the texas chain saw massacre google drive

This carries over into the rest of the film, which spills only a few actual drops of blood on screen (real blood in one moment, because the prop knife that was going to be used for the effect of cutting Marilyn Burns’ finger wasn’t working, so they just cut her) but some viewers would swear to you that they had seen the most brutal and graphic violence.įor me though, the key way that the film is deceptive is in how its various elements take up space in my mind between viewings.

From the beginning, as camera flashbulbs illuminate rotting corpses and skeletal remains, the horror inherent in the images makes you believe that you’re seeing them for longer and more explicitly than you actually are. James Ferman hit on something essential about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in observing that the ‘problem’ with it couldn’t be cut around: it’s a deceptive film. Later, they run out of gas and, looking for help, stumble on Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) a manchild who butchers people, often with a chainsaw, and wears a mask made from a flayed human face and his cannibalistic family, living on a neighbouring farm. On the way they pick up a hitchhiker (Edwin Neal) who spooks them. You know the story by now, but in case this is the first thing you’ve ever read about this film, it finds a group of teens, notably Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) and her wheelchair bound brother Franklin (Paul Partain) driving through Texas to the farm owned by their late grandparents. As it fast approaches its 50 th birthday, it remains every bit as primal and terrorising as it ever was. This latest one, the first UK release on 4K disc is the fourth format I’ve owned the film on, but The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is worth it. Since then, Tobe Hooper’s magnum opus (which is not, as many have misattributed it, his feature debut) has had more releases in the UK than I can count. It may be apocryphal, but apparently when he attended a cinema club screening of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, then director of the BBFC James Ferman said something along the lines of “It’s all right for you middle-class cineastes to see this film, but what would happen if a factory worker in Manchester happened to see it?” This snobbery, and Ferman’s insistence that it wasn’t any one image that kept him from granting the film an X (later 18) certificate but ‘an atmosphere of madness, threat and impeding violence’ kept The Texas Chain Saw Massacre from the eyes of the great unwashed until Ferman’s retirement in 1999.

The texas chain saw massacre google drive