The “fantastic” horror movie that left Stephen King scarred for life: “It just looks fucking real”
Stephen King has long reigned as a master of the horror genre, but that doesn’t mean that he has rapidly consumed every fear-fuelled, stomach-curdling piece of art. In fact, it took him almost a decade to watch one of the most iconic scary movies ever made.
King’s luck changed in the 1970s when his first novel, Carrie, was successfully adapted for the screen by Brian De Palma, the image of Sissy Spacek covered in blood as she accepted the title of Prom Queen remaining indelible. It became a defining movie of this new era of mainstream horror, grittier and more boundary-pushing than ever before.
Within a few years, King’s other novel, The Shining, had been made into a feature film by Stanley Kubrick. With several major horror movies coming from King’s brain, it seemed like he had a monopoly on this period of filmmaking for the genre. Alongside Carrie and The Shining, the era also saw titles like Alien, Halloween, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre emerge as some of the biggest hitters, but King didn’t see the latter until much later on.
It’s baffling that it would take him eight years to see the decade-defining horror movie, but I guess King was busy writing. So, in the early 1980s, when the slasher genre was officially in full swing, the writer finally got around to watching Tobe Hooper’s terrifying tale of a chainsaw-wielding masked killer and his strange family of cannibals.
“I should say that I never saw Texas Chain Saw Massacre when it came out,” he told Variety. “I saw it in 1982 in Colorado. I was a young father and I was writing to stay ahead of the bill collectors. I was in the theatre almost by myself. That’s when a movie really has a tendency to work on you, to get its cold little fingers under your skin”.
Watching something like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in an empty theatre, with the image of Leatherface in his apron opening up the door to his bone-covered house, unavoidable and inescapable, was clearly an unforgettable experience. You’d certainly find yourself looking over your shoulder, unable to relax into your seat.
“It had that kind of washed-out ’70s look, for want of the better term,” he continued. “You could tell that this print had been around for a while, and it’s better for it, because it just looks fucking real. It works because there’s no artifice about it, there’s no buildup, there’s no character nuance. I mean, there are scenes in the graveyard … they’re not extras, they’re not Hollywood people at all. They look like they came from the nearest little Texas town. It’s fantastic”.
Hooper’s film, which was shot on a minuscule budget of around $140,000, has a grubby look to it that really enhances the believability of the story – it’s hard to believe that we’re not watching some snuff film that has been unearthed after everyone involved has ended up in prison.
You can smell the rotting flesh, the heat burning through the celluloid, gritty and unpolished. It changed the horror genre forever, but King was clearly a little late to the game. Still, he got round to it eventually, soon realising what a monumental piece of cinema it really is.
