WHEN director Tobe Hooper unleashed The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on our cinema screens in 1974, it was met with the kind of sweeping disgust and righteous outrage from society's moral guardians that PR people can only dream of.
There's no such thing as bad publicity right? Even if Hooper's debut exercise in everyday bone crunching horror was mostly being talked about in deeply disparaging terms.
A very cheap and brutally basic study in rural terror, it told the creaky tale of a gang of five young friends who venture out into wilds of Texas only to be tormented and tortured by a clan of inbred locals with limited social skills.
With a human skin wearing, chainsaw wielding nut job right out in front, it's easy to see why it presented such a shocking proposition at the time – it does display a sordid fascination with the misuse of gardening appliances after all.
Today, it remains an unrelentingly grim and gruesome proposition even though the passing of time has left us able to see a lot of the jet black humour that underpins much of the antisocial activity on screen.
Most mainstream reviewers of the time were repulsed, treating it like something unmentionable that they were forced to scrape off their shoes. Naturally, kids and horror heads loved it: there's nothing your classic nihilistic youngster digs more than something that makes everyone from parents to church leaders get their collective undergarments in an unholy twist, is there? Thus, a proper cult phenomenon was born.
Watching the latest 4K release of this notorious shocker on MPI Media in 2023 is an odd experience, though. The story is flimsier than the attire of the teenagers who head out to investigate reports of grave robbing in the Texas sticks and wind up facing off against a family of cannibalistic cretins led by the aforementioned garden tool toting psychopath, who has now passed into horror history as 'Leatherface' – but still we lap it up.
The 'acting' is basic at best and the effects betray the minuscule budget at every turn, but still it holds us in its clammy grip. What shocked critics and audiences in 1974 now feels almost quaint at times, with much of the 'teenagers in peril' plot and the awful cheesy dialogue they spout coming across like an episode of Scooby-Doo watched through the veil of some very ill-advised hallucinatory drugs. Yet even still, it's the kind of film that's impossible to stop watching once you start.
Oddly enough, there's not even very much in the way of blood – which, given the subject matter, is very strange indeed. However, it's pacey and relentlessly visceral in mood, and that's the reason it still cuts the horror mustard.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has already been released to the home viewing market more times than Leatherface has had hot (or maybe that should be cold) dinners, and there have been more 'deluxe' and 'definitive' editions wheeled out than you could shake a distressingly loud and out of control chainsaw at, but still we keep coming back for more.
In other words it's a proper cult classic.
