The complicated history of ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s’ UK censorship
There was only ever going to be controversy when Tobe Hooper’s film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was released in 1974, at a time when slashers were still a fairly new subgenre in the horror realm, and with its relentless torture and grimy imagery, people were understandably horrified by it.
Immersed in a world of pure violence, we join a group of teenagers as they embark on a road trip through Texas, but soon they become aware of a series of grave robberies that have been carried out in the area, with things getting scarier when they pick up a hitchhiker who turns out to be deranged, and he even cuts one of them with a razor, and we realise that things are only going to keep turning uglier.
Once they stop for gas, they find themselves near an abandoned house owned by Sally and Franklin’s family, but here, they discover a family of cannibals occupying the building, with every room covered in bones and decay. Each teen is plucked off one by one until just Sally remains, tied up and forced to sit at the dinner table with the apron-wearing Leatherface and his family, which includes the hitchhiker and a terrifyingly old man who looks half-dead, half-alive.
We see characters getting placed on meat hooks and chased by the chainsaw-wielding Leatherface, but compared to today’s standards, the gore really isn’t all that explicit, and rather, the movie basks in perpetual dread and relentless fear, with Sally often writhing around in discomfort and screaming as her captors watch on, or make Grandpa Sawyer suck on her finger.
Naturally, the British censors weren’t keen on the movie, which wasn’t exactly what you’d call a feel-good film. It was just pure sadism, which showed the utter depths of human depravity, as they claimed, and there was no way this was going to go through a straightforward classification process. The BBFC first looked at the film in February 1975, with secretary Stephen Murphy believing it to be unsuitable to even receive an X rating, citing the movie’s “abnormal psychology”, after which a slightly edited version was submitted, but it was still no good.
They refused the movie a certificate, seeing it as simply too traumatic, with their primary issue being the overall atmosphere of the film rather than specific examples of gory violence that could simply be cut out to resolve the issue, but since the BBFC has no legal authority and local councils can choose to screen or ban whatever they like in the United Kingdom, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre actually received approval from the Greater London Council, which gave it an X rating and allowed Londoners to watch it. Still, it remained unclassified by the BBFC, even when a new secretary came and reviewed it, still deeming it too much for audiences to stomach.
Once it hit the home video market in the 1980s, however, it ended up on the infamous video nasty list, but once the Video Recording Act 1984 was established to grant home videos BBFC ratings, it was banned, with Hooper’s movie evidently hard to get hold of in the United Kingdom for years, and it seemed like it was never going to become widely available, despite its legendary status as an era-defining and incredibly influential movie.
Things changed, though, when the local Camden Council decided to screen the film with an 18 rating in the late 1990s. Cinema, particularly horror, had progressed significantly since The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was released over two decades prior, so the BBFC decided to reassess the film, and they realised that perhaps they’d been a little too rigid with their previous decisions, and the movie was finally released in the UK as an 18.
So, now it’s easy to find copies of the movie online or on home video, but for many years, the film was shrouded in moral panic, seen as a piece of cinema that could corrupt or traumatise, and maybe it does have the power to do that, but it’s a masterpiece nonetheless.
