Retrospective Film Review

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) • 49 Years Later — the real American horror story

Five friends head out to rural Texas to visit the grave of a grandfather, but stumble upon a family of cannibals.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a cosmic horror. Taking one step away from the comforts of society, and Sally (Marilyn Burns) and her friends find only terror and madness. A universe where humanity is a mere plaything for unknowable horrors. We never learn the family’s name, let alone their firsts, and the once-uttered ‘Leatherface” (Gunnar Hansen) could be a throwaway insult. Nor are they dead, they merely wait, and soon they shall wake; “a whole family of Draculas” feeding blood to their decrepit patriarch whose more Nosferatu than Bela Lugosi. There are monsters in the real world.

Titles fade over a blood-red sun as “the news programs detail an unusual number of natural disasters” as the screenplay phrases it. A mental hospital collapses for no reason, four children found with their “features carved away”, a month-old baby chained in the attic of a…