by Thomas Marinelli ’26 on October 30, 2025
A&E - Film & TV
I’ve seen many, many horror movies in my time. A lot of them have become what I call “Hollywoodified,” pretty stupid and not very scary. Others, however, truly live up to their reputation and are legitimately terrifying. Recently, in anticipation of Halloween (my favorite holiday), I watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), and I was not disappointed. This movie stands as a classic for a reason. Even for a film made in the 1970s, its gore, cinematography, and realism surpass most horror movies made today, despite having a tight budget. To make things worse (or better), it was loosely based on real-life murderer Ed Gein. For the sake of keeping things newspaper-friendly, I won’t go into detail about his crimes. Nevertheless, Gein, who gained infamy in 1950s Wisconsin, had a ripple effect on the horror movie industry. The new season of Monster (2022) on Netflix explores his story. The show, best known for its first season about Jeffrey Dahmer, dives into how Gein inspired iconic horror villains like Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs, 1991), Norman Bates (Psycho, 1960), and Leatherface (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Out of these three movies, all excellent in their own way, only The Texas Chainsaw Massacre truly scared me, and that’s the reason why everyone should watch it this Halloween.
Like many horror films, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was shot on a very low budget. It was supposed to be a two-week shoot under the brutal Texas sun, but ended up lasting 33 days, with filming often running up to 16 hours a day. Needless to say, the cast wasn’t having much fun, yet their exhaustion and discomfort only added to the movie’s unsettling atmosphere. Set in rural Texas, the story follows a group of teenagers on a road trip to visit family members, stumbling upon a deranged family of cannibals living on a decaying farm that used to be a slaughterhouse. Director and writer Tobe Hooper was inspired by several things: America’s growing disillusionment and distrust of authority after Watergate and the Vietnam War, as well as the dark fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, with the teenagers as the lost children and the cannibal family as the witch who traps them. However, perhaps the most iconic spark came when Hooper, stuck in a crowded department store during the Christmas rush, imagined using a chainsaw to “cut” his way through the crowd. It’s strange, sure, but that kind of mind makes for great horror.
What I love most about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is how beautiful it looks, even in its horror. Hooper makes the Texas sun come alive; the film always seems to take place during golden hour or late afternoon, where even the daylight feels haunted. The set design is both bizarre and perfect: an abandoned slaughterhouse surrounded by the eerie relics of a deranged family, with cameras constantly zooming in on unsettling details scattered throughout the house and landscape. Some might dismiss the film’s gore as outdated, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Even in the opening shot, the fake corpse looks disturbingly real, and the gritty, documentary-style camera work makes everything feel believable. The film leans more on psychological terror than pure slasher tropes; this isn’t Freddy Krueger killing for fun. Every act of violence in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre feels either obsessive or defensive—never random.
Leatherface, the main antagonist, is quite literally masked with a human face, representing both his hard exterior and his soft, frightened interior, a reflection of America itself at the time through Hooper’s eyes. Despite wielding a chainsaw, Leatherface is essentially a child, terrified of intruders and reacting in the worst possible way, through violence that both “feeds” and satisfies him. From beginning to end, the film is deeply disturbing and unpredictable; no one feels safe, and there’s no time to relax. The teenage characters might be the weakest part of the film—they’re not very relatable and can be annoying—but their fear feels genuine, and that authenticity carries the story. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the few movies that truly scared me. It made me feel unsettled in a way few films do, mainly because it is something that could actually exist. My friends didn’t find it as scary, but that’s because it’s not a jump scare movie; it’s a gruesome, realistic thriller meant to linger in your mind long after it ends.
So this Halloween, gather a group of friends, turn the volume up and the lights down, and tell everyone to shut up and just watch. There’s no way you’ll be disappointed.