A Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) BRUTAL MOVIE REACTION! | FIRST TIME WATCHING!!

Another Tobe Hooper film to check out is The Funhouse (1981). I would love to see your reaction to it.

Look up Ed Gein and you will see how he inspired the characters of Leatherface, Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill! Weird relationship with his mom and loved wearing other people’s skin....

Brittyn Lindsey

Death Trap was Tobe Hooper's next film...a less refined version of Psycho, Texas style lol. The Chainsaw Massacre 2 goes in the opposite direction, bat shit crazy and weird.

I think this movie is more of a sensorial overload than something that's easy or enjoyable to re-watch. It tries to bombard you and put you in the scene to make you want it to stop and want to get out of there. The pay-off being the moment when the final girl is sitting in the back of the pickup and you feel the sense of release. It has some very good moments, but it's got a b-movie approach in that doesn't bother to develop the characters beyond simple caricature, and doesn't really even ask you to learn or remember anyone's names or anything about who they are or why they are doing what they are doing. It's like going on a rollercoaster and surviving the intense experience. I can respect it's place in movie history, but I can't say I find myself wanting to watch it very often, and the handful of scenes of great cinematography and sound design are outweighed by the long, grueling scenes of screaming and chainsaw noise that beg to be fast-forwarded after you've seen the movie once before. Whereas The Exorcist pushes you to the limit, it knows when to cut to silence to give you a reprieve. I find this one is just too relentless for repeat viewing.

Ian

The great drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs says that one of the most significant aspects of TTCM is that it's set in the country. For most of Hollywood's history, it had always been a cinematic convention that small towns, the countryside, the farm, had been symbolic of innocence, wholesomeness, moral fiber and community spirit, while the big city was symbolic of corruption, temptation, loss of innocence, basically just a cruel and indifferent world of urban squalor populated by criminals and (gasp!) promiscuous women, which also meant venereal disease and drug addiction. MASSACRE inverts that. Here the supposedly sophisticated college kids are hopelessly naive and careless, and it's the countryside, the slowly crumbling small Texas town in the middle of nowhere, which hides something monstrous. It might not have been the first to flip this narrative - DELIVERANCE in 1972 showed 4 businessmen stalked during a river rafting trip by demented locals - but the ruthlessness it displays towards the innocents really touched a nerve in popular culture. This movie also came out as America was still coping with its Vietnam hangover; "peace" had been declared less than 2 years earlier, the country (South Vietnam) we'd spent 9 years and 58,000 lives protecting had 6 months of existence left before the communists would overrun it, and there was still tremendous resentment from conservative working-class Americans towards an antiwar movement they felt was nothing but lazy, spoiled rotten college kids whose protests and riots had undermined the country during wartime and made a mockery of the kids who had served and died in Vietnam. It's not too hard to see that seething resentment in this movie, with a backwoods family, who lost their livelihoods when the slaughterhouse shut down, literally chopping up and eating the educated class who they blamed for all their troubles. After this film Tobe Hooper still had 2 successes in his future, the TV-miniseries 'SALEM'S LOT (based on a Stephen King novel) and POLTERGEIST. He also directed the flawed but highly entertaining LIFEFORCE, a batshit crazy movie about space vampires running wild in London, but budget cuts led to that film's failure. He wrote and directed THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2 which is, hmm, very polarizing to say the least. A very different film from the first. Hooper's career dwindled to directing low-budget horror movies, episodic TV, and writing scripts which never got funding. Interesting footnote, the company which distributed THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE in theaters, Bryanston Distributing Company - which also distributed John Carpenter's first film, DARK STAR - was apparently wholly controlled by the Mafia, which used it both to launder money from criminal enterprises and to illegally distribute pornography (which was still illegal in many cities and states at the time).

Patrick Flanagan

Great movie and I love the fact you play Dead By Daylight!

This is the one I was most looking forward to. First of all: Tom has the most hilarious reaction faces. Shaun always delivers the hilarious comments. You guys are the perfect combo. "soft shiver" LMAO The 'bone couch' was just creepy. Watching you guys jump...priceless.

Ron Thibodeau

This is the documentary The American Nightmare- really eye opening about horror in the late 60s and early 70s, and in particular the films of Wes Craven, John Carpenter, George Romero and Tobe Hooper. Definitely worth a watch https://youtu.be/k5v03a_zCSM

Love this film -completly ground breaking for its time it was banned in the UK for years so when I first saw it back in 1989, it was on a dodgy pirate VHS tape that was passed around at university. All the more powerful because there is only marginally more blood on screen in this film than there is in Psycho (mainly the bit with 'Hitch' in the van and Curt's death). Everything happens in your head and imagination due to the brilliance of the film making and the use of camera angles. Marilyn Burns performance is phenomenal and possibly one of the most physical final girl performances ever. The remakes and modern versions pale in comparison, mainly because they try to give Leatherface and his family a motivation. This version is terrifying because they are completely insane and we don't know why. The lorry at the end never did make sense though. You might want to watch the documentary The American Nightmare , which i think you can find on YouTube, which really goes into detail about this period of horror film making and in particular how this, and other 'body in pieces' films were very much a response to the political climate at the time, in particular the Vietnam War, police brutality, race rioting and the atrocity at Kent State University, where Middle America was seen as quite literally destroying its young. By the way, Tobe Hooper' s career kind of took a dive after Poltergeist, so that film and this one are for me, the only ones worth watching