FolknHell tackles Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), its still-shocking violence, suspicious barbecue and surprisingly solid claim to American folk horror. Also, this is Take Two because somebody forgot to press record.
Some films age gracefully. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) still looks as though it has been left in the Texas sun beside a sack of bones, and that is very much a compliment.
In Episode 29, Andy Davidson, David Hall and Dave Houghton revisit Tobe Hooper’s horror landmark and ask why its grainy, documentary-style nightmare remains so brutally effective more than fifty years later. The discussion gets into the first hammer blow, the meat-hook sequence, Marilyn Burns finding several entirely new levels of screaming, and Gunnar Hansen giving Leatherface a strange flicker of pathos beneath the mask.
Then comes the FolknHell question: is this really folk horror? The answer involves an isolated patch of land, a family with its own inherited rituals, bone totems, slaughterhouse traditions and a group of outsiders who discover that the local rules include becoming barbecue.
There is also a comparison with House of 1000 Corpses, a debate over whether the film refuses to glorify violence or is gleefully sadistic, and the mystery of a missing sound effect that one host had apparently been carrying in his head for decades.
This is also the second attempt at recording the episode. The first version, which nobody recorded, was obviously the greatest podcast ever made.
Spoilers throughout. Watch the film first if you would rather enter the farmhouse without knowing exactly where the hooks are.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is American folk horror as well as a proto-slasher. The isolated landscape, closed family community, inherited slaughterhouse customs, ritualised bones and doomed outsiders fit the genre with alarming neatness. It is not an enjoyable film in the cosy sense, but it remains an essential and astonishingly powerful horror experience.
- David Hall: 8.5/10
- Dave Houghton: 8/10
- Andy Davidson: 8.5/10
- Total: 25/30
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