The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

This being October, we get a lot of horror movies on a bunch of the movie channels, not just TCM's lineup of vintage horror movies it can get the rights to, which it seems disproportionately means Hammer horror. Anyhow, I noticed that the original 1974 version of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is getting some airings on the Showtime package of channels, and has another one tomorrow (Oct. 19) at 12:45 PM on Flix.

There's not that much going on in this one. We hear a radio news broadcast, with one of the stories being about alleged grave robberies in a rural part of Texas. Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) is the granddaughter of one of the people buried in the cemetery where this is supposedly happening. So she takes her wheelchair-bound brother Franklin and a trio of her 20-something friends, Kirk, Pam (who's into astrology), and Jerry. They get to the cemetery and find that Grandpa's grave is still intact, leading Sally to suggest they go see what's left of Grandpa's old homestead.

Along the way, they pick up a hitchhiker who's a really strange bird. He takes a Polaroid photograph of one of the passengers in the van, and then burns it since he was expecting to get paid for this and the passengers didn't ask for the picture. He also requests a pocket knife, using it to cut his own hand. He could have just used his straight razor for that, except he's got a different intention for that, which is cutting Franklin on the arm.

After the friends kick the hitchhiker out, they try to gas up the van, but this being 1973 and the oil embargo going on, the middle-of-nowhere gas station is out of gas. Still, they carry on to the old homestead, which is of course in a parlous state having been abandoned some years back when the grandparents died. Franklin, who apparently was not in a wheelchair when he was a kid, tells Pam and Kirk that there's an old swimming hole down the hill, and they decide to go swimming.

They don't find the swimming hole, but they do find a house that sounds like it's running a generator, which means that they have to have gasoline. (Well, technically it could be a propane-fueled generator.) But in any case it means there should also be people around who can help the stranded travelers out. Except that these aren't normal people. The house seems to be run by a person in a leather mask (Gunnar Hansen), who decides that he's going to kill Kirk when he goes in the house!

Pam's been waiting for Kirk outside the house, so it's no surprise that after a fair bit of time without his coming back out of the house, she decides to follow him in. Big mistake, of course, but then she doesn't know what the viewer knows. Nor will Jerry, Sally, and Franklin when the time comes for them to go to the house and meet their inevitable doom.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre gives no explanation for why Leatherface or the Hitchhiker are the way they are, which isn't such a bad thing. The idea of such ultraviolence that's so random and seemingly without any valid reason only makes the movie more frightening, or at least would for viewers back in 1974 when it was originally released. Over the past half-century, many of the plot devices in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre have become tropes for other movies to follow. That's not the fault of this movie, but now that we can get so much more graphic violence on the screen, that may lessen the impact of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre somewhat.

But it's also because of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre setting the standard that it needs to be seen. It's earned an important place in American cinema.