It scared me, yes, not because of a clever, supernatural conceit, but because it tapped into something monstrously authentic. It was that rare feeling of deep-rooted recognition that my mind had just experienced something that it would never forget. When all was said and done, I sat in stunned silence. Without knowing anything about it, I felt as though I knew everything about it and my fear to face the thing greatly informed my viewing that fateful Saturday afternoon. This was a vision of terror unlike anything else, a film that made the viewer feel as dirty as the filthy, bone-based decor which adorned every room in the godforsaken manor that the latter half of the film is concerned with. This was iconic horror of the Grindhouse sort, predating Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger, deriving from a time of hyper-realism and documentary-style guerrilla filmmaking.
Its reputation had preceded it, of course. Its hard, sweaty realness swept over me, aligning my senses to the sights, sounds, and implied smells of the impossibly distant world the film’s teenagers had found themselves in along with the inconceivable cost of admission.
#PAM THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE MOVIE#
A movie that begins in flickering, splotchy brightness, so raw and so red that it’s difficult to tell what’s more disturbing: the unsettling Rorschach-test-like visuals or the dark chaos of the disparate soundscape. It’s a film that deals in the sun just as much as it does the lack thereof. In some ways, I think I believed that the bright, midday setting would perhaps shield me from some of the film’s impact. The sun shone in through an adjacent window as I placed the disc in the tray and sat down uneasily. I was going to watch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). I don’t know why it had to be then but it just felt right. I felt something in the pit of my stomach. But I hadn’t watched it yet, hadn’t even opened the DVD. I had acquired this particular title fairly early on. After a moment, I came upon a shiny, black case marked with sharp silver letters.
I perused my burgeoning collection, taking in box art and weighing my mood against the tone of what the images presented. I had been delving into the horror genre and had accumulated quite a few titles that I had still yet to see so this posed the perfect opportunity. As was customary for me at the time, I decided to watch a movie. One afternoon in college, I found myself alone on a lazy Saturday with nothing at all to do.
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