At 50, this classic horror movie is still cinema’s ultimate nightmare

Earlier this week, Variety published a list of the 100 best horror movies ever. Sitting at the top, like an exhumed corpse festering in the brilliant midday sun, was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. This was not a controversial choice on the publication’s part, not in the year of our unholy lord of darkness 2024. Tobe Hooper’s deranged thriller, which roared into theaters 50 years ago, has been rising in critical esteem for decades, its reputation as a truly great movie — rather than merely a deeply upsetting and effective one — steadily cementing over the last half-century. Time, in other words, has been very kind to a savage, scandalous act of grindhouse exploitation once considered so shocking, it was banned in multiple countries. Yesterday’s outrage machine has become today’s lionized classic.

For as much as the movie deserves every drop of overdue recognition it’s increasingly earned, it’s still a little unusual seeing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre canonized by mainstream arbiters of taste. The next two films on Variety’s list, The Exorcist and Psycho, have more commonly wrestled for the nebulous title of horror’s pinnacle. Both of those movies were plenty shocking and controversial in their time, of course. But like most historic hair- and knuckle-whiteners, they’ve lost a little of their transgressive power over the decades since, as the standard of what gets under the skin of the average moviegoer evolves. Generally speaking, they don’t traumatize like they used to. They’re safer — which, in a sense, makes them easier to enshrine as the Mona Lisas of their video store aisle.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is different. This is not a safe movie. Though it’s now widely recognized as a masterpiece, it’s not something you appreciate from a respectful distance, admiring its historic qualities like an anthropologist of B-movie artifacts. It’s an experience, undiminished by everything that’s come after it. The primal immediacy of Hooper’s achievement — the sheer demented intensity of his 83-minute assault on the senses — has not waned. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre will still mess you up. If it doesn’t, there might actually be something off about you.

John Larroquette provides the faux-true-crime narration of the opening scene — a dryly ominous introduction that frames the events to come as reenactments of real unspeakable crimes, which the wildly successful marketing campaign exploited. This is not a true story in any literal sense, though Hooper did base some of the violence on the very real mayhem of the serial killer Ed Gein. In a much more general sense, few films have felt more in touch with the madness of American culture, the evil lurking in our country’s heart and its forgotten corners.

Part of what remains so unnerving about the film, five decades later, is how it seems to straddle the line between a harsh, scraggly, almost documentary realism and something more hallucinatory. Even as Hooper rubs our noses in forensic evidence (retrospective glimpses of the horror to come — a devious device for triggering our dread early), he also begins to pull at the fabric of the reality he’s establishing, washing out the images, drowning out the audio with droning, atonal music. It’s as if the insanity of the Sawyer clan was already polluting the movie’s style, minutes before we’ve met a single one of them.

Rewatching the film, it’s striking how much its opening act functions as one long premonition of doom. Over and over again, Hooper seems to erect an existential “Turn back now” sign, giving his van of unlucky city slickers numerous warnings that something awful waits down the road they’re traversing. Hell, one of the abominable killers himself tries to warn them, in his own way, in a gas station scene that would become a cliché of the 1980s slasher movies Texas Chain Saw helped inspire. The early stretch of the film is littered with bad omens: roadkill, reports of violence on the radio, the roar of what just might be a chainsaw in the distance. Even the daily horoscope seems to be beaming in a red alert from the universe: “There are moments where we cannot believe what is happening is really true,” one of the kids reads aloud. She’ll grasp the meaning of those words when she’s hanging from a meat hook later in the afternoon.

So much has been written over the years about Leatherface’s iconic first appearance, that moment when he stumbles into a doorway without prelude or fanfare, and clocks someone dead with a hammer, before slamming the metal door behind him. It happens so fast, you can almost miss it. It’s like the “We’re gonna need a bigger boat” scene in Jaws, the multiplex phenomenon that opened a year later: a jump scare so unexpected and so off rhythm — a moment you can’t possibly anticipate — that it scrambles your sense of security. Nearly half a century earlier, Boris Karloff got a star’s entrance as Frankenstein’s monster, slowly turning to face the camera and reveal his hideous face. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre seemed to announce a scary new era of sudden lunacy, when the monster simply blips into our line of sight, too obscene for formal introduction.

The scene almost plays like a hole has been torn in the fabric of time and space, depositing something horrible and beyond reason. Who in their right mind thought we needed an origin story (nay, two!) for this brute? Leatherface is so much scarier as an evil that’s just suddenly there. Not a single one of the sequels, prequels, and remakes is essential. They all give us more than we need of this awful place, these unknowable monsters. They try to bring psychology into the matter, when the Sawyers — bloodthirsty emblems of American derangement — exist beyond the purview of diagnosis. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a complete thing. To continue what passes for its story is futile, because its power can’t be replicated. Hooper seemed to realize that, and took his own over-the-top sequel, the best one, in the only direction that made sense: black comedy.

All the mythology those mostly dire follow-ups would build upon is largely implied in the original. No one ever even identifies the Sawyers as cannibals; a couple ominous close-ups of cooking meat at the BBQ pitstop says it all, though, doesn’t it? That goes for the movie’s politics, too. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is one of the most witheringly resonant movies ever made about the violent spirit of America, but it doesn’t do the interpretative work for you, the way so many modern festival-feted creepshows do. There’s a world of sociopolitical meaning in the one-line revelation that the Sawyers used to be factory workers before automation put them out to pasture. British censors certainly got the message, warning that the film might inspire something in the working class. Fearmongering? Of course. But you can’t say this isn’t a political movie. It just keeps its ideas draped in nightmare logic.

Another thing that’s easy to forget, if you haven’t seen The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in a while, is how elegant it is — especially for a film made on a shoestring budget and with such savage, unpretentious aims. The slaughterhouse ambiance of the film looms large in the imagination, but there’s nothing artless about how it’s put together; you could go shot for shot through Chain Saw Massacre, like Roger Ebert used to do with Citizen Kane and other art-house milestones in lecture halls, and find something to admire after every cut. It’s such a carefully, brilliantly assembled movie — maybe the ultimate example of how the best horror movies work your nerves with the how as well as the what of their dark vision.

It’s in the last half hour that the movie starts to feel truly wrong, like something you shouldn’t be watching, like something that short-circuits that old “it’s only a movie” rationale we use to get us through rough sledding. It’s not the violence, which never gets all that explicit (to the point where Hooper hilariously reasoned that he might be able to secure a PG rating for the film, can you even imagine?). It’s the way The Texas Chain Saw Massacre devolves into pure, primal emotion, as Sally runs and screams and pleads for what feels like a grueling eternity, all while her tormentors buffoonishly giggle like Hee Haw bit players. 

In the pantheon of scream queens, there is Marilyn Burns and then there is everyone else. No one has seemed as believably destroyed by terror as she does here. The film runs less than an hour and a half, but that dinner table scene — all bulging eyes in extreme close up, all slapstick near-death — seems to go on forever. That’s because Hooper has locked us into Sally’s crucible, and offered a vision of insanity that feels realer than what movies ever offer. It’s hard to think, too, of a more iconic ending to a horror movie — that frustrated chainsaw ballet in the daylight, Sally laughing hysterically with a relief that tells you she’ll never be OK ever again, an abrupt cut to credits denying us the creature comfort of a denouement. 

Yes, fear is subjective — one person’s phobia fuel is another’s sleeping pill, blah blah blah. You may have your own personal, idiosyncratic choice for scariest movie ever. (For this writer, no single moment in cinema is more irrationally petrifying than the Winkie’s diner scene in Mulholland Drive, which isn’t even a horror movie by the strictest definition.) But if we’re talking about consensus power to unsettle, there’s still nothing like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It simply doesn’t operate like a normal movie. It feels inherently touched by death from its opening frames. And it eventually cracks into a madness beyond plot or suspense — a total immersion into blinding panic and fear. It’s possible no movie has ever felt more like a nightmare. You wake up, but it’s still there, twirling like Leatherface in your head.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is currently streaming on Peacock, Tubi, Plex, and other streaming services. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.