Witness the fascinating low dolly shot from under a swing as we first enter the Sawyer house, or the quick-cut montage of Burns' eyeballs as she's being tortured around a dinner table.
The early sun-drenched exteriors are striking in the way they combine function with form, and the film's most famous sequences work so effectively due to Pearl's dexterity. There are shots of impressive fluidity and shocking beauty in the film. Now one of the more successful and in-demand DPs in Hollywood, he cut his teeth on 'Texas Chainsaw,' and his work is admirably ambitious. 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' also works as a piece of pop art thanks to Pearl. If not quite existential, 'The Texas Chainasaw Massacre' is certainly the most unsentimental of horror films when it comes to valuing humanity's ultimate place in the natural pecking order. The universe cares little for us mere human animals. As the film suggests again and again narratively (by the arbitrary order in which the protagonists are killed) and visually (by frequently placing our heroes in diminished positions within his compositions), meat is meat. At the same time, the characters are archetypal enough that Hooper is able to easily equate them with the cattle of the local slaughterhouse. Hooper and Henkel also outline the other passengers with some quirky strokes, particularly the zodiac-spouting Pam (Teri McMinn, who meets a particularly nasty end on a meat hook) and her ineffectual boyfriend Kirk (William Vail, who we at first think will be the traditional, rugged leading man).
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We are able to see heroine Sally (Marilyn Burns, perhaps the greatest screamer in horror movie history) as a if-not-quite-three-dimensional person than at least as a genuine human being worthy of our empathy. Hooper and screenwriter Kim Henkel also achieve greater thematic resonance thanks to character construction that is a bit more complex than it may at first appear. Much like a bad dream where, no matter how hard you try to run, your legs just won't cooperate, 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' captures that primal, irrational terror and milks it for every last drop of effectiveness. Yet there's a sustained through-line of (il)logic, that may not make "sense" on a conscious level, but feels subconsciously correct. Screen direction frequently shifts, eye-lines don't match from one shot to the next, and the low-budget conditions often wreak havoc with continuity of lighting, performance, and dialogue. On one level of craftsmanship, 'Texas Chainsaw' would seem to be a mess. It accomplishes that with astonishing fidelity. As directed by Tobe Hooper and shot by cinematographer Daniel Pearl, the film aims only to reproduce the structure and syntax of a nightmare.
The point of 'Texas Chainsaw' is hardly its plot. What follows is about as gruesome and blood-soaked as you can imagine. Stumbling upon a seemingly deserted farmhouse, the kids discover it's really the home of the hitchhiker's even nuttier clan, led by demented patriarch Sawyer and his obese, chainsaw wielding brother Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen). The van of kids promptly kicks him out, but that's only the beginning of the fun. After stopping by a particularly creepy gas station to ask for directions, they pick up a crazy hitchhiker (Edwin Neal) who regales them with tales of the local slaughterhouse, and, in a charming precursor of the horrors to come, slices himself with a razor blade. A group of five friends is making a trip through Texas in search of the grave of a relative. The story is likely familiar to most, and if not, it will likely seem completely generic because it's been ripped-off by just about every slasher film of the past three-and-a-half decades. But perhaps that's besides the point these days - the film exists in our memory banks as a collective nightmare, with images that still hold enough raw visceral power to shock thirty-five years after its original creation. Whether of not that makes 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' a legitimately good film is another matter. Just mention the words of the title to someone, and even if they've never seen the film, they'll know exactly what you're talking about. The very definition of '70s grindhouse horror, ' The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' is not only a classic of the genre, but a piece of our shared cultural lexicon.
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