The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

directed by Tobe Hooper

Brad Efford

You can lose your mind driving through Texas. The highway goes nowhere. The brush has nothing to say. The steppes swell up from the soft jelly the heat makes of the horizon and though they exist, you can see them, they’re right there, still they stay somehow frozen forever in the numbing middle distance. No birdsong. No squirrel, no cougar, no mule deer—where would they survive? How? Driving through Texas is like standing still in the emptiest place on earth. You can lose your mind doing that, you do it for long enough.

Years ago now we drove from Austin to Marfa in a 1997 Subaru Legacy wagon on what would turn out to be the beginning of the end of its last legs. We were going to Marfa for the same reason most Millennials make the trek: we’d heard it was “interesting.” Maybe even “cool.” Some perfumed combination of vibrant and rimmed in cobwebs, a ghost town full of artists, a living gallery in the middle of the dead and dying desert. I’m making it sound more romantic than it is. We stayed in a boat someone had propped up on permanent blocks at the inside entrance of a trailer park, just enough room in the hull for a mattress, two people, and a bathroom we were asked to be careful with. We were 27 years old and not yet married.

I haven’t mentioned the sounds of west Texas because I don’t know how best to confront the memory of them. Hours into the drive and we had made it past civilization for the most part. Every gas station by then was half busted; we had stopped passing other cars altogether. Where had everyone gone? And us? Where were we going? A peculiar pair of sounds kept happening—I can’t think of a better way to describe it: the sounds were happening to us, like a blanket tossed lightly over a deeply sleeping lover.

The first sound was heavy and rolling, a pinball returning to its starting point, ready to be spit back into action. The second I knew immediately, and even out of context it ran me cold. It was the high, clean sound of sharpening metal used so frequently, so ruthlessly, in Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Even then, I had seen Texas Chain Saw more times than it feels should be healthy or lawful. It’s a nasty, spiteful movie—but funny, of course, in its nasty spite. There’s a final girl, but no one gets out alive, not really. My mother first showed it to me when I was seventeen. It’s one of her favorite movies, I think, along with The Matrix and Cronenberg’s Fly and Jesus Christ Superstar and Tommy. Like most kids who want only to tear a path of solitude through their own erratic sense of taste, I’ve since spent so much of my adulthood learning just how large her influence looms over my life. And that’s one of the joys of getting older, watching the way everything you’ve resisted for so long, and so loudly, comes back as all your favorite sights and sounds of home. Even this; even the chainsaw and the hammer.

But that’s a little disingenuous—the first time I saw Texas Chain Saw I knew my mom had given me a gift. I was in love from the opening camera flash, the sound of that whining Texas pumpjack. I found it all so thrillingly bleak, so stuffy and claustrophobic right from the start. It’s a movie with no remorse for its audience and no interest in making money or making art. Every shot is brimming with the simple joy of making movies.

Ten years and who knows how many stunned viewings later, I was burning my Legacy through empty west Texas. There was nothing. Even a birthmarked hitchhiker would have provided some desperate relief. The pumpjacks were everywhere, at one point doubling at a frightening frequency, and their two-shot aluminum bird sound was stifling. I feel compelled to do my best to mimic it, as a way to possess what haunts me maybe:

thump-whumwhumwhum-rrrrRRRREEEEeee

Before going out to Marfa, I never realized what Hooper had done in mining the desolate Texas oil pumpjacks of their animal voices and dropping them into a hellscape; I figured the sound was pure invention. I’m not originally from Texas, in case it isn’t obvious. Tobe Hooper was, of course, and so was most of the Chain Saw cast. They filmed it outside of Round Rock, in September. It was 110 degrees, of course, for most of the shoot—doesn’t dip below scorching in Texas until you’re ankle deep into October. In 1973 it must have felt then like it felt years ago, like it feels even now: if hell is a fiery void of desolation, then the Lone Star State is the closest we’ve got in this country.

The worst fear we had in going that far out that weekend years ago was getting stuck. Our car was unpredictable, rattling bucket that it was, nearing 300,000 miles, and we were in a very bad place for unpredictability. So when we took the long forsaken stretch from the city proper out to Prada Marfa—an infamous sculpture in the middle of the middle of nowhere that looks like a locked but fully stocked high-end Prada storefront—how were we supposed to know the gas gauge would hold steady for miles then drop to less than a quarter full in a quarter of a heartbeat? We were near enough to Prada to make it there and marvel at the silliness of the thing, but needed to face what came next.

If we kept driving, there was a town on the map that, well, was on the map, which felt like it meant something. Going back the way we’d come, back to Marfa, was farther. We might not make it. We hadn’t seen another car the whole way there and cell service had gone kaputt hours ago. And the sun was going down. Oh well.

We took the tense drive forward, banking on a gas station that might not even exist. And lo and behold: it didn’t. The town on the map should have been erased from it—dead barely begins to describe the place. It might as well have been dust. There had been a station at some point it seems, maybe, but now we were out of options. The gas light had come on, but—oh well—we had an hour drive back to Marfa and we took it, neither of us daring to speak a word, worried that whispering a fate would whisper it into existence. We drove.

And we made it, of course. Everything seems much more frightening when you’re in the middle of it. I would be lying if I said Leatherface wasn’t on my mind that night, though, hounded by the squealing pumpjacks along the state highway and haunted by too many hours of my life spent poring over a movie I never should have seen, living in a state I never should have lived in. Marfa was all right; it was interesting and cool. A year later we got married, and six months after that we moved to California. It’s beautiful here, crisp enough for a sweatshirt, and full to bursting.

Brad Efford is the founding editor of wig-wag and co-host of the podcast Film Fest. He lives in Berkeley, California.