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The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Sometimes my view on a film takes time to coalesce. While I found the experience of watching the Texas Chain Saw Massacre a few weeks ago to be extremely unpleasant, it has stuck in my mind, and the more I think about it, the better I think it is.
The film perfectly balances grueling suspense with brutal action, with the shift almost exactly at the halfway point. Most horror films skew to one extreme or the other, to their own detriment. Films like Halloween or When a Stranger Calls are great at building suspense, but never really confront the audience with truly unmitigated fear. On the other hand, more recent horror porn films (Saw and so on) give only a distasteful gorefest without any subtlety or intelligence in the exposition. From the title, I was expecting The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to fall in the latter category, but was surprised at just how masterfully it builds suspense, and how deeply disturbing it is with such a relative lack of blood.
While the film certainly has exceptionally troubling moments (e.g., the unforgettable dinner scene), the antagonists are also not as sadistic as I was expecting. They are primitive, animalistic, and damaged, but they are not particularly malicious, and they even possess a twisted sense of morality. The film goes some way to explaining how they became such animals -- the dehumanizing effect of constantly killing in an abattoir, the isolated rural homestead with its troubling lack of domestic space and of living women. While it's a cliché to put horror in the home, this film effectively transports its characters into a perversion of a conventional family, with the most familiar elements made unfamiliar, just as in a nightmare.
It is an astonishing fact that Tobe Hooper tried to get a PG rating for the film, especially since it was banned outright in many countries. Tellingly, Wes Craven questioned "what kind of Mansonite crazoid" could have "conjured up such a visceral and punishing experience". It's indisputably brutal, harrowing, and nightmarish. But it is also pure and singularly effective in achieving its purpose, which is something that one can rarely say about a film from any genre.