![]() KATE: How did you think of the idea of using a chain saw in the first place? But we were able to find it-or replace it. There was a time we lost Sally’s top in the laundry or something. HOOPER: Probably two or three sets of costumes. KATE Mulleavy: One chain saw for the making of Texas Chain Saw Massacre! What about costumes? How many sets of those did you have? We really did only have one saw, so it would take hours to pull the clutch out and put it back. And when we needed to cut into something, we’d put the clutch back in. That way the chain would still vibrate around. Halfway through, I said, “Excuse me, someone may get hurt.” After Gunnar fell and had the presence of mind to throw the saw away from him, we decided we had to do something. LAURA: So it was a fully operational chain saw? But the real way we want to start this interview is to ask if the chain saw was real? There are so many nuances and layers to the storytelling. It’s one of the most beautiful films ever made. I have always looked at it as an art film. Strangely enough, even before we knew we’d be interviewing you, I rewatched the behind-the-scenes documentaries about the making of the film. LAURA MULLEAVY: We’re so excited to talk to you today because we’re such fans of Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I didn’t ask them what they ate for lunch. The Mulleavy sisters are horror-film aficionados who have used dark cinema as inspiration in their designs. to discuss the making of his masterpiece. He lives in Los Angeles, and before a trip to Cannes to screen the restoration at the Directors’ Fortnight, he met up with designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte at a restaurant in downtown L.A. Hooper, an Austin-born filmmaker who was 30 years old when he shot this film, has gone on to make a dozen pictures (including directing 1982’s Poltergeist and 1986’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2). There is total identification and no mercy there is no chance of comprehension and only the desperate instinct of self-defense. Hooper’s camera stays on Marilyn, running alongside her, and the dread is as alive in that moment as it is in the shower scene of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). This narrative setup has since become a convention for slasher films (along with the faceless killer), but what makes The Texas Chain Saw Massacre a true work of art is its hallucinatory visuals, its brilliant camerawork and unexpected angles, its dazzling use of daylight and darkness, its heightened, straining sound effects, its pathological interest in the human body, and co-writer, director, and producer Tobe Hooper’s masterful ability to cast a spell of fear and tension around the actors until it leaks out into the audience like a fog of insanity-even shutting your eyes won’t drive it away.Įvery TCM fanatic has a favorite scene: Mine happens to be the extended chase scene between Leatherface and Sally (played by the lithe, blond-haired sensational screamer Marilyn Burns), right after he cuts through Sally’s wheelchair-bound brother, and she hurries through trees and brambles and toward the subsequent death trap of the cannibal house. The family’s youngest member, Leatherface (played by Gunnar Hansen), has a penchant for waving a chain saw and using a meat hook to suspend his living prey. The plot of the film is gorgeously simple: five youths in a van visit a remote house in central Texas that belonged to the grandfather of the lead protagonist, Sally Hardesty, and quickly become victims-and possibly food-for a family of cannibals that resides next door. It’s a fitting testament to a film that has not only proven one of the most horrifying and mesmerizing pieces of cinema ever to come out of America, but has inspired countless directors and filmmakers in the past four decades, and has lived on both in the nightmares of its millions of viewers and in the archives of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Which movies stand the test of time or even exist in the collective conscious beyond their brief theatrical runs? This summer The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is celebrating its 40th anniversary with a painstaking renovation and color correction of all 120,960 frames on 16mm film stock that rolled through the camera on the hot July set in Round Rock, Texas, in 1973. But the questions of survival could be asked about all films. “Who will survive and what will be left of them?” This was a tagline of the 1974 movie campaign for a super-low-budget, indie-before-there-were-indies horror flick called The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
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