movie#
Slarek and Camus re-examine what makes Tobe Hopper's seminal independent horror movie 1974 THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE a horror masterpiece, and celebrate Second Sight's definitive 40th Anniversary Blu-ray.
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