Review: Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre on Dark Sky Films 4K Ultra HD

Five decades haven’t blunted the cutting edge of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Not even the onslaught of sequels (the first of which, also under Hooper’s direction, is actually kind of brilliant), rip-offs (Juan Piquer Simón’s batshit Pieces being one of the looniest), and a couple of pitiful stabs at a remake could manage such a seemingly impossible task. The film has achieved the perfect storm necessary for enduring notoriety: It’s a masterwork that flawlessly mirrors the time and place of its origin, while at the same time remaining one for the ages, thanks to its uncanny power of nearly subliminal suggestion, almost avant-garde editing and sound design, and its uncompromising vision of an American consumerist society run amok.

However, as the opening credits and early dialogue intimate, the fault may be in our stars as well as in ourselves: Images of massive solar flares and selections read from an astrological almanac indicate that time itself is out of joint. Certainly the fixed date that we’re supplied (August 13, 1973) suggests something portentous, even as the pre-credits crawl ponderously narrated by John Larroquette lends a false sense of veracity to events that are really nothing more than a brutal and blackly humorous riff on Hansel and Gretel.

Such a pseudoscientific worldview ultimately may prove a red herring. Nevertheless, it continues to crop up in the primitivism exhibited by the hitchhiker (Edwin Neal) who’d rather ritualistically incinerate an unwanted Polaroid than leave it behind as “evidence,” and who proceeds to mark the kids’ van with some sort of inscrutably bloody sigil. Likewise, we can discern an almost totemistic attitude in the “artworks” and furniture that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s cannibal family constructs out of their victims’ remains.

Circularity and repetition are important structural components throughout. The fierce red sun that dominates the opening credits is visually matched late in the film by repeated close-ups of red-veined eyeballs. At the level of the plotline, Sally (Marilyn Burns) circles back to the Last Chance gas station where she beseeches the Old Man (Jim Siedow) for help, only to have him turn out to be one of the cannibal clan. Later, she runs circles around their rural farmhouse. And The Texas Chain Saw Massacre isn’t afraid to reduce its repetitiveness to absurdity either, as when Sally twice jumps through a window in an effort to elude Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen).

Something else that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre pioneered is a light touch when it comes to sounding the depths of a horror film’s subtext. Most of the thematically important dialogue comes across like throwaway lines, including the riotous “My family’s always been in meat.” Or else key themes are rendered purely visually: Witness the mummified corpse of Granma that provides the only female relation among the otherwise phallocentric cannibal clan, how the camera slowly pans across the hellish red barbeque cooker while a radio divulges tales of recent grave robbery, or the way Leatherface dolls up in garish “Baby Jane” makeup for the climactic family meal. And then there’s the one indelible image that somehow encapsulates the clan’s entire wonky and perverted milieu: a chicken cooped up in a birdcage.

Image/Sound

Dark Sky Films’s new 4K UHD transfer of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre definitely constitutes an improvement over their 2014 restoration, albeit not an absolutely overwhelming one. The image is still suitably grungy, given its 16mm origins. But colors, particularly primary hues, get a considerable boost in saturation. Fine details are further enhanced for the most part, though in certain scenes some of the deep blacks and blown whites sometimes obscure minor details. The UHD disc offers no fewer than four sound mixes, but your best bet remains the Dolby Atmos 7.1 surround track. It’s a suitably terrifying and immersive experience, especially for the way that it punches up Tobe Hooper and Wayne Bell’s experimental sound design.

Extras

Aside from the four commentary tracks accompanying the film, the bulk of the bonus features on this two-disc set appear on a second HD Blu-ray disc. New to this edition are two substantial extras. The first, The Legacy of the Chain Saw Massacre, is a feature-length documentary featuring a wide array of talking heads discussing their first exposure to the film, its characters, themes, and setting, and its myriad contributions to subsequent horror cinema. Participants include critics Heather Wixson and Amanda Reyes, remake director Marcus Nispel, Leatherface directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, and horror maven Mick Garris.

The second, “Friedkin/Hooper,” is an hour-long conversation filmed back in 2014 at a Cinefamily screening in West Hollywood commemorating the 40th anniversary of the film’s release. William Friedkin is boisterous, pithy, and amusingly profane in his assessments, while Hooper is quieter, more introspective, but no less incisive in his responses. Along the way, Friedkin teases out some interesting inspirations for Hooper that include Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World, Lou Reed’s classic album Berlin, and John Frankenheimer’s brilliant and still-underrated Seconds. All told, it’s a warm, witty, and compelling conversation. Also included in the case is a sizeable two-sided, foldout poster.

Elsewhere, Dark Sky carries over the extras from their 40th anniversary Blu-ray, and, cumulatively, they allow for every conceivable aspect of the film’s conception, production history, release and reception, as well as the franchise’s legacy (from Hooper’s first feature, Eggshells, to the Platinum Dunes remake and beyond) to be covered in exhaustive detail. Perhaps expectantly, there’s some anecdotal overlap and repetition to be found across several generations of home video extras. Nevertheless, this is a truly exceptional assemblage of materials old and new. Most poignant of all is the in memoriam segment of the Flesh Wounds documentary, when you realize that—in addition to offering tributes to actors Paul Partain and Jim Siedow and production designer Robert A. Burns—it needs to include Marilyn Burns, who passed away in early 2014, and Tobe Hooper, who died in 2017, in order to be up to date now.

Overall

Accept no substitutes: Tobe Hooper’s original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre still cuts the competition to the bone. Dark Sky Films’s new 4K UHD package adds a dynamic visual upgrade and a couple of great new extras to their already phenomenal 2014 40th Anniversary edition.