Screening The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

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1:01they make, from hotel quality batting and bath to kitchen essentials and thoughtfully designed furniture. They make well-designed pieces for everyday living. So find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com slash retrospectors, get free shipping on your order in 365 day returns, now available on Canada and the UK too, that's q-u-i-n-c-e.com slash retrospectors. It's October 1st, 1974, and another remarkable event is about to be uncovered by

2:01Ariel, Rebecca and Arley, the retro specters. Many of us have probly entertained various ideas of how to skip the line while standing in a particularly slow-moving queue, but few have likely been as extreme, disturbing and frankly profitable as the one visualized by the US screenwriter Toby Hooper, who, one Christmas, imagined himself slicing through a busy department store queue with a chainsaw. The inspiration he says for his acclaimed horror film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which had its first American screening today in history in 1974. Yeah, screenings the right word because if this was a premier, it's a bit weird because it's a premier to which it's star Gunnar Hansen was not invited. But The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was an incredibly low budget film. It was made by a then 29-year-old director Toby Hooper, as he just said, with a crew from the University of Texas that were incredibly inexperienced and a cast that no one had heard of,

3:05and was filmed entirely on location. So it's hardly a surprise that people can't really remember exactly what the first screening was in Austin, Texas. It opened a couple of weeks later, and no one could have predicted the sensation this film would become. It made in this first year of 1974 21.9 million pounds globally. That's for a film that cost £100,000 to make. Yeah, but on this day in Austin, it was very much a local event. I mean, obviously it's got Texas in the name, but also Hooper was an Austin native. He'd gone to the then-new University of Austin film school. And he actually, one of his inspirations to the movie was that he was there on the 1st of August 1966 when Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower Sniper, opened fire on random people from the University's clock tower killing 14 people. The cast were mostly unknown actors from central Texas, and it had been filmed in and around Round Rock, which is a town just outside of Austin, mostly at a real 1900s farmhouse. Yeah, and Ollie, you say it was a sensation in its first year after it did finally open more widely. I do. I would have happily

4:10invested in this. Well, well, you know me too, as it turns out, but it wasn't necessarily hugely critically acclaimed. It had, let's say, a mixed reaction. Lindegross of the Los Angeles Times called it despicable. Stephen King, interestingly, called it a work of cataclysmic terror. He said, I would happily testify to its redeeming social merit in any court in the country. Whereas Harper's called it a vile little piece of sick crap. Yeah, and I mean, we're told at the opening of the movie that the film you're about to see is true. And many viewers were convinced or at least uncertain, not least because it had these unknown actors and the low budget production that gave that kind of gritty rip from the headlines to look. Who per se, he wanted the film to open with that as a commentary on quote being lied to by the government about things that were going on all over the world, you know, post-Vietnam post-Pentagon papers post-Watergate. But as well as there being this widespread distrust and the establishment in the US at the time, there was also an increasing distrust in society, a sense that you could no longer trust your neighbors, you know,

5:12that small town America could have these hidden horrors, not least because you had the start of high profile serial killers in the news. You know, you had your edgine, your ed camper, in Texas, you had Dean Cole and Ed Marwein Henley and the zodiac killer, you know, these murderers motivated by sadism and depravity that went far beyond murders, motivated by money or romantic rivalry, things that, you know, the average person could understand. And so you had these movies like a clockwork orange straw dogs that were pushing boundaries and horror in particular became way more gruesome and more explicit, you know, movies like Last House on the Left that were just mingling sex and violence in a way that I think now and certainly to some people at the time felt extremely exploitative, particularly the way that it fetishized sexual violence against women. Yeah, and yet despite its reputation for all of this gore, a lot of the violence actually isn't shone, it's just suggested and this is because Hooper was actually hoping to get a PG rating

6:13so that the film could get a really wide audience, but of course he didn't manage that, famously, it went for an X rating, but ultimately it was downgraded to an R rating which meant that it could actually be shone in cinemas. Yeah, Hooper said later that when he heard they planned to give an X rating, he said, I called the MPAA and asked them, how can I hang a girl on a meet hook and get an R rating? And they said, you can't, but in the anti-detail. Meanwhile in the UK, it wasn't released nationally until March 1999, 25 years later, because the British Board of Film class certification refused to give it a certificate at all. Basically because it seemed to revel in a vulnerable woman's distress, that was the objection here in the UK. They acknowledged that it wasn't explicit and that was the issue, they couldn't cut it, you couldn't cut one minute of gore and then say, okay, now we can release it as 18. It still had this sinister intention to get the

7:14audience to seemingly enjoy watching someone be tortured and they just couldn't reconcile themselves with that being art or being something that an audience should be allowed to see. It was released briefly on video before videos had certificates, but then became one of the feared video nasties and was withdrawn from sale. And then there was a thought that it could be released as an R18, but then it would have to be sold in sex shops, which doesn't really deal with the pornography of terror issue. So it really took a very, very long time before people in Britain were able to see it. Yeah, I mean, once you did see the film, what you were watching, even if it wasn't truly gory, was genuine suffering in the cast because, oh my god, they went through hell to make this thing. The shoestring budget, which you mentioned, Oli, was, you know, it was tiny, famously John Carpenter had a low budget for Halloween, and that had a budget that was five times

8:14the amount that Texas Chainsaw massacre was made for. And that, of course, meant little pay and long hours for the cast and crew, but what was even worse was that the production took place during this incredibly hot text and summer when temperatures were regularly above 100 degrees in Fahrenheit. And most of the people in the cast weren't allowed to change their costumes for continuity reasons, which meant that they were getting increasingly smelly and vile as the production went on. And there was this constant presence of bones and rotting meat that were used as props because to put together the, the sort of interiors that they arrived at. Some of the production members were actually driving around the deserts, peaking up old rotting bits of animals and bringing them back to the house. So it was just absolutely putrid in there. It's extraordinary what they did do on that set that you couldn't do as part of the studio system even in 1974. I mean, the final

9:17famous sequence of leather face wielding the chainsaw and throwing it around and dancing, Hanson literally, let's go of the chainsaw in that. You can see it leave his hands. That's not in a protected way that you threw the chainsaw at the cruise. There was a real injury on Marilyn Burns' finger at one point. The prop knife didn't work, so they just cut Marilyn Burns' finger for real. But all of that fettied atmosphere and fear and exhaustion does contribute to the atmosphere that you're watching. You can smell that place. And partly, that's because they shot it in sequence. I mean, you were saying about the costumes needed for continuity. They were needed for continuity because they actually filmed it in order because one of the advantages of making such a low budget film with essentially like three locations in it is they can actually film it in order. So the final scene was the final scene and those actors had been on that horrific journey. And what's worse, by the time they got to the end of that terrible terrible journey at the point at which this film started actually performing well in the box

10:20office, they must have all thought that they were in for rather a big payday. But for two reasons, they were deprived of very much cash. The first was that their shares were actually a percentage of the company vortex, but vortex only actually owned half of the film because they had to bring on other investors to complete the picture. And so the percentage that the actors were in line for first of all was going to be half what they initially had anticipated. But further to that, there's this fascinating alleged connection to the mafia because this extra investment arrived to help finish the film in post production came from this company called Brianston and its owners were Joe and Lou Perreno and they were members of the Colombo Crime Family and the money, what do you know just magically disappeared? Or 12 million dollars that it made at the box office in its first year. And interestingly, despite its enormous success, I mean it was re-released in the States for eight consecutive years after this. It didn't really make a star of its star, gonna Hanson who plays

11:25leather face. I wonder if that's partly because he's got a thing on his face. Now I was going to say the focus of the film moved away from him in the title. It was originally going to be called leather face, but I think that would have helped focus you on the villain, whereas calling it the Texas Chainsaw Mask, you're sort of focused on the victims in a way, aren't you really feeling what they feel? Yeah and I mean you mentioned leather faces being the villain, which I mean obviously he is. He's had a hard life as well. Exactly there are certain qualities to leather face that make him not just a straightforward psychopathic villain. I think that's the reason for the dinner party. Yeah, exactly. Put on a new face. Yeah. The franchise has had so many instruments, you know partly obviously because of the success of the previous ones, but also because you've got this horrifyingly fascinating figure at the centre of a chainsaw, it kind of falls into what was called the Hicksploitation genre, which you know had these grotesque characters of rural people as being you know inbred clans of cannibals usually being physically

12:26deformed and mentally deranged for good measure, which is obviously you know the case with leather face. Who put also saw the character and the situation as amusing as worth saying? There is black comedy in the Texas Chainsaw Mask. It was just so shocking for people in 1974 that that was not immediately recognised, but you know if you go and watch it with an audience now there will be laughs because it's kind of an awkward family dinner party right the final scene like it's horrendous, but there is there's a few awkward family dynamics that are amusing and Toby Hooper when he went to see it at the Cannes Film Festival was disappointed that was the first time he ever saw it with an audience that they weren't laughing. Can you imagine showing an audience that no idea what to expect in France, the Texas Chainsaw Mask and they're being like why aren't they laughing? First no PG rating and now this. Tomorrow you don't have to be in love you can be a missionary now without even leaving your house. Ditch the ads and get a Sunday episode when you join club retrospectors. patreon.com slash

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