![]() ![]() The masked figure became a staple of horror and of course The Texas Chainsaw Massacre featured that strangely persistent trope: the final girl, the young woman who achieves a queasy, Pyrrhic victory of survival, balanced against the monster’s own survival, an undiminished threat which, quite unlike any other movie genre, flavours the closing credits with that sense of non-ending, and open-ended fear and possible sequel. But then, inevitably, the rules were relaxed and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre progressed to being a cult classic, a movie revered by new generations of directors. These became the much-feared, much-gloated-over “video nasties” and were refused certificates for two decades after this. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre became a locus classicus of the censorship and screen violence debates here when it was refused a certificate by the British Board of Film Classification upon its first release, and then in the 1980s, as the era of VCR and video rental dawned, had its brief video release cancelled along with many other ultraviolent provocations such as Hooper’s next film Eaten Alive (1977), Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980), Wes Craven’s Last House On The Left (1972) - notably inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s Virgin Spring - and Meir Zarchi’s I Spit On Your Grave (1980). ![]() In the wilderness, where outsiders are rare, where neighbours are 30 minutes’ drive away, and the uniformed forces of law and order further still, this can mean a great many things. Families are private families keep their own secrets families mind their own business. The point is that the “family”, so readily evoked as the benchmark of wholesome American normality, can be anything but. Like Norman Bates before, and Dr Hannibal Lecter afterwards, the grisly, skin-crawling, skin-flaying Leatherface had been taken from the real-life story of Ed Gein, the 50s serial killer who made trophies out of human remains.īut it is not merely that Leatherface is an implacable, irrational and essentially motiveless killer: he is part of a secret family or cult within whose enclosed society these horrendous acts have become normalised as part of an evolved ritual. This was the nightmarish story of a man called Leatherface who wears a gruesome mask and kills people with a variety of implements including a chainsaw. ![]()
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