The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Tobe Hooper, USA, 1974, 16mm, 1.78, colour, 83′

THU September 18 / 21.00 / Slovenian cinematheque

Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) and her paraplegic brother, Franklin, travel with three friends, to visit the old Hardesty family homesteadin the country. What awaits them instead is a chain saw wielding killer, Leatherface, and his family of retired slaughterhouse workers and grave-robbing cannibals (“My family’s always been in meat.”) The rest is history: the meat hook, the mallet, the chain saw… the massacre. “Who will survive and what will be left of them?”

Tobe Hooper’s infamous cult slasher The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, often described as the best and most shocking horror film in cinema history, belongs to the brilliant generation of late-60s and early-70s genre flicks (Night of the Living Dead, The Last House on the Left, The Exorcist) whose subversive potential, socio-political commentary, and graphic violence set a new standard in horror filmmaking.

“As a collective nightmare it brings to a focus a spirit of negativity, an undifferentiated lust for destruction, that seems to lie not far below the surface of the modern collective consciousness … In conjunction with the film’s relentless and unremitting intensity, [this is] what gives Massacre (beyond any other film in my experience) the authentic quality of a nightmare.”
– Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan… and Beyond

“There are films which skate right up to the border where “art” ceases to exist in any form and exploitation begins, and these films are often the field’s most striking successes. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is one of these … I would happily testify to its redeeming social merit in any court in the country.”
– Stephen King, Danse Macabre