Fifty years after ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre,’ is the classic slasher film dead, or just waiting in the shadows?

By Sydney Bishop, CNN

(CNN) — Fifty years ago, two independent filmmakers named Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel had a gruesome vision for a new kind of film.

Their idea involved merciless kills, a chainsaw, a group of youths and a homicidal family with a craving for human flesh; all set against the backdrop of a sunny, countryside day giving way to a nightmarish evening. The pair didn’t have much else, other than a modest budget and few credits to their name.

When “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” hit theaters in October 1974, audiences were horrified – and enthralled. The plot wasn’t that complex, nor were the characters. But boy, was there grime and grit.

The film ended up being banned in “numerous countries” and “quickly disappeared from theaters,” Henkel told CNN in an email.

Regardless of its reception at the time, “Chainsaw” was arguably the first mainstream hit for the bloody, chaotic slasher subgenre of horror. Marion Crane had been stabbed in the shower over twenty years before its release, and Italian giallo films (giallo means yellow) had imbued horror with twisted psychological flourishes. Yet the elevated carnage of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” was a new world.

Now, the slasher subgenre is an instantly recognizable part of film lore. But as time and tastes have marched on, is the heyday of the big, murderous baddie truly over, or is it lurking in the shadows for another jump scare?

The first cut is the deepest

One must see “Chainsaw” to believe it. With only words, it sounds like some twisted story told at a sleepover, with only a flashlight’s shadow illuminating the dark.

In short, five young people trespass upon the worst property imaginable and come face to face with a bloodthirsty gang of cannibalistic killers, including one man dubbed “Leatherface” who has a penchant for – you’ll never guess – chainsaws. There’s a creepy hitchhiker, a girl who becomes impaled by a meat hook, and graveyard vandalism, all told in a grainy, documentary style (including a series of unsettling radio reports and opening narration).

Hooper, the film’s director, was born and raised in Austin, and told Texas Monthly in 2004 his initial inspiration for the film came from seeing a chainsaw display in a store around Christmas of 1972. The other plot points – a hitchhiker, a girl escaping not once but twice and a memorable dinner sequence – fell into place almost instantly afterwards.

Henkel, the film’s screenwriter, said the brutal, almost animalistic violence in the film was an intentional exploration of what scares us down to our bones.

“The enduring quality of German fairy tales — tales that touched on fundamental, even primordial fears, fears that seemed to endure over time — were at the core of our thinking,” he told CNN. “We wanted to create a cautionary tale for our times, one that would tap into both conscious and unconscious fears, and would endure over time. Fifty years on, forgive us the arrogance of some small sense of vindication.”

“Chainsaw” made it all the way to the Cannes Film Festival in 1975 and grossed a reported $30 million, far exceeding the $60,000 Hooper and Henkel had on hand in making the project, with a low-budget back-up ask of $25,000 for a black and white version.

The film’s nuances didn’t translate for everyone. Film critic Roger Ebert called the film “unnecessary” upon its release. “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to make a movie like this,” he wrote, noting it was still “some kind of weird-off the wall achievement” that was “all too effective” in its mission to “disgust and fright.”

It did, however, become the enduring story Henkel predicted. Now that “Texas Chainsaw” is turning fifty, there are screenings in theaters all across the US, limited-time merchandise and cast and crew reunions.

Joshua Dysart, a comic book writer, Texan, horror movie aficionado and “child of the early 80s VHS boom” was Henkel’s guest at the 50th anniversary screening at a recent festival in Los Angeles. He and Henkel met twenty years ago through a mutual friend.

The celebrations surrounding his favorite slasher film are a dream for Dysart, who jokingly refers to it as “some low budget 16mm movie (Henkel) wrote and helped make with a bunch of friends in their 20s one summer in the Texas Hill Country.”

Dysart first saw the film as a pre-teen growing up in Corpus Christi, when his family was the only one on the block with a VHS player. He says the first kill in the movie, when the character of Kirk is attacked by a sledgehammer-wielding Leatherface, was a game-changer.

“I remember the suddenness of it was so powerful and has really impacted me as a storyteller forever.” Dysart told CNN. “Sudden violence has tremendous power on the viewer.”

A bloody subgenre is born

If an indie film about a backwoods family operating out of a makeshift slaughterhouse could find its way to the mainstream, certainly there was something in the formula that was working. It was a subgenre in the making.

After “Chainsaw,” a parade of hair-raising slashers soon followed and a golden age loomed: “Black Christmas” with a US release just a couple of months later (often grouped with “Chainsaw” when discussing early influences in the slasher subgenre), “Halloween” in 1978, “Friday the 13th” and “Prom Night” in 1980, “The Slumber Party Massacre” in 1982, “Sleepaway Camp” in 1983, “A Nightmare on Elm Street” in 1984, “Child’s Play” in 1988, “Candyman” in 1992, “Scream” in 1996 and “I Know What You Did Last Summer” in 1997.

As the slasher genre evolved, it effectively replaced the ‘B movie,’ says film critic and comedian Jourdain Searles, who first saw “Chainsaw” in film school.

A ‘B movie’ like that of 1958’s “The Blob” were off-the-wall, non-star-studded backends of double features in the golden age of Hollywood. By definition, B movies were cheap to make, and so were slashers.

This new film iteration also included some social commentary, Searles said, and created communities among slasher fans.

“It became this new kind of horror communal entertainment that also allowed for more violence and sexuality than before and so it also makes it easier to do little social commentary in there as well,” Searles told CNN. “It’s just the way it’s packaged and the way the audiences were changing”

To terrified audiences, these popcorn fright fests felt both original and familiar. The characters (or victims) were a group of friends – usually attractive and unlikeable – hanging out at places like summer camps or celebrating holidays. The methods of murder were zany, creative and done at the hand(s) of a masked killer, almost always with a sharp object. For the “final girl,” her role was to escape the madness by the time the end credits rolled.

Slasher aesthetics changed the culture and eventually started informing subsequent projects. Artifacts like the Ghostface mask from “Scream” grew to be symbols of the horror genre at large while countless tropes and storylines were ripped from the slashers and parodied in other media, like the “Scary Movie” franchise of the early 2000s. This practice eventually gave way to a series of remakes, including re-imaginings of “Friday the 13th, “Black Christmas”, “Halloween” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”

As the prime slasher years faded, the horror genre morphed into many different monsters – with subsequent eras dominated by supernatural elements, “found footage” films and yes, more remakes and sequels. In present day, the most talked-about horror films are a little less campy and a lot more existential. Finely crafted flicks like “Midsommar,” “The Invisible Man” and “Longlegs” aim to evoke deep thought and discussions about symbolism and layered meanings, adding some refinement to the scare factor.

However, even in the modern horror landscape, the influences of the high slasher era still echo every time a movie character decides to investigate a creepy basement, or a group of people come upon a spooky, isolated farmhouse.

Here lies the classic slasher film … or so it seems

Dysart admits the slasher’s dominance in the “mid-1980s,” when “the horror genre was slasher,” is likely over. But he also believes some part of the sub-genre is still kicking, evidenced by this year’s “Terrifer 3” and “In A Violent Nature.”

“Every year, there’s going to be two or three movies that are dedicated to the slasher genre and aesthetic and that succeed to varying degrees, both artistically and financially,” He told CNN. “Nothing ever goes away.”

If you ask Searles, she believes the classic slasher as seen in its golden age will be hard to revive.

“Filmmakers now overthink it… It’s like it’s trying so hard to say something (but) then you get annoyed that it’s trying so hard to say something, and not trying hard enough to make it look good and want to be rewatchable,” Searles said, adding that more recent movies like “X” and “Barbarian” are not ones she is keen to rewatch.

Alex Svensson, a media scholar who teaches at Emerson College, wrote an essay for Horror Homeroom entitled “Is The Slasher Alive or Dead?: Conflicted Genre Discourse and the Continued Return of Michael Myers.” In it, he posits that many were anticipating for the slasher to “return” after the 2018 incarnation of “Halloween.”

But slashers as a whole, Svensson said, are much more complex and cyclical than that.

“There is a rather easy and perhaps obvious argument to be made that – of course – the slasher never went anywhere, “Svensson wrote. “It is an ever -persistent and long-popular subgenre, even in years when other onscreen horrors (from torture traps and paranormal activities to teenage witches and satanic rituals) have seemed more immediately to capture public and critical imaginations.”

By the time director Wes Craven’s “Scream” was on the scene in 1996, the slasher genre as it was in its heyday “is kind of (already) dead,” Dysart said, with “Scream” serving as a popular entry in what Dysart calls the “horror deconstruction” phase.

The “deconstruction” phase is typified by “Scream”’s tongue-in-cheek awareness of its own genre – which largely signified audiences’ weariness of cookie-cutter slashers. The film attempts to play by the “rules” of a horror or slasher movie, including a side character’s advice to “never have sex … never drink or do drugs” and “never (ever, under any circumstances) say ‘I’ll be right back” in the event a serial killer happens to be prowling around your small town. In a memorably recursive moment, the character of Casey Becker (played by Drew Barrymore) is quizzed on horror movie trivia by the killer via landline.

What sets the iconic slashers apart from their peers is often each film’s unique overall message – some being more novel while others like Craven’s “Scream” and “New Nightmare” allude to their place in the larger canon.

“To me, to make a slasher that has value … You’re going to need to express the violence in a way that says something,” Dysart explains. “There’s something in the horror genre and ergo the slasher that is a struggle against the way of the universe.”

As thousands don their Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees masks this Halloween, perhaps they’ll mourn the classic slasher’s once dominant yet alive as ever status in the horror genre… while also steering clear of any chainsaws.

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