The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Like Night of the Living Dead (1968), another key work of modern horror, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre starts with a car ride to a cemetery: Sally Hardesty and her wheelchair-bound brother, along with Sally’s boyfriend and two other friends, pay a visit to their grandfather’s grave in rural Texas. They get an inkling of the horrors to come by picking up an unpleasant hitchhiker on the way back, but it isn’t until they stop by the family’s deserted house that things take a turn for the worse; the rest of the film can be summed up by its legendary tagline: “Who will survive – and what will be left of them?” The tongue-in-cheek humor of the tagline and the sensationalist title are misleading, however: far from being a campy bloodbath in the Herschell Gordon Lewis vein, Tobe Hooper’s masterpiece is one of the most intelligently conceived and artistically ambitious horror films ever made, creating a uniquely terrifying experience by combining elements of documentary and avant garde filmmaking.

Veikko Suvanto

Tobe Hooper (1943–2017) was an American filmmaker. After making an unsuccessful experimental film in 1969 with screenwriter Kim Henkel, the two reunited for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), which caused a sensation. Hooper’s next four films were also horrors, the most famous of them being Poltergeist (1982), produced, co-written and most likely co-directed by Steven Spielberg. Hooper also made two sci-fi films and was involved with the first sequel (1986) and the prequel (2006) to his 1974 masterpiece.