TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE Screening at Webster University March 6th – ‘Grave Tales’

“You could have dinner with us… my brother makes good head cheese! You like head cheese?”

The ‘Grave Tales’ Horror film series concludes at Webster University Thursday March 6th with a screening of Tobe Hooper’s TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974). The screening will be at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium (470 East Lockwood). The movie starts at 7:30 and a Facebook invite for the event can be found HERE. 

Tobe Hooper’s THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE may or may not be the scariest horror movie ever made (I think it is) but it’s certainly one of the most referenced, imitated, ripped off, and influential. It opened in October of 1974 when I was 13 and I read about it in a few monster mags, but could not initially talk my dad into taking me to see it (hew was usually pretty cool about that kind of thing – he’d already taken me to FRENCH CONNECTION and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE). About 6 months later, in April of 1975, the Italian horror film TORSO opened at the Four Seasons Cinema at Olive and Woods Mill road and it was double feature with THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE! This time, dad must have got sick of my begging because he drove me and a couple of buddies there and dropped us off. CHAINSAW was the first and it’s still the most terrifying moviegoing experience of my life (TORSO wasn’t nearly a scary but at least it had some nudity, something I wasn’t used to!)

Hooper claims THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE was his reaction to Vietnam and Watergate and he shot it with a gritty, in-your-face realism. For a first-timer, Hooper directed with a solid sense of composition and attention to detail and forced some amazing performances from his cast. Audiences and critics at the time responded to it’s high level of gore, but they were wrong. It’s actually a masterpiece of restraint that Hooper made and much of its magic lies in the fact that the audience thinks they saw a no-holds-barred gorefest when they didn’t (the scene of the Hitchhiker (Ed Neal) slicing his own hand with a knife is the only actual bloodletting in the entire film).

What happened to Tobe Hooper? His follow-up, EATEN ALIVE, was a decent horror films but one no one would talk about if another director had made it. POLTERGEIST was a hit but legend has it that it was mostly directed by Steven Spielberg and it certainly plays that way. The less said about SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION, INVADERS FROM MARS and MORTUARY the better. Though FUNHOUSE, LIFEFORCE and TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2 have their followings, it’s safe to say that Hooper never again captured the magic that was THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and many rightfully view him as a one-hit wonder. The iconic concluding shot of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE lingers on the wounded and frustrated Leatherface, spinning in the sunlight as his chainsaw roars and his terrified prey eludes him. It’s one of the most famous final images in cinema and could be seen as a metaphor for Tobe Hooper’s career. THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE is a masterpiece, still holding strong today, and you’ll have the opportunity to see it again in all of its big-screen glory when it Thursday night at Webster University.

$7 for the general public
$6 for seniors, Webster alumni and students from other schools
$5 for Webster University staff and faculty

Free for Webster students with proper I.D.