The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at 50: a brutal yet artful shock horror

The next time you see The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – and if you haven’t seen it, brace yourself accordingly – close your eyes for the first five or 10 minutes and listen, preferably with a good set of headphones. Because as extraordinary and unforgettable as so many of the images are, the soul of the film comes through on the soundtrack, which unsettles you on several different fronts at once. And now 50 years later, when it’s rightly placed on the shortest of shortlists for the greatest horror films ever made, the film’s ambience still blankets American culture, the low hum (and occasional random shriek) of media malevolence.

Related: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre review – original 1974 shocker is grotesque but brilliant masterpiece

The first voice belongs, incredibly, to future star John Larroquette, who narrates the opening scroll with newsreel gravitas. “The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths,” begins the narration, which goes on to describe the events as “one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history”. Though director Tobe Hooper and his co-writer, Kim Henkel, drew inspiration from real-life serial murderers like Ed Gein, the scroll is total nonsense with the whiff of verisimilitude, a strategy that many horror films that followed, like The Blair Witch Project, would deploy to similar effect.

From there, Hooper and his sound man, Wayne Bell, accompany closeup of body parts in rigor mortis with creaking effects, the grind of flesh-and-gristle and the piercing pop of flash photography. When those confrontational noises start to abate, in comes the voice of a local newscast on the radio, informing listeners of a cemetery in Texas where dozens of graves have been robbed and worried relatives have been visiting to check on their loved ones’ remains. Films often use TV or radio news to convey narrative information, but it doesn’t stop there for Hooper, who keeps news radio on as an important piece of white noise, with all sorts of banal or shocking stories spilling out.

At the time Hooper was conceiving The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the footage coming back from the Vietnam war – and the official fictions the government was pushing about it – had the same quality of that opening soundscape, with terrible violence woven into the steady drone of network newscasts. While Alfred Hitchcock had ushered in a new, more everyday type of boogeyman 14 years earlier with Psycho, Hooper’s sinister masterpiece took it one step further, bringing the horror genre into contact with the slaughterhouse of the real world. Though the film is subtle and relentless in deploying sophisticated cinematic effects, it nonetheless has the grit and grime of something all-too-real. It makes you believe its lies.

One consistently neat trick of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is that it combines what appears to be crude, on-the-fly documentary-like photography with camerawork and art direction that’s anything but amateurish. Shot in 16mm, the film takes place during a palpably scorching summer in rural Texas, where five sweaty young adults have piled into a green van to check on a grave. Once they’re back on the road, they pick up a demented hitchhiker with strong opinions about slaughterhouse methods, along with a passion for Polaroids and knives. He leaves them wanting to peel away as quickly as possible, but when the van runs low on gas and a roadside station doesn’t have any, their plans change.

Hearing the sound of a roaring generator on a nearby farm, Kirk (William Vail) and Pam (Teri McMinn) set off to barter for gas, but the locals turn out not to be so friendly. Their grisly fate at the hands of “Leatherface” (Gunnar Hansen), a chainsaw-wielding menace of the title, leads the other three, including the driver Jerry (Allen Danziger), Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) and her disabled brother Franklin (Paul A Partain), to go looking for their friends, leading to their own terrifying introduction to Leatherface and his extended family. As the film focuses on Sally as the classic “final girl” type – and, in Burns, a peerless scream queen – it develops into a kind of demented sitcom, starring the zaniest family of cannibals in Texas. (Hooper would bring these comic elements to the fore in the film’s underrated 1986 sequel.)

A triumph of vegetarian cinema, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre takes it meat-is-murder theme to the extreme, as a family once connected to a local slaughterhouse that had closed its doors now turns to human beings as a source. The cold detachment of the first few killings, along with the use of a sledgehammer and a meat hook, reveal no distinction between humans and other animals, and the film emphasizes the sizzling flesh and gnarly remains of the carcass. Leatherface may be the scariest executioner of the lot, but there’s a childlike innocence to him that the others, who are more openly sadistic, don’t share. They thrive like savages on the desperation of their prey.

Hooper supplies a wealth of indelible images and moments that have imprinted themselves on the minds of horror fans, from the low-angle tracking shot of Pam, in short shorts, striding confidently to her doom, to the final image of Leatherface spinning around in a mad ballet with his chainsaw against the sunrise. The fight-or-flight-level panic involved in watching The Texas Chain Saw Massacre can disguise just how much effort Hooper and his crew invest into details like the interiors of the farmhouse, with each room looking like a piece from some macabre museum installation. The more you watch the film, the more obvious it seems like a work of art.

Then again, after all the censorship battles and controversies surrounding the film, it’s now just a click away for unsuspecting streaming subscribers on their couch. They can discover for themselves the shock and horror of how easy it is to get a little lost and stumble into the abattoir.