Almost everyone by now must have heard about Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I was one of those who noted this neo-Gothic horror story from Locarno in 1975 and then argued for its inclusion in the London Festival of that year since it looked as if it had been banned outright for showing here. While nobody could seriously call it a work of art, it was in my opinion a quite formidable piece of directorial artifice, a horror comic brought to the screen with frenetic energy and life.
Now slightly cut - but not much, since actually most of the violence is planted in the minds of the audience - the film still seems to me a minor tour de force, bringing a nightmare into focus with sledgehammer abandon. Hyped-up from what was apparently a real incident, it has a vanload of young rednecks trapped in the hands of a lunatic backwoods family, formerly slaughterhouse workers, who make strenuous and almost successful attempts to hack them to death with chainsaws.
The sequences during which one of the trapped girls is tied up to confront the dotty murderers, slavering for blood, and then escapes, pursued by one of them with his mechanical chainsaw buzzing at the ready towards the possible safety of a motorway, is a first-class piece of sweat-inducing cinema. Morally retrograde it may be, but then so are nightmares. The point is that this one, though often crude and raw, really leads the imagination. What also works in its favour is that it doesn't pretend to do anything more than scare the pants off you.
