THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974) at 50

 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974; Tobe Hooper) never showed in my hometown when it was released in 1974. The closest it ever came was a hundred miles away at the Tower Theater in Klamath Falls, Oregon, on a Bryanston Pictures double bill with Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris in Return of the Dragon. My cousin saw that double bill and told me stories of how TTCM was so intense that he wanted to join the few who couldn’t handle it and flee the theater. He didn’t, though. He stayed to the horrifying end. His stories of that screening gave me nightmares and made me imagine it would be too much for me to ever see it for myself. 

In fact, I never even got a chance to until three years later, when I screwed up the courage to catch it on a double with Sergio Martino’s Torso (1973) at the West 11th Drive-in in Eugene, Oregon. I’ve seen it in drive-ins three or four times since, and countless times either in theaters or on home video formats, and I’ve come to think of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as probably the scariest movie I ever seen, certainly a masterpiece, perhaps even one of my two three favorite horror films, period.

And it’s never been as scary as it was seeing it the weekend before Halloween, at the Wheel-In Motor Movie here in Port Townsend, a unique venue to my experience, one enclosed on all sides by dark, moody forest and unspoiled by intruding noise from nearby highways or light pollution from off-property sources.

Experiencing Franklin and Sally Hardesty’s trudging through the brush after dark, Franklin’s horrifying murder at the whirring, raging blades of Leatherface’s saw, and then the nightmarish chase through the woods as Sally flees toward even more abject terror, all backed by the trees enveloping and rising above the screen itself, made for an absolutely providential match (or the opposite of providence) of film setting and theatre setting which created a disorienting sort of melding of the two that made the sequence, and the rest of the film, even that much more intense, closely approaching the effect the movie had the first time I saw it. 

The 50^th-anniversary restoration of picture and sound was brilliant as well; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has never looked so good as it did on the Wheel-In’s eerie- forest-enclosed screen, so clear and yet still in complete possession of the raw, unpolished visual power it has always had. And the sound was mixed so well as to fool both my daughter and I into thinking footsteps heard outside the filing station/barbecue joint where Sally seeks and fails to find help were those of someone approaching our car from the outside, perhaps someone ready to pull the cord on a gas-powered weapon of their own.

It’s really rare for a movie to retain as much of its original power 50 years down the line as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has, and it was a great privilege to be worked over by it in such a setting. That pre-Halloween screening definitely won’t be my last run-n with this movie in my lifetime, but I can’t imagine ever being lucky enough to see it exhibited to such overpowering effect as Nonie and I did tonight. Bravo, Wheel-In Motor Movie, and thank you!

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