New to this edition are two substantial extras. It’s a suitably terrifying and immersive experience, especially for the way that it punches up Tobe Hooper and Wayne Bell’s experimental sound design.Īside from the four commentary tracks accompanying the film, the bulk of the bonus features on this two-disc set appear on a second HD Blu-ray disc. The UHD disc offers no fewer than four sound mixes, but your best bet remains the Dolby Atmos 7.1 surround track. Fine details are further enhanced for the most part, though in certain scenes some of the deep blacks and blown whites sometimes obscure minor details. But colors, particularly primary hues, get a considerable boost in saturation. The image is still suitably grungy, given its 16mm origins. Image/Soundĭark Sky Films’s new 4K UHD transfer of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre definitely constitutes an improvement over their 2014 restoration, albeit not an absolutely overwhelming one. And then there’s the one indelible image that somehow encapsulates the clan’s entire wonky and perverted milieu: a chicken cooped up in a birdcage. Most of the thematically important dialogue comes across like throwaway lines, including the riotous “My family’s always been in meat.” Or else key themes are rendered purely visually: Witness the mummified corpse of Granma that provides the only female relation among the otherwise phallocentric cannibal clan, how the camera slowly pans across the hellish red barbeque cooker while a radio divulges tales of recent grave robbery, or the way Leatherface dolls up in garish “Baby Jane” makeup for the climactic family meal. Something else that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre pioneered is a light touch when it comes to sounding the depths of a horror film’s subtext. And The Texas Chain Saw Massacre isn’t afraid to reduce its repetitiveness to absurdity either, as when Sally twice jumps through a window in an effort to elude Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen). Later, she runs circles around their rural farmhouse. At the level of the plotline, Sally (Marilyn Burns) circles back to the Last Chance gas station where she beseeches the Old Man (Jim Siedow) for help, only to have him turn out to be one of the cannibal clan. The fierce red sun that dominates the opening credits is visually matched late in the film by repeated close-ups of red-veined eyeballs.
Likewise, we can discern an almost totemistic attitude in the “artworks” and furniture that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s cannibal family constructs out of their victims’ remains.Ĭircularity and repetition are important structural components throughout. Nevertheless, it continues to crop up in the primitivism exhibited by the hitchhiker (Edwin Neal) who’d rather ritualistically incinerate an unwanted Polaroid than leave it behind as “evidence,” and who proceeds to mark the kids’ van with some sort of inscrutably bloody sigil.
Such a pseudoscientific worldview ultimately may prove a red herring. Certainly the fixed date that we’re supplied (August 13, 1973) suggests something portentous, even as the pre-credits crawl ponderously narrated by John Larroquette lends a false sense of veracity to events that are really nothing more than a brutal and blackly humorous riff on Hansel and Gretel. However, as the opening credits and early dialogue intimate, the fault may be in our stars as well as in ourselves: Images of massive solar flares and selections read from an astrological almanac indicate that time itself is out of joint. The film has achieved the perfect storm necessary for enduring notoriety: It’s a masterwork that flawlessly mirrors the time and place of its origin, while at the same time remaining one for the ages, thanks to its uncanny power of nearly subliminal suggestion, almost avant-garde editing and sound design, and its uncompromising vision of an American consumerist society run amok. Not even the onslaught of sequels ( the first of which, also under Hooper’s direction, is actually kind of brilliant), rip-offs (Juan Piquer Simón’s batshit Pieces being one of the looniest), and a couple of pitiful stabs at a remake could manage such a seemingly impossible task. Five decades haven’t blunted the cutting edge of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
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