Movies

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE Midnights This Weekend at The Hi-Pointe – Take the Whole Family!

By Tom Stockman | July 28, 2014

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

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE screens this Friday and Saturday nights (August 1st and 2nd) at midnight at the Hi-Pointe Theater (1005 McCausland Ave, St. Louis) as part of Destroy the Brain’s Late Night Grindhouse series.

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.

40 years have passed and now THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE has been cleaned up and remastered. The film was shot on grainy 16mm film stock with no negative, and the final film was full of tears, splice marks, and dirt. This added to the grindhouse atmosphere of the film, so I’m not sure it was a good candidate for a makeover, but they have and the gang over at Destroy the Brain.com will be presenting this souped-up 4k new version at midnight this weekend (August 1st and 2nd) at St. Louis’ fabulous Hi-Pointe Theater (1005 McCausland Ave, St. Louis) as part of their Late Night Grindhouse Midnight series, so don’t miss it!