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[film projector]
[indistinct voices]
[woman giggling]
[moans]
Is that all I get?
- No. - Jeez.
[film projector]
Gee, look at that old place.
[woman] Looks like something out of a dream.
[ominous music playing]
[woman on TV] Please.[yells]
[Oswalt on TV] I'm so sick of these romantic comedies
with these non-committal titles, you know?
Like, "Feeling sorta, kinda, whoo!"
Something's gotta give!
It's like, that's like the movie's way of going,
"Don't blame me, I got nothing to do with this!"
[audience laughing]
Give a movie a title!
Give it... And get ready to bleep me.
...a motherfucking title!
- [man] Yeah! - You know what the greatest movie title ever is?
A movie title should let you see
a free movie in your head when you hear the title.
'Cause you go, "Oh, my God, we gotta go see that!"
Greatest movie title ever?
Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
My first movie memory is a memory of terror,
because I was at a Halloween activity day for kids.
I was 5, down in Tustin Meadows,
and it's the early '70s, and the adults, they meant well,
but they were thinking, "Oh, let's make pumpkin cookies,
and let's do cut-out black cats,
and we'll show the kids an old silent movie,
Nosferatu, that'll be safe for the kids.
It's an old, silent, G-rated."
And they projected a little eight-millimeter thing on a wall,
and it was... It was...
It's still one of the scariest things I've ever experienced.
It's just this square of light on a wall in a library activity room,
and we were just pulled out of early '70s Tustin Meadows,
and into this nightmare-logic German vampire world.
Really disturbing imagery
that has its own creepy sense of time and gravity and logic,
and it really, really messes you up.
Nothing in Nosferatu moves very quickly.
The vampire rarely moves.
So, it's like a series of photographs that are very, very disturbing.
My first "encounters" with Texas Chain Saw Massacre
were images. I wasn't able to--
I didn't have access to the movie... This was now the early '80s.
...but you had access to Fangoria magazine.
I was used to pictures of films being very well-lit, very well-composed.
And these looked like crime scene photographs
that had been stolen, and then Xeroxed,
and it was second and third generation.
And there was something so primitive and forbidden and creepy about--
Just the photos of the film were very, very disturbing.
The title sounds like you're chewing on flesh.
Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
It sounds like a guy just ripping into meat.
And now...
let's watch.
- [knocking on door] - [man] Hello?
[Oswalt] My first viewing of Texas Chain Saw Massacre
happened on my friend's small, color TV
in his living room, with his ancient early '80s VCR,
top-loading, no rewind, no pause.
You put it in, you hit play, boom, there you go.
- Hello! - [Oswalt] I bet his family
spent eight grand on that VCR.
I remember my friend had this.
We watched it at his house. This is...
I love how they compiled a bunch of different images.
This is Leatherface running away from the house at the very end.
That's Pam being hung earlier.
I always loved the detail
of the chainsaw hitting the "T" and the "H."
It's like he's killing his own movie.
That's how evil this guy is.
[buzzing]
It has the feel that
the killers in the movie have stolen a camera,
and are filming all of this.
[screaming]
[Oswalt] The visuals and the film itself
are ferocious and primitive, and not quite human.
[woman screaming]
And the stupidity of the point of view,
of just the animal stupidity of it.
There's no clever dialogue.
You can make them stop.
No, he can't.
Shut your mouth.
[woman sobbing]
Can't be helped, young lady.
- Oh, please. - [man 1] Shut up.
- You can't let them kill me. - Don't pay him no mind.
[Oswalt] There's no negotiating with this family.
They're not doing it out of hatred. It's what they are.
You like this face?
[woman screaming]
[Oswalt] Much like in Jaws, they're like,
"Why are you swimming in the ocean?
That's where sharks live. It's kind of your fault."
Man Bites Dog is this amazing Belgian film
about a film crew, a young film crew
that are besotted with cinema,
who are following around a psychopath
while he goes about his day,
and philosophizes on what life and death are,
and it takes you a while to realize he's a moron, basically.
But he happens to kill people.
[grunting]
[Oswalt] Man Bites Dog shares a lot of DNA
with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,
but there are moments in Man Bites Dog
when you see how it's affecting the film crew,
all the killing that they're doing,
and eventually,
that there is some kind of moral judgment going on.
Texas Chain Saw Massacre is so much more brutal
because the camera is simply observing.
It has no opinion.
It's not being affected by what it's seeing,
so you get the full brunt of what is happening.
[screaming]
[Oswalt] And weirdly enough,
the camera, it's almost mocking us
in the weird moments of beauty that it finds.
Almost like, "I'm gonna show you this moment of beauty,
because you know something horrible's coming up."
[ominous music playing on TV]
Kirk.
[Oswalt] When Pam gets up off the swinging chair,
and there's that beautiful shot
of her walking against the blue sky.
The camera's almost going, "Oh, you want a nice Hollywood movie?
Well, here's your nice glamor shot,"
as she's literally walking into a slaughterhouse.
She doesn't know that, but we do.
So, the beauty of the shot itself is mocking us,
and it's amazing.
It just really jangles your emotions.
He likes what is lurking beneath what looks like a picture postcard.
The beautiful Days of Heaven type shots of the landscape.
Or, you know, "Oh, this is nice!"
And then it just goes horribly wrong.
[ominous music playing]
There's one shot in Nosferatu that totally mirrors the shot in Texas,
where she gets up off the swing and walks into the house.
It's a very calm, peaceful, idyllic shot
of a ship coming into a harbor,
but we know that ship is crawling with death,
and is bringing the plague to this city.
He's using it in service of telling you
that death and destruction is coming.
And I love it. It's amazing.
I've never forgotten that shot.
[unsettling music playing]
This is my theory about Texas Chain Saw,
because, again, I've seen the movie 30 times.
The opening credits have close-up shots
of storms on the surface of the sun.
Red storms, just blazing on the surface of the sun,
and then, in the rest of the movie,
people are always looking up at the sun.
It's like the sun itself has become diseased,
and is bathing the world in this madness,
and it's starting to take hold,
and we're just following a small group of people.
I think the madness in that movie
is spreading all over the planet.
We are just watching one tiny incident of it.
Leatherface seems terrified and horrified
by the fact the people are in the house,
and doesn't quite know what to do.
In a weird way, up until this point,
I feel like Leatherface was just digging up bones,
but maybe he wasn't really killing anybody.
He was just digging stuff up,
and making arts and crafts out of it, and furniture.
But now, people are being fed into the slaughterhouse.
And, you know, first he clobbers the guy with a hammer,
the way you would just stun a cow,
then he grabs the other woman,
and with no diabolism or passion,
just hangs her on a hook, turns, goes back to his work,
'cause that's what you do.
And then, after he's killed the third guy,
he goes into the front room, and he's looking out the window,
like, "What is happening? What is happening?
Why are people coming to this house?"
Like, he's not prepared for this.
Then, later on, when his family comes home,
they're yelling at him and bullying him.
It's like the world is starting to go crazy.
Are you sure--
[speaking gibberish]
You...
You damn fool!
You ruined the door!
That last shot of Leatherface waving his chainsaw at the sky,
it's this bright red ugly sun like we saw in that first image,
the sun storms,
the madness is fully taking hold of the earth,
and Leatherface is trying to kill the sun with his chainsaw.
She's in the back of the truck laughing, she's gone insane,
like the world is now going insane. It's an apocalyptic event.
That's what I think is going on in that movie.
And that's another link to Nosferatu,
which is, it is an apocalypse coming to this city.
Whereas in Nosferatu, the sun,
the rising sun saves the city
from the plague and from the madness,
but in Texas Chain Saw, there's no escaping it.
The whole world is bathed in this evil radiation.
Oh, honey, you're gonna ruin your eyes.
This is not good for you.
[Oswalt] Everyone watches a movie differently.
Here's an example of how everyone watches a movie differently.
When I was in college,
I went with my then girlfriend and her mom--
I don't know why her mom was with us.
But we went to see Silence of the Lambs.
And we left the movie, and I was like,
"Man, that was intense, like, that was amazing."
And then, her mom said,
"I know. That man had a ring in his nipple."
And that was the thing that she took from that.
And I was like, "I think he was making clothes out of people?"
But, like, that's what she landed on.
So, with Texas Chain Saw, you can look at it for what it is.
It's a horror movie, a group of people come
and they encounter monsters, and who's gonna get away?
But you can also look at it as
the most fucked up Western ever made,
where this is the long, long,
long hangover of Western expansion,
of going out, subduing the Native Americans,
killing off all the buffalo.
We've done all that, there's nothing left.
Hey, man, did you go in that slaughter room, or whatever they call it?
The place where they shoot cattle in the head with that big air gun?
Oh, that-- That gun's no good.
I was in there once, with my uncle.
The old way. With a sledge.
[chuckles] See, that was better, they died better that way.
How come? I thought the gun was better.
Oh, no, no.
With the new way, people were put out of jobs.
You do that?
Look!
So, the people that did all the gross,
dirty work that we don't like to look at...
Although we do enjoy our steaks.
But I don't wanna think about a guy with a hammer,
you know, killing a cow.
But now they're,
"Well, we're gonna just start eating you.
We still gotta feed ourselves, so you're the cattle now."
And now, here's a van full of hippies,
like, literally a Scooby-Doo group,
and they're being slaughtered
by these displaced blue-collar workers.
The family in Texas Chain Saw Massacre
are doing the most extreme, disturbing version
of how life operates.
It's not you dying and feeding trees.
It's somebody hanging you on a meat hook
so they can cut steaks off of you,
and serve you to their family so the family can survive.
'Cause, "I wanna take care of my dad, and my brother,
and my grandpa.
And, if they need it,
I'll go make myself look like their mom. I'll be the mom."
Like, there is this absolutely serving the function of family
in the most damaged way possible.
Doesn't matter how many flowers you garland over your backyard,
no matter how many beautiful books
you decorate your shelves with,
you will eventually die.
Your body-- And death is a horror show.
There's no way to get around it.
There's a Stan Brakhage film
called The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes,
where it's a footage of an autopsy.
And you watch it--
I remember Alan Moore described it, where,
at first, you're horrified, "Oh, my God, this is--"
You know, they're cutting a body open.
But then, as it goes on, there is a kind of beauty
in like, this is a really complex machine,
and it works. And that's me, I work.
That there is beauty in all this gore.
So, if you can face the horror of it dead on, without blinking,
then there's poetry in you not blinking at it.
The camera in Texas Chain Saw, by not blinking, by not judging,
is being a very demented, poisonous sort of poet.
Every frame has something unnerving in it.
Like, even a long shot of the highway,
then there's a dead armadillo.
This weird swoop of the chainsaw at the end
when Leatherface is coming after their pickup truck,
or that pause that Sally does after she closes the van door,
- and then she sees that symbol. - Let's go.
Or, when they go visit the graveyard,
there's the people that are kind of laughing and crazy,
and the one drunk sitting in the tire,
I've always wondered, is he an accomplice of the hitchhiker?
Is he quietly also helping him at night dig stuff up,
and he's finally going nuts
thinking about the morality of what he's doing,
and that's why he's out there drunk, like, "I've seen things!"
[man] Things happen here about,
they don't tell about.
[laughs]
I see things.
[Oswalt] Is the guy who goes and comes and washes their window,
is he another, like, cousin, or weird, distant, inbred version,
member of the family that they don't know what to do with,
and they're like, "Go wash windows."
There's a whole infrastructure going on
that they don't talk about, but it's there.
And, also, just when they go and find the old house,
there's all those clocks
and watches with nails through them,
hanging in the tree... Much like Castle Dracula.
You're now in a zone where time doesn't matter,
gravity doesn't matter. We rule things here.
[tense music playing]
[Oswalt] Texas Chain Saw feels eternal.
[woman screaming on TV]
The experience itself will always be disturbing and frightening,
outside of any context that you're watching it in.
The moment of Texas Chain Saw Massacre
is the moment when Pam
almost escapes the house.
I feel like that moment
separated a specific generation of horror movie fans:
the ones who stayed became the people that read Fangoria
and got into all the John Carpenter stuff,
and the ones who were out were just like,
"Yeah, this isn't my... It's just not my thing."
And I know people my age now
who have never gotten beyond that point.
Once the porch scene happens,
they're like, "Yep, I'm out."
It's also a very, very twisted version
of the scene in Gone with the Wind,
where Rhett Butler, who basically rapes her,
he just-- "You're not turning me out tonight,"
and he picks her up, and takes her up the stairs
while she's pounding on him.
It's just a mutant version
of what people thought romance was in movies.
[whimpers]
There'll be no locks or bolts between us, Mary-Kate,
except those in your own mercenary little heart.
[dramatic music playing]
- [sobs] - You watch it now, you're like,
"Ooh, yikes."
So, at least Texas Chain Saw Massacre
was like, "Well, this is what it actually is," you know?
She is literally a piece of meat, ka-chunk.
I see Tobe Hooper as the best kind of film stylist,
in that he was an opportunist.
You can plan and storyboard all you want.
It's when you get to the location, and realize,
"Oh, that shot I want I can't get, but I could get this."
They had no money.
And it has that adrenaline, desperate quality to it,
of, "We're grabbing shots wherever we can."
I watched it again, on my big-screen TV,
and I just now realized, the lamp over the dinner table,
that's a human face.
And the "armchair." Get it?
So, there's all these little details.
Bob Burns, the art director, was frigging amazing.
I mean, look, Tobe Hooper
did kind of a scary thing for an artist,
which is he really didn't blink from his dark side.
Sometimes the zeitgeist picks a messenger,
and that messenger doesn't realize that they're the one
that's being picked, and they're the one that's channeling
and delivering what the zeitgeist wants people to look at.
And I think the zeitgeist, clearly, is prankish and playful,
and it's like, "Oh, I'm gonna show people what they are
through the grossest drive-in movie possible,
but that will actually stand the test of time."
[tense music playing]
[birds chirping]
[insects buzzing]
[wind whooshing]
Hello?
[ominous music playing]
Is anybody home?
Excuse me, I'm looking for some friends.
Hello?
[Miike in Japanese]
[man in English] I thought I heard something.
[woman in English] There's a light.
- [man] Yeah? - [woman] Yeah.
Oh, looks like a house.
[Miike in Japanese]
[man in English] What are you doing?
[screaming]
[Miike in Japanese]
[in English] No, no!
[Miike in Japanese]
[reporter in English] According to Sheriff Maldonado,
there were instances in which only the head
and extremities were removed.
[Miike in Japanese]
[laughing maniacally]
[buzzing]
[screaming]
[man groaning]
[chuckles]
[man whimpering]
[screaming]
[in English] Do you believe in Jesus?
Yes, I do.
Well, you're gonna meet him.
[Miike in Japanese]
[speaking Japanese]
[grunting]
[Miike]
[grunts]
[in English] Where is my ring?
[Miike in Japanese]
[ominous music playing]
[man grunting]
[man continues grunting]
[interviewer in English] Did you ever go back to the theater to watch City Lights?
[in Japanese]
[laughs]
[soft dramatic music playing]
[Heller-Nicholas] I was born in the same year
Texas Chain Saw Massacre was born.
I grew up on the border of the outer suburbs of Melbourne in Australia,
and the bush, effectively,
and we were about 40 minutes from Hanging Rock.
So, growing up, that film was hugely, hugely important to me.
Because it really tied film and the magic of film
to a place that I knew really well.
[girl] What we see...
and what we seem...
are but a dream.
A dream within a dream.
[tranquil music playing]
[Heller-Nicholas] And for my eighth birthday, my parents took me--
They brought me a brand new little lace dress.
And for some deranged reason, they thought it would be funny to hide.
When I went to the bathroom, I came back, they were gone.
And that has stayed with me.
[girl] Miranda, don't go up there! Come back!
[screaming]
[girl continues screaming]
That feeling has stayed with me.
Partially resentment to my parents,
but mostly just that fear
and that connection of fear to the cinematic.
For a lot of Australians of my generation,
Texas was like Road Runner cartoons.
You know, it was this sort of imaginary, faraway place.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was denied classification
in 1975 twice,
and then again in 1981.
It wasn't until 1984
that the film was cleared for release.
Give me that flashlight!
[Heller-Nicholas] My memory of Texas Chain Saw Massacre
in those very early days when it was finally released
was it was something that was the terrain
of friends' older brothers.
Very gendered and very forbidden for little girls.
And so there was a sense of danger and excitement
to Texas Chain Saw Massacre,
this film that's been banned for ten years,
finally released in Australia.
I was far too young to see the film,
but I have a kind of ambient memory
of it being in the atmosphere.
And I don't know where I first saw the trailer.
[announcer 1] K-Tel Video. Your home of entertainment
presents more great titles from Filmways VTC.
[announcer 2] This is the horror movie to end them all.
[Heller-Nicholas] It feels like Leatherface cut the trailer
to the Australian Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Like, it's off its head, it is mental.
It has this incredible kinetic energy.
It doesn't make a lick of sense at all.
It's like an art film.
It's like this avant-garde, experimental frenzy.
And, you know, you have sort of flashes of generic horror content,
but, you know, kind of blurred, this sort of Stan Brakhage-esque,
experimental blur.
It's like Mothlight with serial killers.
It kind of has no relation to the film,
in that sort of images from one moment
are sort of placed next to images
from a completely separate part of the film.
And so the sensory really takes dominance.
Help!
[Heller-Nicholas] And that does come through
in the film itself.
[woman] Get back and push down.
This is impossible.
I knew something was there.
[Heller-Nicholas] The first time I saw the film was when I was a bit older,
so it would have been the early '90s.
And it was always presented to me as a kind of test.
Are you hardcore enough?
Got something for you.
[woman] Ugh! [grunts]
[Heller-Nicholas] I first saw Texas Chain Saw
alongside things like I Spit on Your Grave,
Faces of Death, Executions.
And because these films were really gatekept
by the young men that I knew at the time,
there was a real clash there.
And I remember watching these things
and thinking, "These are for me."
Like, "These really speak to me. These don't belong to you."
So, the Australian VHS release of Texas Chain Saw Massacre
really right through until the late '90s
was copied from, like, a really beat-up film.
So, you have the wear and tear of normal VHS usage
combined with the fact that it was a pretty, pretty shitty print to start with.
So, the version that I saw
and that most people of my generation saw on video
doesn't look like the version that we see today.
It's visually completely different.
I don't remember that film having any blue or green in it.
I remember it being yellow and scratchy
and faded and beat up
and that that was part of the danger.
The feeling that you were watching something really covert
that you weren't meant to see.
Because the version that I first saw was so yellow,
I tethered it much more closely, I think,
to a lot of Australian film that I'd seen.
[girl] What we see...
and what we seem...
are but a dream.
A dream within a dream.
[tranquil music playing]
[Heller-Nicholas] Because yellow is really
very, very at the forefront of the aesthetics
of the outback and of the desert.
So, yellow is how I see heat.
And I knew that Texas was hot, and it's like, okay,
so it looks like this, it looks yellow.
It's this very Australian aesthetic of heat.
You know, it looks like things like The Proposition.
Australia.
What fresh hell is this?
And it looks like things like Wolf Creek.
[tense music playing]
[screaming]
[Heller-Nicholas] It looks like the start of Wake in Fright.
I first saw Wake in Fright on a VHS tape
that was taped off this one famous TV broadcast in 1989.
And, of course, it's this washed-out print that was shown on TV,
on a tape that had been played a hundred times before.
And I saw it at school, and it was, you know,
hot Australian summer
with no air conditioning in my classroom,
which fits in, of course, beautifully to the film.
It's like this sort of post-apocalyptic Kansas
in like a really fucked up Wizard of Oz.
And it's, like, this is the outback.
Welcome to Australia. [laughs]
[wind howling]
[Heller-Nicholas] My memory of it, seeing it on video,
looks exactly like my memory of seeing Texas Chain Saw Massacre,
and it's tethered so tightly
to the things that were going on in my world,
and in my life, in my country, at the time.
In 1983, we had, uh, dust storms,
these enormous dust storms, terrifying dust storms.
We had horrific bushfires, the Ash Wednesday bushfires,
which were absolutely catastrophic.
It's the most scary thing that's ever happened to me.
It's the most frightened I've ever been.
I have this very, very strong, vivid memory
of these sort of yellow, very heavily yellowed images
of houses that have been burnt down
and all that remains are the chimney stacks.
And every time, even now, no matter how many times
I see Texas Chain Saw Massacre
and I see that tombstone, I always think
it's a chimney stack every single time.
There she is, ladies. Hanging Rock.
[Heller-Nicholas] Hanging Rock was so physically close
to where those fires were.
The bush that you see in Hanging Rock
is the bush that was destroyed in those fires.
It's the same place.
And there's a beautiful little montage sequence in Hanging Rock
where the girls are sort of swaying and spinning
and they take off their shoes and it's hot.
And I feel that heat.
My body remembers that heat, and that panic,
and that fear, and that disorientation.
So, when I think of the dust storms
and I think of the fires, over time,
they've sort of blurred with images from films.
And the heat that I associate with Texas Chain Saw Massacre
has sort of bled into my memories of the Ash Wednesday fires.
And the fact that one was real and one was a film,
you know, memory doesn't care, it doesn't care.
It's like this weird, porous thing.
I find it hard to be objectively critical
about Texas Chain Saw Massacre
because it's a film that you feel
before you think about.
It's a very smart film.
The depth of the cultural knowledge
is extraordinary to me.
And I don't even know if it's conscious.
It probably isn't even a conscious thing.
I think of that moment in the van
where the hitchhiker shows them
the photographs of the meat.
And the first photograph
looks exactly like a Rembrandt painting.
And the second photograph,
very heavily reminiscent, I think, of a Francis Bacon.
And it's-- There's Leatherface vibes there for me.
There's no way that the Black Maria truck at the end is an accident.
Black Maria was the name of Thomas Edison's film company.
It was the very first film company.
I feel like the hitchhiker
when he takes his Polaroid photo and he's like... [gasps]
You know, it's, "[gasps] Look."
The magic of photography,
the magic of cinema.
- [giggles] - You took my picture.
[Heller-Nicholas] And that feeds back into this early film tradition
where it's like, "[gasps] I can't believe cinema's a thing."
You know, I can't believe Texas Chain Saw Massacre
is a thing. I can't believe it works.
I can't believe this film pulls off what it does.
Magic.
Everything means something, I guess.
[Heller-Nicholas] That's my motto as a film critic.
You know, film critics are often accused of reading too much into things.
No art is ever created in a vacuum.
Whether it's conscious or not, film soaks up the zeitgeist.
It has to. It has to.
It's extraordinary to me the parallels
between Texas Chain Saw Massacre
and a lot of Australian cinema in the 1970s.
It's eerie because these are...
These are places that are literally worlds apart.
[ominous music playing]
It's an odd thing to say, but I think
we almost don't pay enough attention to Leatherface,
which I know sounds strange because he's one of the great monsters of horror.
Where are the kids? Where are they? Show me!
[speaking gibberish]
[Heller-Nicholas] It's a home invasion film
from Leatherface's point of view.
He's... He's really stressed out
that these young people just turn up in his house.
If you watch him as he moves from the kitchen to the window,
he's fussing, like, he's flapping.
He's like, "I don't know what to do with myself."
It's such a, like, it's such an Italian, like, "Mamma mia,"
like, it's so gestured.
It's gorgeous.
It's very Buster Keaton, the way that he moves.
[yelling]
[Heller-Nicholas] It's silent cinema, you know?
It's the legacy of the Black Maria.
As much as my memories of the film are tethered to yellow,
so much of the film's energy completely changes with the color red.
When I think of Hieronymus Bosch,
I think of the Hellmouth,
you know, these big, sort of gaping red, terrifying voids
that I think Texas Chain Saw makes quite literal.
This idea of the Hellmouth, you know,
taken from the Medieval art
that was presented in paintings and in manuscripts
as a literal mouth, like a big red mouth
with, you know, people inside
or devils with big red mouths.
Those strange little art objects,
the feathers and the bones, these weird little things,
they're like they're straight from a Hieronymus Bosch painting.
And it almost feels to me like Texas Chain Saw is riffing on that.
The scene with Sally and the Cook,
I think, is, um, is really pivotal.
Sally's literally sandwiched between the cannibalistic grill
and the saucers on the other side.
I think that's really great.
And Cook pushes her against a chopping block,
you know, in case the cannibalism motif
isn't kind of coming through already.
And we have this incredible moment
where he leaves to get the car.
She thinks he's going to help.
And the sound of the sizzling escalates
and the sound of the radio escalates.
[man on radio] Barometer is 29.9 and rising.
- Acting on a tip... - [sizzling]
[Heller-Nicholas] You see the horror in her face
when she puts it all together and realizes that what she's hearing
and what she's seeing are connected.
The way that that grill is presented
is this terrifying red, gaping void.
It is the entry to hell.
[reporter] ...there were instances in which only
the heads and extremities were removed.
And others in which only a hand or foot is removed.
The remainder of the cadaver left intact.
[ominous music playing]
Somebody! Help me!
[screaming]
Help me!
Please! Please help me!
Please!
[fire crackling]
[man] My first movie experience was a horror movie.
It was called Bambi.
I was probably 3 years old,
and I remember Bambi's mother saying,
"Man has been in the forest,"
and I just went, "Oh, my goodness."
What happened, Mother?
Why did we all run?
Man...
was in the forest.
[woman screaming]
[chainsaw buzzing]
[ominous music playing]
[King] I've been a movie fan since forever.
My first editor, Bill Thompson, said, uh,
"Steve King has got a projector in his head."
And there's some truth to that
because I grew up on the films.
I gravitated toward monster movies.
My brother didn't care for them,
and so I would usually find myself sitting by myself.
I love the black-and-white movies.
The idea that reality
and the outrageously crazy
could merge together in a film
and it would be realistic.
What I'm thinking about in particular
was Ray Harryhausen's work
in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers,
where you see a flying saucer
crashed into the reflecting pool in Washington D.C.
And you see another one that wobbles
and then takes off the Washington Monument.
And I thought, "I wanna do that."
I wanna bring the reality and the make-believe together
in the same place so that you can't even tell the difference.
[gasps]
[gasping]
[screams]
Stay away!
[King] There are a lot of movies that are like that,
that, uh, I just absolutely love.
One of them is The Haunting of Hill House.
That movie scared the living shit right out of me.
It wasn't anything that you saw.
It was what you thought you saw.
[King] You could see a door bellowing in and out like a lung.
[creaking]
You could see a shape in the plaster
that began to look like a face, that sort of thing.
I... I just loved that.
It's all suggested.
It's all shadows.
And there's a scene early on in The Exorcist
where a clock just stops for no reason.
It just tick, tick, tick,
and then it just stops.
That's a very unsettling moment.
You have to be a real artist like Robert Wise
in The Haunting of Hill House to do the thing
where it's just almost suggested.
There isn't really a lot of blood in Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
[buzzing]
[screaming]
I should say that I never saw Texas Chain Saw Massacre
when it came out.
I saw it in 1982 in Colorado.
I was a young father,
and I was writing to stay ahead of the bill collectors.
I was in the theater almost by myself.
And that's when a movie
really has a tendency to work on you, you know,
to get its cold little fingers under your skin.
It had that kind of washed-out '70s look
for want of a better term.
You could tell that this print had been around for a while,
and it's better for it because it just looks...
It looks fucking real,
and it works because there's no artifice about it.
There's no, you know, kind of buildup.
There's no character nuance.
I mean, there are scenes in the graveyard.
They're not extras.
They're not Hollywood people at all.
They look like they came from the nearest little Texas town.
My granddaddy's buried here.
Can we find out if anything happened to him?
What's your granddaddy's name?
Honey, that big heavy fella
with that flashlight in his hand,
that's the sheriff.
You go tell him your granddaddy's buried in there.
- He'll let you in. - Thank you.
Say, fella, I'm gonna run off with your girl.
You don't mind, do you?
[King] It's fantastic.
And that adds to the horror, because you never feel
that kind of barrier,
that see-through barrier between,
"Oh, well, this is just a movie."
You wanna get about four or five men and a couple dogs?
There's a house over here behind those trees. We wanna go check it out.
[King] Night of the Living Dead is the same way.
You know, you don't know any of those people.
They look like real people.
The zombies look like real people.
It just feels
like you can't tell
where fact ends and fiction begins.
[ominous music playing]
[screaming]
The thing that sticks in my mind, of course,
was they're trying to kill the girl
and they want to use a sledgehammer on her,
and they keep trying to give the old man
who's just green, uh, to give him the hammer.
And that's... That's a very Cormac McCarthy scene.
In fact, in some ways, I see
a book like Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
and Texas Chain Saw Massacre
as almost like fraternal twins.
The slaughterhouse, the idea about the bolt gun,
it's a real Cormac McCarthy touch.
- [man 1] What is that for? - [man 2] Would you...
- Would you hold still, please? - [man 3] The air gun.
It shoots a bolt into their skull and then retracts it.
It's just, "Boom." Goes, "Boom."
[woman] Franklin, I like meat.
Please change the subject.
- Boom. - That's terrible. It's still going on.
[man] Josh!
Josh, where are you? Tell me where you are!
[King] Texas Chain Saw has a lot in common
with The Blair Witch Project.
My memory is...
I'd gotten hit by a van, and I was in the hospital,
and I was in early recovery, and I was in a lot of pain,
and I was taking a lot of dope for the pain,
and my son came in, and my memory is
that he had a TV monitor
hooked up to an actual tape machine.
And we sat and we watched that movie.
And the more we watched,
the more these kids got into the woods and started to see
these talismans hanging from the trees and everything.
I got to a point where I said, "Joe, turn it off.
I can't take anymore."
And that's rare.
I'm kind of case-hardened, but every now and then,
one will get under your skin,
and that one really got under my skin.
Both of them were made on tiny budgets
with small casts.
And both of them have a look
that's almost amateurish,
but they both work...
because you don't really see
what's going on at first.
I don't think in The Blair Witch Project
you ever see exactly what's going on,
because it all leads up to that final shot
with the guy standing in the corner of the basement
with his face to the wall.
It's terrifying, but you can't even say why it's terrifying.
Whereas in Texas Chain Saw,
the brilliant thing that Tobe did
was he begins with a number of Polaroid photographs
that flash and are gone, flash and are gone.
And we find out later that they're bodies
that have been exhumed from a cemetery.
But really beyond that...
My old agent, Kirby McCauley, used to say,
"It's all violins. It's all violins."
You don't really see too much.
I think that at some point,
you have to put your cards down on the table.
You have to show what's there.
That's always been my philosophy.
[grunts]
[King] Horror is disintegrating into a pile of putrescence.
[screaming]
[King] Whereas terror is that ball bouncing down the stairs
in The Changeling.
It's a really scary moment.
I've always felt that horror was easy,
and at the same time
terror is probably a finer emotion
if you want to put an adjective on it.
But I've tried to use terror in some of my stories,
mostly The Shining,
which is a story where you just see things
out of the corner of your eye for quite a while
before the horror really kicks in.
The things that are primal and terrifying
are the things that we know as children
that we really, really fear.
Like, when I was a kid, I can remember
seeing frost on the window
and thinking that it was the face
of some crazy person who was out there trying to get in.
And so, if I were to make a movie,
and put frost on the window,
and shoot it the way that Robert Wise
shoots some of the plaster figurines
in that bas-relief in that movie,
I think it would work,
because I think that most children
they may not have seen frost on a window that looks like a face,
but they've seen, like, dolls that are terrifying for some reason.
That appear to be pleasant enough in the daytime,
but once it's nighttime, they take on a different aspect.
Tobe did some of that in Poltergeist.
[jingling]
So, it can go either way.
But you have to be a real artist
to do the thing where it's just almost suggested.
My boots aren't laced!
Oh, my God, what the fuck is that?
What the fuck is that?
[breathing heavily]
[King] It is scary in a way,
and Blair Witch is scary in a way
that Hollywood movies don't seem to be able to replicate.
And I think part of the reason is because there are too many people
involved with the creative process in movies.
I've run into producers who say,
"Well, yes, I want to give you notes
about this and that and the other thing."
I hate the goddamn notes, okay?
Because whatever they want to do,
every step homogenizes the process a little tiny bit more.
With Texas Chain Saw,
Tobe didn't have to worry about any of that.
He could do where the spirit moved him.
So, you see that in small budget, independent movies.
It's true with Evil Dead.
Evil Dead is balls-to-the-wall horror.
When I saw Evil Dead in Cannes,
I went nuts for that movie.
I thought it was really terrific,
really scary, and really, really original.
[growling]
[yells] Oh, God.
[King] And I said to Sam when I finally met him,
Sam Raimi, I said,
"How did you do that steady cam thing?"
I said, "Kubrick took all this special equipment
and very expensive stuff
to make what's essentially a very cold movie."
And [laughs] Sam Raimi just kind of laughed and he said,
"There were two people holding a two-by-four
with the camera mounted on it,
and they just ran like hell."
That's the solution that wouldn't occur to somebody
who's making a Hollywood movie.
The merits of Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Well, I think it puts us all in touch with our primal fears,
and it gives us a chance
in a relatively harmless place
to experience emotions that we ordinarily wouldn't feel.
And I think those things are valuable.
Not everybody does.
Is that social?
I don't know if it really is.
You know, that's a...
That's a question of morality,
and I'm not sure that when you deal with entertainment,
those boundaries are necessarily the same.
Speaking just for myself,
I actually want to violate good taste.
I think that that's where you're supposed to go,
as somebody who writes horror fiction,
or stuff that has to do with the macabre.
I'm sure that, at the time,
when Poe wrote that Tell-Tale Heart story,
and he wrote about dismembering the body
and putting it under the floorboards,
there were people who went, "That's too far, that's too far."
Well, you're supposed to go too far.
I think that when it comes to movies,
the taste and conscience side of it
belongs not with the filmmaker
but with the people who do the rating for the films.
And I think that their tastes and their ratings are very plastic.
The swearing, Paul.
There, I said it.
Yeah? The profanity bothers you?
It has no nobility.
[King] For instance, you know,
you can see a movie where Godzilla stomps a city
and it will get a PG-13 rating.
And as long as you don't show dismembered bodies,
it's all right.
But when you draw back a little bit
and you think about it, there are thousands of people
that are being killed by movies like Godzilla,
or Marvel pictures with supervillains
that lay waste to huge cities.
We just don't see them.
[dramatic music playing]
Sam Peckinpah once said,
"There's nothing more pornographic
than a Hopalong Cassidy movie
where you go 'pow', like that,
and the guy goes 'Oh' like this and he falls down."
There's no blood, there's no mess, there's nothing like that.
It's very sanitized.
He just goes, "Oh, God." Like that.
He doesn't say "Oh, God," because that wasn't allowed.
But Peckinpah said,
"I'm gonna actually show what happens,"
so that in a movie like Straw Dogs
or The Wild Bunch,
you see what happens to the people who are shot.
There's blood.
He even shows it in slow motion.
So, yeah, morality and movies,
morality and art,
I don't think they really go together.
Somebody else has got to decide that.
You can't ask Tobe what he thinks about taste and conscience,
because Tobe is gone to the great reward in the sky.
If you asked me, I would say
he never thought about taste and conscience in the least bit
when he made that movie.
You never know what boundaries are gonna be violated,
because that's what it's about,
it's an outlaw genre, really.
And it always has been.
You can't ever get comfortable.
And that is the artist's job, to make you uncomfortable.
And I think that there's a great gun culture in this country
that's partially fueled by movies like Death Wish.
The difference between a movie like Death Wish
and a movie like Texas Chain Saw Massacre
is you don't really expect
some impressionable 18- or 19-year-old
to go out and buy a chainsaw and start cutting people up,
whereas somebody who saw Death Wish
might very well say, "Yeah, that's a pretty good idea.
Never mind the movie, fuck that.
Let's go out and shoot a bunch of drug pushers or something."
You have to be careful about that.
Now, I have a book called Rage that was published.
It was written halfway through senior year in high school,
and it was about this kid, Charlie Decker,
who comes in and shoots his teacher
and holds his class hostage with a gun.
And it gets the class sort of, like, on his side,
and then, later on, there was a shooter in Oregon
and he shot three or four kids
and that book was found in his locker,
and there were a couple of other cases.
And I said,
"This might actually be an accelerant."
And I pulled the book,
because I don't want to think of myself
as partially responsible for that.
It was written at a time when school shootings were unheard of.
That's my only defense, and it isn't a good one.
Seventy-four, November, take nine.
I admire this movie so much,
and it was made for,
you know, chump change, really.
It's amazing.
And Tobe was young
when he made this movie, too,
because you don't know at that point
that you can't do certain things.
So, everything is on the table.
It's a fantastic thing.
It's a kind of a classic feel to it,
a classic, primal, horror movie feel.
Man, the movie is like fucking less than an hour and a half long.
It's almost a short subject.
It really gets in there.
It's like a Beatles song, in a sense.
The archetypal Beatles song
would be like, "She Loves You,"
or "I Wanna Hold Your Hand."
Two minutes and 17 seconds,
gets in, does its business, done.
There's no fat, there's nothing.
So, yeah, I would say that it's timeless.
And you can't say...
You can't say it's part of the zeitgeist,
because it's so early, you know.
It feels like, almost like... the zeitgeist came later.
Do you see what I'm saying?
That it's like... Just its own thing.
I read somewhere that Texas Chain Saw Massacre
is the only movie about psychotics that was made by a psychotic.
And it does have some of that feeling to it.
I worked with Tobe a little bit on Sleepwalkers,
and Tobe was just this soft-spoken, nice man,
and quite handsome.
And he had his lines down pat.
Hey, buddy, buddy.
I ain't taking the rap on this.
I lock this place up every night.
It's not my fault if every pervert, weirdo--
Don't talk to me, go to talk to someone in charge.
I'm busy.
And I didn't get a real chance to talk to him,
but my idea about him was,
he's like the rest of us that do this for a living.
He puts on his normal face
and he comes out and he does his job.
And I'm the same way.
I wear a normal mask
when I'm doing these things,
and then I turn into somebody else
when I'm writing something that's really scary.
And there's always a kind of a smile on my face
because I'm thinking to myself, "I'm gonna getcha."
[woman] No! No! No! No! No!
No, please, no!
Please, please, please, no!
[woman screaming]
[tense music playing]
No!
[woman screaming]
[tense music building]
[glass crashing]
[yelling]
[grunts]
The first time I got to see the movie
was on film actually,
at the Angelika Film Center.
I was about 19.
I was probably in the fourth or fifth row.
And I remember walking out of that theater
feeling like I had never seen
such a legitimately terrifying vision of the world.
I didn't understand that the movie
was going to affect me
the way a great work of art can affect you.
And to see a movie that had this grindhouse kind of reputation,
and then to recognize it as an American masterpiece
was just this really interesting,
disjunctive experience for me as a young artist.
I feel like we are watching this incredible depiction
of multiple populations
that feel entitled to a way of life.
You don't want to go fooling around on other folks' property.
Some folks don't like it, and they don't mind showing you.
Oh, my father owns it.
- That's your daddy's place, huh? - Yeah.
[Kusama] Whether it's the kids in a van
who want to see an old home that's in their family...
They already have a legacy of owning property.
They have the legacy of having a car and taking a vacation,
road-tripping together.
...or the nightmare family they run into
and are tragically going to collide with.
[screaming]
[Kusama] That family is sort of the other side of the coin,
of this depiction of an American family
in which their industry has been taken away,
their livelihood has been taken away.
And yet, there is a sense that they are owed
their jobs back as professional killers
and good killers.
To watch the dinner scene again
in the very quiet privacy of my own home,
where I'm certain my dog
thought something terrible was happening in the other room,
I was really struck by the depiction
of, first of all, this idea of the patriarchy.
I won't have this.
It brings up so many complicated feelings as you're watching,
because on the face of it
what's happening is offensively violent,
offensively grisly,
and yet it has this quality of high comedy,
because it really is so revealed as base and pathetic.
They, as a family, are so pathetic.
He's just a cook.
Shut up, you bitch hog.
[woman sobbing]
Me and Leatherface do all the work.
He don't like it, ain't that right?
You're just the cook.
Shut your mouth!
You don't understand nothing.
[Kusama] I cannot help but watch the movie
and feel some very uncomfortable sympathy
for those characters, and deep sadness.
When they're talking to Sally at the dinner table,
it's the saddest, scariest depiction of masculinity
I think that might exist on film.
And of a broken masculinity.
[woman sobbing then screams]
[Kusama] Leatherface is a child.
And the chainsaw itself is just another prop
in a role he's trying to find a place
in the production to play.
Like, he's in a family with no role,
and that has made him completely insane.
Howdy.
Want to take off the mask, huh?
No? Okay. All right.
[Kusama] And so, to see human monsters like this,
it's actually evoking, I think, the feelings
that a lot of older horror classics,
I think particularly of Frankenstein,
where that monster is the product
of something larger,
something far more diabolical and fucked up.
I can't look at Leatherface
and feel like he's simply a monster.
He is a part of us.
And for that reason, I can't reject him out of hand.
There's something about this family's
inability to modernize that is both, like,
incredibly touching and maddening,
because they are stuck in an America
that doesn't exist for them anymore,
and it's made them insane.
And I feel like that's something that
Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel were investigating.
What do you do when you take a person's livelihood away?
No matter what you think of their livelihood.
And I think in a funny way,
the monster family and the victim family
are incredibly entwined in their identity, in a way,
and in their expectation of what America owes them,
and what the promise of the American dream really is.
Didn't you say there's a swimming hole around here?
Yeah.
Well, Pam and I'd like to go swimming, man.
Uh, there used to be a trail down between those two old sheds.
Come on, we'll find it.
- [woman moans] - This must be it.
[Kusama] Perhaps the bigger nightmare of the movie
is that it didn't exist at all.
I feel like watching the movie 50 years on,
it is as if we are witnessing the young artist Tobe Hooper
looking into the future of America.
And he is imagining a world on fire.
He is imagining a level of American violence
that seems to be unprecedented, day after day.
He's seeing a depiction of community relationships
that have completely disintegrated, and...
It's like the movie is evergreen,
so sadly, for Americans,
because it feels relevant still,
even strangely more relevant to me now.
[reporter] Health officials in San Francisco reluctantly admit
they may have a cholera epidemic on their hands.
Some 40 cases of the highly infectious disease have been confirmed.
[Kusama] And he sets it all up in those opening minutes
with the bad news
that could be the bad news I'm listening to
on my drive to talk to you today, 50 years on.
I mean, it's an uncanny kind of prescience.
By putting the date at the beginning of a movie like this or like Psycho,
instead of making it more real,
what it does is it makes it timeless.
[suspenseful music playing]
In planting this concept of specificity for the audience,
a day that something terrible happened,
for which and to which we can apply
all kinds of memories of our own.
It's like Texas Chain Saw Massacre is saying,
"Well, this film is going to now enter
that pantheon of memory for you
and will be burned in your memory forever."
It's like he's branding the audience with the time.
The date is very powerful to me.
Um, August 18th is the day my brother died.
And I feel like I know...
I just feel like that date visits me, uh,
in this interesting kind of cosmic way.
And, um...
It's just a strange, strange thing.
Strange.
When malefic planets are in retrograde...
And Saturn's malefic, okay.
...their malefice is increased.
The depiction of and the conversation around
the planetary alignments on an astrological level
along with the constant reference
to the sun and the moon visually in the language of the film
to me is part of that bigger strategy
that Tobe Hooper was employing
that seemed to suggest something almost mythic
about what we were about to watch,
that it's not small-town America.
It's a depiction of primal human animus,
primal human urges and disappointments
that can only end in catastrophe.
But it's as if he's saying, you know,
this is the landscape of myth.
[rooster crowing]
[Kusama] And so, we are witnessing that
getting acted out upon these terribly unlucky characters.
But then we're also witnessing this violence being perpetrated
by characters who themselves also seem terribly unlucky.
[narrator] The film which you are about to see
is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths...
[Kusama] I mean, I always forget about the opening crawl,
and then to see it, it's like what Hooper is preparing us for
is the American nightmare.
And then he's titillating us by saying, "And it's a true story,"
which is its own kind of theatrical flourish of the film.
And then to be in that graveyard
and get those fast shock cuts.
[reporter] ...this morning. Officers there discovered
what appeared to be a grisly work of art.
[Kusama] Along with this incredible tracking shot,
it's as if to me, Hooper, the filmmaker,
is announcing himself and saying,
"And now I present to you a grisly work of art."
Such an interesting question
to think about the role of beauty and poetry in art.
And this larger question perhaps about its necessity.
The feathers that fly through the air
as we watch characters crawling across a floor
to find a piece of furniture made out of bones.
It's so much like the thing that would bring a child
back to Grimms' Fairy Tales,
even if it meant they lost some sleep and had nightmares.
And I think that is the secret ingredient
to the film's brilliance,
is that he's not making something
that we can strictly look away from.
The final sequence of Texas Chain Saw on the highway,
it's a collision of competing ideas
about the American project as something hopeful,
optimistic, fair,
and then the madness of human impulse,
human instinct.
Hooper is saying, in my opinion,
"I'm not optimistic about America,
but I do believe beauty still has a place."
[screaming]
[dramatic music playing]
[Kusama] And that that idea that in other horror films,
the sun rises to put evil to bed.
I think, in Hooper's case,
he's saying the sun rises so that we may see evil better,
[chuckles] so that it's more legible to us.
I have a friend in San Francisco
- that you could stay with. - Really?
[Kusama] Eggshells is an interesting first film
because it's really clear that Tobe Hooper was interested
by American motifs.
[folk rock music playing]
[Kusama] The concept of the big old house.
The concept of the town square.
I think Eggshells displays
this really interesting sense of freedom.
Freedom with the camera,
freedom with the rhythms of the storytelling.
And it was sort of like a test run
for Texas Chain Saw Massacre,
which I think became a much more classically distilled story.
And then he took some of those stylistic flourishes
and really found his filmmaking voice, his visual language.
And there's something about this is America, right?
Like the plains, a sense of wide-open space,
a sense of possibility.
A sense of modernity is welcome here with this, you know,
vehicle slicing through the frame.
So, it's kind of playing on our romantic notions
of the American landscape.
Hello?
[Kusama] His obsession with doorways
and framing people in doorways,
it makes me think of Bergman.
It makes me think of Tarkovsky.
[man singing in Russian]
[Kusama] I feel like Hooper is right up there
with indelible images about characters
at a threshold from which walking through the door
ensures you will never return to your old life.
There's a sequence in Texas Chain Saw
that I watch and have to fight the urge to look away,
and also want to figure out exactly how it was achieved.
Which is the moment
that Leatherface takes Pam's barebacked body,
lifts it up onto that meat hook.
I'm sure there are cuts that allow for a trick of the eye,
but my experience of it is always,
this is one continuous nightmarish thing happening
and it feels so real.
It's so beautifully staged and framed
to set it up with the bare hook previous to that moment
so that you are really focused on it.
You really sense its potency in the frame.
I have that experience with other movies,
like Come and See, the Russian film.
There's a sense that what I'm watching
is a living, breathing nightmare.
[flies buzzing]
What makes this movie an enduring masterpiece
is that its thesis seems to be
America is a madness,
and I want you to look at it and experience it.
And there's art that perhaps works
within a more polite setting,
but ultimately, I think most great art
is a punch in our complacent faces.
That movie expands my notion of what art even is.
It allows me permission
to make stories that feel maybe harder sometimes...
[grunts]
...or more unpleasant.
Spit on it, spit on it!
- Fuck you. - Spit on it.
[Kusama] And still believe that there's a place for beauty.
There's a place for redemption.
I think Tobe Hooper wanted people
to walk out of that theater shaken and changed.
And he did that using the medium in a really sophisticated way.
He uses so much art and poetry in the filmmaking
that I would think many audience members
couldn't help but feel seen, spoken to,
provoked, and respected.
I can't think of a better mission as an artist,
you know, to make work that is attempting to see its audience
and make them see something bigger than just the mirror.
It's a hard movie to watch.
It's a hard movie to re-watch.
And I keep going back to it because it's worth it.
It has poetry...
beauty...
No, no, they didn't see me.
[Kusama] ...shock...
awe.
[reporter] The remains of relatives
have been removed.
No suspects are in custody.
[Kusama] Tragedy.
It's as big an American film as any American classic.
And for that reason, I keep returning to it,
because it gives something back.
There's always more to see.
Sally?
- Sally-- - [Kusama] There's always
more subtlety and meaning
to glean from re-watching it.
Sally!
[laughing maniacally]
[Kusama] How lucky we are as cinephiles
to have Texas Chain Saw Massacre as an American statement.
[chainsaw buzzing]
[ominous music playing]
[ominous music continues]
[music fades out]