Critics reviews

Once I got my lightweight self to catch up on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, I couldn't help but be enthralled by it as a work of sensory cinema. It is a question of form—and of format—and the grainy, saturated, menacingly askew compositions of Tobe Hooper's midnight classic can harsh your high even before the sound and image ratchet up to an onslaught.

Few films are as unshakeable as the original Chain Saw, which manages to get more terrifying with each subsequent viewing.

For those who still haven't seen it—likely because of the brute implications of that title—it's both as repulsive as the title suggests and somehow transcendent of the cheapness it implies. This kind of nerve shredding can only be accomplished through a tremendous amount of care, and that Hooper was able to fold layers of dark humor into the film while never once short-circuiting its full-throttle suspense is further testament to a singular talent.

That vicious, unforgettable pursuit from the late, great Tobe Hooper's landmark masterpiece, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, so powerfully acted by Marilyn Burns and Gunnar Hansen (and by the entire cast throughout the movie), is both horrifying and distressingly emotional. It is also strangely beautiful in its nightmare vision, real and unreal...

...Now a consuming terror whose feral ferocity would have been unimaginable not long ago has been unloosed. There is a violence to the filmmaking that transcends bloodletting, and the movie devolves into a merciless and unceasing assault on the senses, filtered through the terrible experience of Marilyn Burns's archetypal ‘final girl'. It ends with perhaps the most deliriously lurid sunrises in all of cinema, and the sunrise signifies the dawn of a new era of endless, awful possibilities.

The movie's lurid rep scared me a little so I, like a lot of people coming to the movie for the first time, was a little surprised at how not-gory it was. Although of course it was still entirely harrowing. And rather unexpectedly funny. I became obsessed with the movie right away and have seen it almost as many times as I have seen Psycho or Repulsion or any of the other romantic comedies I'm so steeped in.

The American cinema is one of intense contradictions, represented too often by the machine of Hollywood, the films emerging from the dream factory have never been able to reflect the totality of the American experience – least of all, within the horror genre. Low budgeted and dirty, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre represents at once the stretching infinity of the land and the stunning resourcefulness of its greatest artists.

Subtext is inseparable from Watergate/Vietnam dysfunction and anger, yet Hooper's indelible nightmare moves in its own cosmic cycle, a sky in which the blasting orange sun and the full moon give way to the capillary-cracked whites of Marilyn Burns' dismayed eyes.

Justifiably praised for suggesting more than it shows, the nature of its suggestion is far more horrifying than I'd imagined. For death isn't what's truly horrifying here; after all, the blankness of death stalls the imagination; what's truly horrifying is torture. Prolonged, agonizing, unthinkable torture.

Tobe Hooper's 1974 bloodbath cheapie acquired a considerable reputation among ideologically oriented critics, who admired the film's sneaky equation of middle-class values with cannibalism and wholesale slaughter... The picture gets to you more through its intensity than its craft, but Hooper does have a talent.