But The Texas Chainsaw Massacre grounds viewers in a body horror that's closer to home - and far more disturbing for it. Over-the-top torture porn certainly makes one squeamish. Much like the happy accident that forced Steven Spielberg to barely show the titular shark in Jaws, 1974's Texas Chainsaw Massacre's PG-restrictiveness inadvertently revealed how less can be so much more when it comes to body horror. I don't know if we'll ever get another horror movie where you can so viscerally smell the blood, sweat, and decay wafting off the silver screen. Every subsequent reboot, like the 2003 series (and, in all likelihood, the upcoming 2022 remake) equally fails to capture the original's iconically understated grisliness. But that only resulted in movies with 100% more camp and about 15% of its predecessor's masterfully immersive rancidness. In fact, director Tobe Hooper purposefully shot his first feature film with a PG rating in mind, only for an obviously shook MPAA to slap him with its most explicit label available at the time (later replaced by today's NC-17).Īfter the first film's unmitigated success, Hooper got a free license to amp up the bloodiness as many notches as he wanted in the sequels. Yet despite featuring literal cannibals hungry for innocent teen flesh, the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre was surprisingly devoid of any truly graphic gore. Receiving an X rating in America, it was flat-out banned from several countries, including the UK. Welcome to Thanks, I Love It, our series highlighting something onscreen we're obsessed with this week.Īt the risk of pissing off every gore-loving Saw franchise fanatic or Human Centipede devotee (if you sick freaks even exist), we need to state an undeniable truth: After all these decades, the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre still reigns supreme as the ultimate masterclass in gross body horror.īack in 1974, the beloved slasher was unlike anything audiences had ever seen before.
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