In 1974, Tobe Hooper released this intimately upsetting and disturbing horror: a gonzo-macabre masterpiece inspired by the true story of serial killer Ed Gein, who was arrested in 1957 for grisly atrocities in remote Wisconsin. (Texas sounds better in the title.)
Hooper’s minimalist shocker appeared just 14 years after Hitchcock’s sleek Psycho, which was also indirectly inspired by Gein (via the novel by Robert Bloch). Psycho is a far more refined variation on the Gein theme, more like Edgar Allan Poe. In contrast, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre feels utterly different: gritty, gloomy, social-realist; a no-budget account of how the Gein horror might have felt to those who actually encountered it. It feels closer, in its down-home style, to something like Barbara Loden’s Wanda, from 1970. Compared with the screeching slashers and their jump scares which it inspired, this is almost … well, not restrained exactly but more controlled, less generically self-aware, readier to defer its shocks. It is pre-formulaic. The first bizarre murder happens with no stabbing musical score on the soundtrack, with the camera positioned unresponsively at the other end of the room.
