*The Texas Chain Saw Massacre* is often remembered as a film about a man with a chainsaw. Oddly, the chainsaw may be one of the least interesting things about it. What still makes Tobe Hooper’s film so horrible is the sense that its victims have accidentally wandered into somebody else’s perfectly functioning system. The first hammer killing is astonishingly abrupt. There is no theatrical wind-up, no villain enjoying his entrance. A young man walks down a corridor, Leatherface appears, and suddenly he is meat. The family used to work in slaughterhouses and, in practical terms, they have simply carried on with the family business. That is also where the film begins looking suspiciously like folk horror. The Texas landscape is not decorative. The heat, empty roads, scrub and choking vegetation progressively close around the outsiders. Even escape becomes circular: Sally fights through brambles, reaches what ought to be civilisation and discovers that the garage is simply another part of the same world. The family’s house then supplies the belief system. Bones are not discarded but arranged. Human remains become furniture, ornaments and strange feathered constructions whose precise purpose is never explained. They clearly mean something to the people living there, which is considerably worse. And then there is Leatherface himself. Gunnar Hansen somehow gives considerable pathos to a man wearing somebody else’s face. After the intruders start appearing, Leatherface sits with his head in his hands like a blood-spattered Rodin’s *Thinker*, apparently wondering why the working day has gone so badly wrong. He is monstrous, certainly, but also frightened, subordinate and trapped inside the family hierarchy. That makes him stranger than a straightforward killer. The dinner sequence finally turns slaughter into ceremony, with the barely living grandfather handed the hammer because he was once the family’s finest practitioner. Tradition has become ritual, and ritual has become grotesque entertainment. This is not an enjoyable film in any sensible meaning of the word. It is abrasive, nasty and exhausting. More than fifty years later, though, it remains alarmingly immediate. *The Texas Chain Saw Massacre* does not feel like a legend being retold. It feels like somebody found the place, pointed a camera at it and was extremely lucky to get the film back. --- Reviewed by FolknHell, the folk horror film podcast · folknhell com Hear the full FolknHell podcast discussion of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: folknhell com/the-texas-chain-saw-massacre-review along with our other reviews, transcripts and episodes.