I’ve been pretty open and honest on here about my fraught relationship with horror as a genre.
During my prime adolescent years, when you’re supposed to be building a solid foundation, I was either not allowed or too scared to be seeing any horror movies. So my adulthood has been mostly spent playing catch-up. Trying to see the most well-known landmarks, acclimatizing myself to Halloween events, making more of an effort to desensitize myself.
Part of the reason is just because it’s always felt like a huge pop cultural blind spot. It’s a drag thinking that there’s an entire genre shut off from me on account of I’m so scared. Also since moving to Los Angeles, where the locals go hard into horror stuff for months every year — it’s the closest we get to having seasons here, I guess — it seems like I’ll never have a chance of belonging here unless I get caught up.
More than any of that, though, I just want to be a horror fan. When it hits with me, it hits hard, and several of my all-time favorite movies are either straight-up horror or hybrids. And even among the ones that don’t aspire to be much more than fun, there have been more hits than misses.
Watching the two Psycho sequels back to back over the past couple of days reminded me that there have been tons of movies over the years that I either dismissed entirely, or mentally filed into the “I’ll get around to it someday” category. They were both such a pleasant surprise that I realized I should probably go back and reassess more of the movies that had inescapable pop cultural impact, but which I’d immediately written off as being either too scary, or not worth my time.
It also reminded me of the first time I watched the original Psycho, which was probably in my late teens or early 20s. It was already so well-known by that point that I’d seen countless references to it, I knew roughly why it was considered significant, and of course, I had heard all about the shower scene. When I did actually watch it, my heart was racing in anticipation of it… and then it just kind of happened. I’d waited too long, so I was never going to be able to get the full effect. (The same thing happened with Alien).
That also meant that a later murder scene in that movie took me completely by surprise, and it’s still the most viscerally memorable part of that movie for me. I now wonder whether that scene has been referenced so often as “the part that most people don’t remember about Psycho” that it doesn’t have any surprised for people younger than me. It’s a movie that feels like its bones have picked clean by pop culture. Future video essayists will have to fight over the gristle, doing deep dives into the rich symbolism of Sam Loomis’s suits.
Another movie that’s always had an aura around it, and an oversized presence in pop culture my entire life: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
When I was little, it was the ultimate in forbidden terrors. A film so full of filth and depravity that just knowing about it would mark a stain onto your soul. As a sensitive kid who’d been terrified by episodes of Fantasy Island, I thought it had to be the most horrible thing. It’s right there in the title: they’re murdering a lot of people! With a chain saw!
In Texas!
It’s kind of funny to think that even as an extremely impressionable kid, who was a prime target for hype and propaganda, I still had some limits. The even more forbidden movies were the Faces of Death series, which kids would dare each other to watch. Occasionally reporting back in hushed tones about how they’d been forever changed, more often saying “eh, it’s probably fake.” I do have to wonder how many of them grew up to become Facebook content moderators. In any case, there was never any aura of attraction around those for me, because I could never even imagine what was the point.
But I still imagined that at some point, I’d be an adult who was finally able to accept the challenge and watch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
By the time I went to college, the movie was already being rehabilitated into an art film. In a film class I took as a freshman, the teaching assistant showed us the opening crawl and first scene of the movie before the credits. Ostensibly, it was to encourage new film students to look for influences outside of the narrow set of accepted classics, and to appreciate how artful composition and cinematography could be found in otherwise unexpected places. The more I think about that class, though, I think it was just a guy in his early 20s wanting to screw around with a bunch of freshmen. He’s the one who also dropped Un Chien Andalou on us one morning without any preparation for what we were going to be seeing.
In the years since, that conception of the movie has solidified, with the consensus being “everything you’ve heard about this movie is wrong!” and that it’s a horror classic. It’s frequently mentioned as one of the most influential horror movies, and images and individual shots are praised for their cinematography and called iconic. I’ve seen the shots of Leatherface swinging his chainsaw around futilely while the sun sets behind him, tons of times. And I’ve gotten into the Dead Meat podcasts recently, and every one opens with the shot from the back of the pickup at the end.
So last night I thought, I’m finally that adult I was imagining, I’ve done a good job of desensitizing myself to horror movies, and the consensus seems to be that this was never the gore-filled splatter movie it had been made out to be, so tonight would be the perfect time to finally take on the challenge. I would watch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
I got around 20 minutes into it before I said, “Nah, I don’t need to watch this.” Instead, I watched the Kill Count video that I’d been avoiding so as not to spoil it, and then went back to the movie and just watched some of the key scenes in context (including the ending).
It actually left me feeling deflated, and wishing that I hadn’t watched it. Not because it was too disturbing, and not because it was too tame, but because it was just unpleasant. It does immediately evoke the feeling of being in the south in August in the 1970s. As someone who was there, I can tell you that’s not a good thing.
And since I was involved in some community theater productions around the time, I’m also familiar with the feeling of being suffocatingly hot and sweaty while surrounded by other amateur actors, delivering lines with varying degrees of inert lifelessness, or committing to weird choices that are just off-putting instead of interesting. All those years, I’d been imagining that the most disturbing stuff would be all the murders and cannibalism, but it was actually just the part that I’d been living through.
Intellectually, I get that the lack of polish is part of the appeal, making it more “raw” or whatever. But for me, it simultaneously felt too artificial to have any sense of realism, but too real to feel like grindhouse. I had the you are actually there! sensation of being dragged around on a low-budget movie production with filmmakers who were more interested in talking about slaughterhouses than in any kind of character development.
So it’s not for me, and I have to admit I already miss having that unopened door that’s been looming for so many years, making me wonder about what exactly was hidden behind it. The aura around the movie is so much more interesting than the reality of it, for me.
But it is at least a sign that I’m entering the “discernment” phase of my horror journey. I don’t need to see everything, because I probably won’t get much out of it, anyway. Whatever appeal there used to be in the challenge itself — the lure of a movie that is supposedly so extreme that it has an oversized aura in pop culture — is long gone. I’ve never seen any of the Saw, Hostel, or Terrifier movies, I don’t intend to, and I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. A younger version of me might’ve been eager to satisfy his curiosity, or just be able to declare that I’ve done it. Now, it just seems like it’d be a complete waste of time, since I don’t have anything to prove.
And it’s a reminder that I’m not really charmed by low-budget or unpolished filmmaking for its own sake. I’m such a big fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 that I started to assume I must be, but I’ve watched scenes from a couple of those movies without the jokes, and they’re just dreadful.
The idea that appreciating schlock is a core prerequisite for appreciating horror is built in to the whole genre, for a ton of reasons. The most interesting one to me is how much of the appeal of a horror movie is in having a visceral reaction, bypassing the intellectual and making you really feel something. A lot of fans are so bored with the mainstream that they gravitate to B-movies and very low budget productions simply because they feel less slick and more “honest.”
But a key part of that is getting the sense that the filmmakers are being earnest. Ultimately, that’s what immediately turned me off of this movie; it didn’t feel like the filmmakers were earnestly trying to do any kind of storytelling apart from getting the characters into a murder house for the most shocking kill scenes they could think of. For all I could tell, that’s either the entire point, or it’s missing the point completely, like complaining that the characters in pornography don’t have sufficient motivation.
I think I’ve been harboring this idea that I need to learn to appreciate schlock, as an essential part of rejecting snobbery and expanding my taste outside the mainstream. And to avoid being one of the squares who reacted with complete revulsion to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre by clutching their pearls and claiming that there was nothing but depravity contained within, that its mere existence was deeply offensive.
So I guess I can at least appreciate finally being able to say that there’s nothing contained within for me. Some of the shots are genuinely iconic; I just wish they felt like jewels in an under-appreciated horror-for-the-sake-of-horror classic, instead of just happy accidents from filmmakers inventing torture porn.
If nothing else, I’m finally ready to tackle other movies whose reputation scared the shit out of me when I was younger, like Phantasm. Wish me luck!
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