The Texas Chainsaw Manufactured

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre's original 1974 television spot started by saying, "What happened, was true." What followed was a close-up of a chainsaw violently coming to life, engulfed in smoke, followed by scenes from some of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history. The spot ends with, "Once you stop screaming, you'll start talking about it."

And so begins one of the great fabrications in the annals of American film history.

I've recently been reading Seth Godin's All Marketers Tell Stories, which discusses how products and services are marketed to the public. The book looks at the process and steps businesses and companies take to ensure their product is noticed among the thousands on the market. While the original title refers to marketers as liars, there is a strike through the "Are Liars" in the title, instead replaced with "Tell Stories." This is what people in their business do: create stories that target the individual's frames and worldviews, even if these stories are false, to resonate more profoundly with the consumer.

Which got me to thinking about certain instances in film where this theory was implemented and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre immediately buzzed to mind.

The film is about five youths, particularly Sally Hardesty, as they travel along the back roads of Texas on a hot, sweltering August day in search of her grandfather's old house and property. Let's just say the young adults get more than they bargained for when they stumble across paths with a family whose idea of having fun is playing with chainsaws, and whose ideal summer picnic features a spread of human flesh.

As already discussed, the film was passed off as true and inspired by actual events. But the key word is "inspired" and significantly - and creatively - much different than "based" on a true story.

Sally and her friends come to the backwoods of a middle-of-nowhere Texas town to investigate reports of vandalized grave sites to see if her grandfather's burial spot was desecrated. The town is barely on the map, where the only stop on the road is a small barbecue joint attached to a filling station - and that's the last stop for hundreds of miles. The locals tell the kids they're better off going back where they came from, as one gentlemen says that some people won't take to them poking around out here, and against better judgment, Sally and her friends continue on.

Along the way they pick up a hitchhiker standing in the middle of a field. The man is strange looking, and even though picking up a hitchhiker was a common occurrence in the 1970s, but even 40 years ago, anyone would pass this man by. But Sally and her friends bring him on board, where he tells them about his family and how the town was once prosperous from a bubbling slaughterhouse industry, only to have the slaughterhouse shut down. The man starts talking weird shit, even for a person of his appearance, and pulls out a knife, slitting a deep gash in his hand as blood flows everywhere. The kids boot the creepy bastard out of the van and speed away - last smart decision they'll make for the rest of the movie.

The gang reaches their destination, find the house in disrepair and notice strange markings on the walls and deranged pieces of art constructed out of animal bones. After a few unfortunate staples of horror films (car won't start, Sally's brother's confined to a wheelchair and gets stuck in thick brush, each member slowly begins to vanish), Sally gets chased through the woods by a masked lunatic wielding a chainsaw, comes upon a house even deeper into the woods and finds a familiar face waiting for - one of the cooks from the barbecue stand. The bad news is that the cook, the masked lunatic (whose name we learn is Leatherface) and the hitchhiker, are part of the same clan, and tonight they're having a dinner party - and Sally's on the menu!

The film feels extremely authentic and real. If it were filmed and released today, it would be lumped together with the "found footage" categories of horror films that are currently popular. The camera work makes the film feel as if the footage on screen is from some crazy person's home video library, and the saturated, grainy film stock adds a sense of realism.

The best element is the characters of the hitchhiker and Leatherface. The actors who portray these monsters feel as if they aren't acting, but actually live the life of these characters. The performances come off natural and lend authenticity to the film where the viewer thinks, "Yeah, these fuckers really are crazy." Especially Leatherface, who gets his name from a mask he wears of stitched pieces of human flesh. Gunnar Hanson played the character as if he suffered from some form of mental retardation, uttering sounds instead of words, banging his head with his hands and licking his lips. The physical appearance of Hanson, with his portly build and thick, hairy arms, lends nicely to a character that carves animals - and humans - for a living.

Again, this film was advertised as true, but that's far from the actual truth.

The inspiration for the film was from crimes that took place in Plainfield, Wisconsin in the 1950s. Ed Gein was a local resident who exhumed and robbed fresh graves in nearby cemeteries, taking keepsakes with him. Gein confessed to the murders of two women who were missing, and when police searched his home, they found unimaginable horrors. Collections of body parts, including noses, bones, skulls, human nipples, pairs of lips and masks crafted from human skin were scattered throughout Gein's house of horrors, among many other atrocities. Gein wasn't only the inspiration for Leatherface, but also for Norman Bates in Psycho and the novel The Silence of the Lambs.

But, sadly, speaking in horror movie terms, there was no massacre - and definitely no chainsaw.

Director Tobe Hooper thought of the chainsaw idea when shopping in a department store during the holidays. Hooper was stuck in those never-ending, slow-moving cash register lines when he noticed a display of chainsaws and thought how great it would be to carve and slash his way through all the people to the front of the line.

With the pieces in place, it is still unclear as to why the film was passed off as true. It has basis in reality, but why would the producers and production company vagrantly lie about the premise of the film?

Godin describes a similar process in his book as the difference between fibs and frauds. Godin classifies fibs as truth because they enhance a story and make them better. If a producer passes their offering off as something enjoyable, people won't mind if it's a lie or a fib. A fraud on the other hand, is only for personal gain and has no connection to a story and little to do with anything. Once people discover the fraud, people are outraged.

But what Hooper has done with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is create a cinematic fib, one that exaggerates the truth to create a truly terrifying, visceral experience.

Why did people believe The Texas Chainsaw Massacre really happened? There never where any news related articles about such horrifying crimes like the ones depicted in the film.

Horror writer Stephen King referred to the film in 1981 as, "a sort of pleasure that doesn't want to score political points but to scare the hell out of us by crossing certain taboo lines."

When people go see horror films they want to be scared shitless, and when they go see movies in general, they want to escape from the realities of everyday life because sometimes reality can be even more grim then the events in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And people weren't ready for a film that dealt with flesh consumption and being ripped to shreds by a chainsaw.

Hooper smartly employs an effective technique towards the beginning of the film. After the opening narration (the opening scroll deeming the story accurate) a radio recording is heard over the image of a grisly corpse mounted to a gravestone. The radio recording details a series of grave robbings, one the viewer is witnessing first-hand, putting the crime into some sort of realistic context.

The horrors witnessed by the characters and the viewer matched the worldview of many Americans during and after the Nixon presidency and in the concluding months of the Vietnam War in 1974. Film critic Robin Wood states, "presentations of violence appeared to claim direct cultural relevance for a generation of viewers that wanted their anxieties about the Vietnam War, civil rights riot, the breakdown of the nuclear family and traditional role models, and the uncertainties caused by the economic crisis, addressed in uncompromising terms."

It's funny the reaction audiences had following a screening of the film. Audiences were throwing up in the aisles and even fleeing from the theaters. And you think a film with "Chainsaw" and "Massacre" in the title would have excess amounts of blood and buckets of limbs, but that's not the case with this film. In fact, there's little amounts of blood on screen.

See? No blood. It's a scene that merely suggests the idea of violence without actually showing too much. Here's a another scene, not as suggestive, but one that had quite an effect on audiences' prior knowledge of how the human body reacts to trauma.

Sorry, sweetie, but he's not coming back. The body shaking as a result to severe trauma to the head was little known among ordinary people and was more than audiences could handle 40 years ago.

The late 60s and early 70s were difficult times for Americans, with a series of corrupt presidencies, an economic crisis and gas shortage, and the atrocities of the Vietnam War being telecast into every person's living room in vibrant, living color, audiences wanted a movie that validated and expressed their feelings of the times they lived in.

As Godin puts it, costumers want something, whether it's a product such as movie that appeals to their needs and wants - their biases - and they only notice things based on how the story is told.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a story about 1970s America and its inhabitants. What happened was true.