People love to ask me what movie, if any, I’m afraid to watch, and while no movie really fits into that category (though I really don’t like watching movies like The Haunting (1963) when I’m all alone on a dark October night -- or any other haunted house movie), there is one movie that comes awfully close and that is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I’m not really afraid to watch this movie and like most horror movies I don’t find it all that scary anymore, but I really don’t like to watch it and won’t watch it unless someone else who has never seen it before wants to, which is the position I fought myself in last weekend with my friend Shawn. He had never seen the movie before and really wanted to see it, so I brought it to his house and popped it in. Within fifteen minutes he told me this was one sick and twisted movie. I agree, which is why I both love and hate this movie (not hate in a way most people hate a movie, but hate because it can too easily be plugged into real life, and while this movie might not really be based on a story that played out this way, stories like this do happen). The movie is just too real.
A big part of this realism is the fact that they don’t really glorify the kill scenes. Instead they just happen. One moment a kid is walking toward an open doorway, the next he has tripped and a hammer is cracking open his skull. Nothing to it. No dramatic music, no overly grotesque splatter of tomato soup looking blood, just the sound of a hammer hitting and crushing through skull and then the spasm of legs as brain signals get crossed. And then the scene with the girl being lifted onto the slaughter hook; again there really isn’t much build up for this, Leatherface just grabs her and hooks her up and then proceeds to butcher the body of the boy with the chainsaw. Afterward one just kind of stares at the TV screen and is like “Wow, did that really just happen?” You almost don’t even process it right away, sort of like witnessing a person hit by a car on the street, or cut down by machine gun fire in a firefight. You don’t react right away because it seems so out of place. Now, of course, with this movie one should be expecting stuff like this, but one doesn’t, because like I said earlier, the kills don’t really happen the way they normally do in a horror movie. They just happen.
This is why I love this movie, but don’t really ever watch it. It just too easily gets under my skin. Don’t get me wrong, I love it when a movie or book does this, and even try to do this with my own fiction, but then often won’t return unless absolutely necessary. I also love it that this movie is considered one of the bloodiest movies of all time when there isn’t even really any blood in it, which again just goes to show what this film does to your mind. It also reminds me of something an editor once wrote when asking for a story for his magazine. He told me not to get into too much detail when describing a kill scene in my fiction, because as soon as you put some sort of description down, a persons can object to it and dismiss it. However, if you leave it up to them to picture it, one can’t deny what their mind shows them, and often that will be more realistic and disturbing than anything one sees on screen or in print, and won’t go away.
On a more interesting note, this movie was the best Valentines Day gift any girlfriend has ever given to me (talk about understanding your boyfriend and knowing what they like). Even better, after going out to dinner we came home and watched it, and, like I said earlier, were completely disturbed by what we saw.
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