The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Director: Tobe Hooper Run Time: 83 min. Format: DCP Rating: R Release Year: 1974
Starring: Allen Danziger, Edwin Neal, Gunnar Hansen, Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, William Vail
A group of friends are terrorized by a family of cannibals in THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE!
Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of a handful of films that punctuate the very life-blood of cinematic history. Intensely brutal with very little reprieve or consideration for the audience, it came out of a rift of a socio-cultural framework, bursting onscreen with the evisceration of the family structure, youth culture, and cultural fragility in a post-Vietnam United States. Like Night of the Living Dead did five years earlier, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre reveals the unraveling framework of society and places the possibility of horror/death to occur anywhere; not in the Gothic castle nor in the fields of Vietnam but, more terrifyingly, in our surrounding neighborhoods. The film also reveals one of the first final girls (Sally) in the American slasher genre.