0 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

USA, 83 minutes
Director: Tobe Hooper
Writers: Kim Henkel, Tobe Hooper
Photography: Daniel Pearl
Music: Wayne Bell, Tobe Hooper
Editors: J. Larry Carroll, Sallye Richardson
Cast: Marilyn Burns, Allen Danziger, Paul A. Partain, William Vail, Teri McMinn, Edwin Neal, Gunnar Hansen, John Dugan, Jim Siedow, John Larroquette

(Spoilers ahead if you can call them spoilers.) I had seen The Texas Chain Saw Massacre only once until recently. That was enough to convince me it was one of the scariest movies ever made. The decision to look at it again was thus soon hampered by gnawing unease and procrastination at the prospect. I realized the last movie that had given me this kind of problem was Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and the link is clear. Neither particularly involves the supernatural, unworldly monsters, and/or abstract forces of evil. It's just human depravity, and that's enough.

To be sure, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is fiendishly conceived and full of exaggerations for effect large and small. Based loosely on the legends of Wisconsin serial killer and cannibal Ed Gein, it seems to take a special glee in the quotidian intricacies of the butchering industry as well as solemnly nodding over tales of how Native Americans put to use every part of the whales and buffaloes they slew. So along the way we find a lot of human bones, hair, skin and such (and feathers, in a room where a live rooster squats in a cage hung from the ceiling) draped all over everything, including the faces of the killers. But the movie is also remarkably free of blood and gore, though in turn that may be offset by larger-than-usual doses of screaming, which at one point toward the end seems to go on for 25 minutes or more.



Free of blood and gore but it never shrinks from making sure we understand exactly what's going on. After all, you really don't have to see a lot of blood or brain matter to understand that a sledgehammer to the skull (with the sickening sound) is brutal. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is obviously a low-budget production but director and co-writer Tobe Hooper and cinematographer Daniel Pearl worked with what they had, putting the supersaturated color of the cheap film stock to work in methodical if lurid dimensions. Red and yellow really pop and red and yellow things are particularly unsettling. The images often have a clinical feel to them, as if studied through a lens. And they're not afraid to let the screen go black when it suits them, worrying you to death at that point with the noises. The Saw franchise actually owes it quite a bit in terms of look and feel.

The range in tones is amazing and goes beyond the visuals, keeping viewers continually off-balance. It lumbers with deadly pace. There's a lot of setup in the beginning about grave robbers, corpses, slaughterhouse procedures, and an extremely unpleasant hitchhiker. But all of it is essential to what makes this such an extraordinarily powerful experience. There are five teens and it seems to take forever to kill the first one. But we have been so lulled by that time that it's as shocking then as it is efficient. The next three go down fast, leaving only Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns), perhaps the original "final girl." In the last third the movie goes places I'm not sure have been matched anywhere yet, notably a dinner table scene where the demented family makes fun of the blubbering terrified Sally (and later when Grandpa can't keep hold of a hammer). It is abjectly horrifying yet also hilarious but it is laughter inside of a void. The scene may be funny, but unlike the later ironic self-referential approaches of Sam Raimi, Wes Craven, and others, we're not really in on the joke. They could be making fun of us next and there wouldn't be a thing we could do about it, and it wouldn't be so funny then.

Well, actually, there is one thing we could do about it, which is the thing Sally does: scream your head off and run if you can and don't ever stop screaming. Marilyn Burns, who died recently at 65, never did much in movies besides this and it's not hard to see why. There's not a lot of range there. But it is an iconic role and she owns it completely, working effectively off the low-budget trappings, letting the story itself winnow away the others—an altogether distracting crew, including the raw vulnerability of Sally's disabled brother Franklin (Paul A. Partain), who travels in a wheelchair, and his haunting face. Finally it is just Sally and the fundamentals of life and death. And no one can argue she isn't one hell of a screamer.

I have some sense that people who do not watch horror movies on principle want an explanation from those of us who do—"enjoy" them is not exactly the right word, at least for me, though obviously there can be elements of camp that provide a good old-fashioned entertainment to many (e.g., The Bride of Frankenstein). The Texas Chain Saw Massacre inevitably became a franchise and a camp supervillain emerged, one "Leatherface," the artist butcher of this film (Gunnar Hansen), who then became just another action figure with Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger. The reasons for watching are complex, a mixture of many different motivations, some so familiar now as to be hackneyed: Catharsis, for example, the exhilaration of surviving, which is also the kick with amusement park rides. Or testing limits—seeing how far "out there" you can go and still get back to a safe place (the implicit question: is it possible to go too far?). Then there's flinty realism—looking at the horror with a cold eye because it is real. This can be something of a passive-aggressive position, favoring things that are ugly by design simply because they are ugly (justified because "real," which I think, enlarging some, applies to believers in regard to the movies that are more overtly supernatural, wherein the "real" becomes Satan and evil). But I suspect all this is more like the proverbial 10% of the iceberg that's visible—a lot of business lurks out of sight in the unconscious, even among those who don't like horror movies. My curiosity about how or why these movies have such a powerful effect might be it. Aside from the violence, which looks like it hurts for sure (not to mention maims and kills, and I'm opposed to that), why does this mayhem frighten me, charge me with adrenaline, make it hard to breathe easy, worry me about the dark corners at night? It's only a movie, right? One thing's sure. Something keeps drawing me back.

Detail: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

0 Poltergeist (1982)

USA, 114 minutes
Director: Tobe Hooper
Writers: Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais, Mark Victor
Photography: Matthew F. Leonetti
Music: Jerry Goldsmith
Editor: Michael Kahn
Cast: JoBeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Beatrice Straight, Dominique Dunne, Oliver Robbins, Heather O'Rourke, Zelda Rubinstein

Let's stipulate right off that Poltergeist is silly and unscary, except (maybe) for a couple of scenes jammed in the middle. The funny thing ha ha about this movie is how wrong it gets everything, even basic stuff, with paranormal investigators who are easily spooked, anachronistic science fiction effects, a proto-Big Chill couple smokin' dope in the bedroom, and seeming endless out-of-context hokum about "the light." It tries very hard to appear to know what it is talking about but it is obviously empty: "Poltergeists are usually associated with individuals. Hauntings seem to be connected with an area," explains our head paranormal investigator at one point, who wraps herself in a motherly shawl (Beatrice Straight). She is only reading lines from a script by Steven Spielberg in which he is merrily making shit up to fortify the special effects. He is the only poltergeist anywhere around here.

Therein lies the rub, of course—there's an exciting credit in director Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), but the script is by Spielberg, the first words we see at the end are "A STEVEN SPIELBERG PRODUCTION," and it is, by all indications, Spielberg in full flush of working on Raiders of the Ark and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial wanting to take on a horror project. By all indications, Hooper was there for the cred to get the deal done. By all indications, it was dollar signs on eyeballs (not least Hooper's) that wrecked this. And by all indications, it worked, a sideshow in the big summer of Steven Spielberg, with E.T. released just a week after it. Cha-ching, baby. E.T. is still high on the list of all-time earners, currently #9 between Shrek 2 and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. But Poltergeist is not doing so shabby itself—#800 all-time.



Tobe Hooper is a topic for another time and place. Suffice to say for now he's virtually invisible in Poltergeist, save for some shots and storyboards (he loves people looming on staircases from below, for example). Hooper is just drowned out by the busy Steven Spielberg (who has his own interesting way of shooting looming people by the way, using a crane). It's a familiar Spielberg circus: suburban middle-class family scenery, ubiquitous TV sets turned on and playing (ludicrously they become instruments of evil here, not convincing perhaps but ahead at least of Videodrome and The Ring), the constant impulse to retreat into safe sitcom blocking and setups, and especially the overindulgence of special effects and music.

It's arguable that Hooper ran out of ideas after Chain Saw, but the evidence in Poltergeist is more persuasive that an egomaniac full of then-current horror was running the show. Spielberg would get better at this, and get better at collaborations too (in Gremlins, with Joe Dante), but he appears to be an uncontrollable force of nature run amok here. Poltergeist is most often aping other things, but adding nothing to them. A tree comes alive and grabs a kid—kind of like The Evil Dead! The cause of everything is defiling a cemetery—kind of like The Amityville Horror! Stuff is inexplicably swirling around in a bedroom—kind of like The Exorcist! Et cetera. These are not the kinds of things Hooper has done in his career, but Spielberg.

This was obvious then and it's still obvious now. My feelings about Spielberg have changed many times, in many ways—he remains one of the most confounding figures in cinema. If I liked Poltergeist then out of some sense of loyalty to him (mostly for Close Encounters of the Third Kind), now I'm more willing to dismiss it as a lesser effort. The scenes in Poltergeist that scared me (disturbed me, annoyed me, got under my skin) are consecutive in the middle of the picture, though also very much incidental to the action. One involves a cut of meat on a kitchen counter, the other a man looking at his face in a mirror. It's still pretty good stuff, but again, overdone.

The whole movie goes on too long, packed with false endings, colorful characters, extra-dimensional vortices, skeletons bobbing up in the swimming pool that is conveniently under construction in the backyard, thunder and lightning every night like evening prayers. Aiyiyi. This goes so far over the top it's coming up under its own ass again. Here's some trivia for you. Those skeletons in the swimming pool are real skeletons, because plastic versions were more costly. In a way this is a microcosm of the whole problem, isn't it? The representation of past spirits defiled includes slathering mud on and spraying down the remains of actual human beings. It's not hard to imagine Spielberg rubbing his hands at such a fortuitous turn of events. Real skeletons. And cheaper! So awesome cool, man. Like it was meant to be.

Detail: Poltergeist (1982)