Tags: texas chain saw massacre

Texas Chainsaw Massacre Month. When you're thinking about something all the time, as we have been thinking about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series this month, you start seeing it everywhere. I started noticing a lot more Texas Chainsaw related videos on Youtube lately. They've always been there, I guess, but they were just waiting for me to notice them. Most of them were, frankly, awful, but I picked a smattering that amused me, along with trailers for all six Texas Chainsaw films. You can view what I came up with after the cut.

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Texas Chainsaw Massacre Month. Last year at the International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix, I had the great opportunity to chat with Marilyn Burns, who played final girl Sally Hardesty in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Our talk focused exclusively on her career in the 1970s and resulted in some great stories about the Texas film industry, the dangers of making a Charles Manson biopic, and why Eaten Alive may not be the film to take home to mother and father.(read more...)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre Month. Many films have clashed with British censors over the years but The Texas Chain Saw Massacre does have its own unique place in the weird and wonderful history of censorship in the UK, having been present at several significant points in that story over the last four decades. In 1974, the Secretary of the British Board of Film Classification James Ferman condemned TCSM as "...the pornography of terror," but his plans to keep it completely out of UK cinemas were foiled on its initial release. Then, despite the best efforts of the BBFC to keep the film off the small screen, it went on to be a black market video nasty hit in the '80s, before the powers-that-be threw in the towel in the '90s, and granted it a legitimate, uncut release. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a perfect example of a film that undermines their whole method of, and approach to, censorship as well as showing the extent to which the process is arbitrary, driven by political and media pressure, and riddled with class prejudice.

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Texas Chainsaw Massacre Month. When it comes to endless savagery and violence in cinema, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a film that usually comes up during the conversation. People shiver as they recount how a madman wearing the faces of others chases down a group of stranded young folk, always eager to carve them to pieces like Thanksgiving dinner (not the worst metaphor either, as the killer and his family enjoy feasting on the remains of the fallen). Those who can recall their own grueling viewing experiences remember all these morbid tidbits in lurid detail. And those who have not seen it, in turn, are taken by the film's reputation and either become hesitant to watch it or convinced that the film is another mindless gorefest.

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Texas Chainsaw Massacre Month. I know, I know. Provocative interpretations of Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (TCSM) abound. I was reminded of that once again after reading Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film while writing an essay (that had nothing to do with TCSM) for another publication. And of course, our articles and reviews this month served notice once again: TCSM may be the most provocative horror film in American history. (read more...)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre Month. Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is an intense, bare-knuckled assault on the senses. In it we see sadism, brutality, and violence as we had never seen it before. What is sometimes overlooked is that one can see in the film a grotesque mirror being held up to the social struggles of the era. The late 1960s and early 1970s were a stressful time for America. The Freedom Struggle, the tragic war in Vietnam, the epidemic of violence in the country, the bloody trend of political assassinations; all of these things had led by the mid '70s to a sense of fatigue and despondence in the country. In 1969, Richard Nixon used the term "silent majority" to encompass those Americans who had become uncomfortable with all of the drastic changes that the country had come through. He gave a name to those not claiming membership in the left-leaning Counterculture or who participated in demonstrations. The excesses of the past decade had built up a sense of victimization and resentment within the Silent Majority. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre can be seen as a reflection and parody of the clash between these two groups.

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Texas Chainsaw Massacre Month. When we talk about sound in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, what usually comes up is the bizarre cacophony that Tobe Hooper and Wayne Bell put together for the musical score. However, there's another aural element that plays an important part in TCSM. The use of country and bluegrass tunes that play on radios within the world of the movie add another layer of reality to the already gritty presentation. One of those songs, playing during the Hitch-hiker's introduction, is "Fool for a Blonde" by Roger Bartlett. Classic-Horror.com guest correspondent John Wisniewski had a chance to ask Bartlett about his career and the inspirations that lead to the song's creation.(read more...)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre Month. I don't know what makes men like Ed Gein superstars, when all they leave behind them is suffering, loss and madness. Maybe it's that their stories are so bizarrely gothic and so filled with lurid details that no movie could make up. Ironically movies about these creatures will later appear - the weird parts repackaged for general consumption. After this we can relax, take a breath and tell ourselves, "Well heck, it's only a movie." When this happens enough, when we've seen the film, read the books and got the pez dispenser, men like Gein become no more real to us than a Leatherface, a Freddy Krueger or King Kong. Soon they have a separate 'star image' and while they still give most of us the chills, for others they are 'anti-heroes' or symbols of rebellion. Perhaps this is the only way we can make life bearable, by fictionalizing them, making fun and denying anything really ever happened. But it did happen and Gein was real. So were his victims.(read more...)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre Month. Greetings and welcome to another installment of Classic-Horror.com's Shiverin' 6. In sticking with our month-long celebration of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series, we've decided to take a look at six members of the cannibalistic Sawyer clan. Demented, depraved and downright bizarre these characters inspired over the top performances from the actors cast to play them, and also provided the audience with many chill inducing moments thanks to their psychotic behavior. Now, in order of their appearance in the series, let's meet the family.

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It began, legend says, at Christmas time. Tobe Hooper, a film director whose only feature credit had been a hippie drama called Eggshells, was standing in a Montgomery Ward, trapped by the bustle of last-minute shoppers. As he contemplated how to get through the mass of consumerism, he found violent inspiration in a display of chainsaws. Thankfully, he didn't act on his carnage-filled fantasy of bloody crowd control. Instead, he channeled the idea into his second feature, a low-budget horror flick about a quintet of young people who are beset by a family of cannibal hicks in the sweltering Texas summer. Although produced with working titles such as Headcheese and Leatherface, it was released in 1974 with the only name it would ever need: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. This brutal cacophony of terror would go on to spawn three direct sequels, documentaries, a video game, several comic books, an official fan club, and countless pieces of collectible merchandise. Its imitators are innumerable. In 2003, New Line Cinema and Platinum Dunes released a remake which spawned its own prequel, merchandise, and comic books.