On the first day of October 1974, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a thrilling slasher flick posed as a documentary, roared across movie screens around the United States. On that day, and on the days following the movie’s initial release, it became undeniably clear how much the official movie poster, which pictured the film’s chainsaw-wielding, leather-masked murderer, had failed to prepare viewers for the year’s most terrifying movie.
The film, inspired by but only loosely based on real-life murderer and body snatcher Ed Gein’s story, was like nothing people had ever seen on screen. Prior to Massacre, horror movie villains were, for the most part, as fantastic as dragons and demons. They were vampires and werewolves, witches and warlocks, mummies, ghosts, goblins, space creatures, zombies, trolls, spiders, blobs, dinosaurs, and giant apes. Simply put, horror movie villains of the past were not human—at least, not until after the 1957 discovery of Gein’s victims, which inspired the creation of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho, the suspenseful, psychological thriller based on Robert Bloch’s novel of the same name and featuring the Gein-modeled character Norman Bates. While Psycho’s mentally disturbed, homicidal Bates was human, unlike former horror movie villains, he was scary in a way people could understand. Bates had a complicated upbringing and a psychological condition that could be blamed for his violent behavior. He was a sympathetic character. Leatherface, on the other hand, was anything but sympathetic. He was hardly even human.
Leatherface was primitive and grotesque, his face a patchwork mask of his victims’ skins, his language a series of vicious grunts and garbled shouts. He was beyond diagnosis and nearly beyond the realm of comprehension. When Leatherface smashed his victims’ skulls with a sledgehammer or ran his saw through their bodies, he uttered a horrible howling shriek. He slaughtered innocent people, indiscriminately and without apology. Had he been an alien invader or a giant lizard, the audience might have understood and even accepted the naturalness of his animalistic brutality. But Leatherface, as monstrous and deranged as he was, was human, and that fact coupled with the film’s documentary technique, traumatized its viewers.
Night after night, people filled theaters to watch the darkest side of human nature manifest on the screen. Many first-time viewers were so shocked, they walked out before the first reel had even finished spinning. Some folks demanded refunds. But for the most part, the beguiling title coupled with the misleading advertising that claimed the film to be a true story drew thousands of horror-hungry moviegoers who were far from disappointed. Some couldn’t get enough. Seduced, they slipped into the screaming darkness over and over again, their blood vibrating with the thrill of a chainsaw taken to flesh.
Ed Gein never used a chainsaw on his victims. Of course, the Massacre would not have been such a hit had the Gein-inspired Leatherface chased his victims with a standard hunting rifle. It’s the saw that draws people. It’s the gurgling buzz of steel teeth biting through flesh and bone. It's how a mind gone wrong can cause a human being to turn into a monster. Finally, it’s how director Tobe Hooper so unscrupulously summons the darkness behind the human mask. Hooper excised the fantasy from traditional horror movies and replaced it with a sinister reality much closer to the heart of our deepest fears. It was this revolutionary change in the horror movie genre that turned The Texas Chain Saw Massacre into a cult classic that, years after its release, enjoys a revival in movie houses across America.
Early autumn, 1982; Newport Beach, California. Outside the air-conditioned Balboa Theater, the sun casts its light on clutches of big-haired youth as they finish smoking their cigarettes in the parking lot. Soon, they will purchase tickets for a movie they’d been too young to see years before when the flick first rolled across the screen.
Already seated inside, my twenty-five-year-old father with unkempt black hair, electric blue eyes, and a toothy grin wraps an arm around my mother as they wait for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to begin. When he squeezes her thigh, his fingernails bite into her jeans, and she giggles. Her dark eyes sparkle as she slides her hand over his. Raised by her midwestern parents to be an obedient, God-fearing, righteous soul, my mother is seeing this movie for the first time. She had been a senior at a private Baptist high school when it first came out and didn’t have a particularly strong desire to see it. But she had thought it curious, in light of the fact her father loved scary movies, that her parents hadn’t let her see the film. She’d spent nearly every Saturday night of her teenage years beside her dad on the couch watching horror host Morgus the Magnificent as he quipped old black and white horror flicks. She’d even continued the tradition when she started taking classes at the community college. She’d still been living with her parents then, and it had been nice to take a break from studying to spend some time with her dad.
The crowd’s laughter flickers out as the theater lights dim into darkness and gold words crawl up the black screen. A somber-voiced John Larroquette narrates: “The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths, in particular Sally Hardesty and her invalid brother, Franklin . . .”
In the brief silence following the narrator’s chilling introduction, Mom hears the familiar whir of an audiotape’s wheels circling in Dad’s lap. She rests her head on his shoulder, her small smile steady in the pulsing darkness. In the past two years she’s known him, he’s told her almost everything about the movie. No surprises. She knows how it ends.
They had both been working for the phone company, Dad for AT&T Long Lines, Mom for Pacific Telephone, a subsidiary, when they met. Though their meeting was unlikely because they worked in separate buildings, they managed to find each other anyway. Mom was the chapter president of a volunteer program that encouraged company employees to get involved in special community events. Perhaps it was a genuine desire to help that inspired Dad to inquire about opportunities, though the more likely scenario was that he was a single, twenty-three-year-old man, and this was an opportunity to meet women. Either way, one warm summer day on their lunch hour, the two of them met for the first time on a street corner halfway between their buildings. Amidst the sounds of traffic passing a few feet away and cars flying on the freeway below, they discussed upcoming program events, Dad’s love of photography, and the possibility of his taking pictures for the newsletters.
After that initial meeting, they regularly saw each other at events and frequently discussed the program over the phone and through company mail. Their relationship was strictly professional until they realized their shared love of movies. The first time they decided to meet outside of work, he suggested they see a film at a small theater known for showing cult classics. They went as friends, each paying their own way. Then he began inviting her to parties where he’d put on slideshows, complete with audio accompaniment, for his friends’ entertainment. She was already familiar with his photography, not just from his volunteer work, but because he was always asking to take her picture. He’d notice her in a dress or skirt and ask her to pose for him in front of a fountain or a flowering bush, which she found flattering. She learned he also liked to spend his free time recording television shows, movies, and songs, splicing clips onto themed tapes for friends and family.
After months of movies, parties, and pictures, Mom still considered Dad to be just a friend. However, she noticed that his eyes darkened whenever she talked about the guys she was dating. When he discovered she was renting out a room to a man, he told her he’d like to talk. He packed a few items, picked her up, and drove to the beach where he spread out a blanket, set down a basket of food, and hit “play” on his portable stereo. “Listen,” he said.
Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” lifted on the breeze like grains of sand as she gazed at the waves breaking on shore. “I give you all a boy could give you / take my tears and that’s not nearly all,” the band’s lead singer crooned. She thought how sweet her friend was to arrange this picnic, but she had to suppress her laughter. The song was awfully dramatic.
As the tune faded out, he clicked off the stereo and turned towards her. “I brought you here,” he began, his voice heavy and serious, “to tell you how I feel. I want our relationship to be more than just a friendship, and I would like to rent that room from you instead of that other guy because it makes me really uncomfortable having him there.”
It didn’t really matter to her who rented out the spare bedroom, as long as they were considerate and paid on time. As to whether they should take their relationship to the next level, well, she couldn’t think of a reason why not, so she agreed to both proposals, and a couple of months later, my parents found themselves living together.
A week after watching The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Mom and Dad return to the Balboa for another look at Leatherface and the bone-filled house in which the masked murderer and his cannibalistic family live, but mostly they’ve come to watch the show in the seats: young people hiding behind squinted eyelids and ravaged fingernails; popcorn spilling onto jerking legs and carpeting the aisles; and when the hitchhiker with the strange smile drags a knife down his own palm, girls turning their faces into the warmth of their dates’ shoulders while their dates grimace at the screen. There is an almost audible sigh of relief in the theater when the youth evict the unhinged hitchhiker from the van, though blood courses down Franklin’s arm where the stranger inexplicably turned a knife on him, and there is a sense, even as the group speeds down the highway, that their troubles have only just begun.
Night has fallen. Sally and Franklin Hardesty have been waiting a long time for their three friends to return to the van. They’re worried Jerry, Kirk, and Pam are lost in the woods—or worse.
“Sally, they took the keys! We don’t have any keys!” Franklin exclaims, his shrill voice rising as he hits the horn. Beep! Beep! Beeeep!
Mom squeezes Dad’s knee, and he, pressing a hand briefly against the small cassette player in his pocket, rises from his seat, whispering, “I’ll be right back.”
“Give me that flashlight!” Sally screams, her long blonde hair flashing around her face as she attempts to wrest it from her brother’s hands so she can search for their friends.
“No, Sally, we can’t go! What if they came back and we weren’t here?”
“Franklin, give me that flashlight!” Sally demands, desperation sharpening her voice.
A few rows from the screen, Mom pulls at her fingers and glances at the empty seat to her left and the open aisle at her right.
“Look, look, I’ll go with you, I’ll go with you,” Franklin pleads.
Sally’s voice cracks as she cries, “I can’t push you down that hill!” Frustrated, she walks away without the flashlight.
“Sally, wait. Sally, wait a minute! I’m coming with you.”
Chilled, Mom rubs her hands together and re-crosses her legs under her long skirt.
Franklin trails Sally through the dark woods, pleading with her to wait for him. When he catches up, they call out for the friend who left them to find Pam and Kirk.
“Jerry! Jerry!”
“Franklin, this is impossible,” Sally complains as she struggles to push his wheelchair over tree roots and vegetation.
“Come on, Sally.” Franklin urges.
Mom crosses her arms, hugging herself.
“I heard something over there,” Franklin says.
The theater is dark, illuminated only by the occasional flickering of the flashlight on screen, but it is not so dark that the shapes of people curling in their seats can't be seen, nor is it so dark that Mom can’t see a figure darting towards her from the shadows.
“Sally, I hear something,” Franklin says. “Stop. Stop!” Suddenly, a flash of crudely stitched mask and hollow, black eyes as the guttural buzz of a chainsaw razes through the crowded theater. The audience screams as Leatherface plunges the whirling metal into Franklin’s chest.
Meanwhile, the shape streaking through the theater materializes in the form of a man with a misshapen face. A butcher’s apron glows red and white in the screen’s shifting light. He grunts and growls as he staggers past rows of seats, swinging a chainsaw. Now he hangs over a woman sitting alone at the end of a row, an easy target. As the saw falls upon her, its vicious purring drowns out everything but her agonized screams.
The people surrounding her scramble over each other, shrieking. Others cramp up in their seats, pressing themselves so hard into the cushions the indents remain hours after the theater’s close. On screen, a desperate Sally Hardesty stumbles through the woods, two-inch thorns lodging in her scalp as she runs from her brother’s killer.
The woman’s screams are almost holy now, a ghastly mantra. No one runs to her rescue as the masked man brings his chainsaw down upon her again and again. Crimson flecks his apron and long-sleeved blue shirt, turning the woman’s screams into ragged, throaty gasps.
And then, in the midst of so many shrieks and above the blazing of the dual chainsaws, erupts a raspy, growling cackle. Half the audience holds its breath; the other half howls as the chainsaw glimmers the darkness. Their eyes trace the silver silhouette of the live Leatherface, the raised saw’s glittering outline, the shaking shape of the young woman slumped in her seat. And then, horribly, the saw falls once more, and a triumphant grunt sails over the crowd as Leatherface thrusts a bloody, severed arm into the air.
The woman screams and screams.
Dad left Mom just before one of the movie’s most terrifying scenes. He knew when he stood up he would look like anyone else who had to use the restroom. He knew too that no one would notice him disappear into the shadows at the side of the auditorium. He’d planned his move, had waited for a scene so dim hardly any light illuminated the theater. He was a ghost gliding through the dark, slipping past the curtain draped over the hallway to the exit.
Outside the theater, he pulled his tape player out of his pocket and twisted the volume knob so he could hear the recording he’d made the week before.
“I’ll go with you, all right? I’ll go with you, but I’ll keep the flashlight,” Franklin Hardesty whined from the small speaker. He had little time to spare.
When he’d parked his car before the start of the movie, he’d made sure to park it just outside the back door and had even left the trunk open a crack so he could quickly grab his gear. Now, he surveyed the parking lot. No cops. It was doubtful anyone would notice him tying a red-streaked butcher’s apron around his neck and waist. No one would see him pulling nylons over his head, adjusting the lumpy side—the illusion of scar tissue created by drizzles of dried glue—over his face. Most importantly, nobody would notice him lifting a chainsaw out of the trunk and carrying it through the back door of the theater at the exact right moment.
Suddenly, saw still spinning, the masked man turns and breaks into a hobbled run. His victim sits in her seat, eerily quiet as the curtain swings closed behind her attacker. The clang of the heavy metal exit-door slamming into its frame echoes through the auditorium, and no one but Sally Hardesty, whose whimpering screams seem never-ending, makes a sound.
Gradually, people uncurl from their seats and slowly migrate towards the young woman. She stands, and for a moment, the audience believes her skirt is soaked in blood. Yet both arms, completely intact, hang from her shoulders. “But—” they say, unable to disbelieve what they were sure they saw. Slowly, the audience realizes they were part of a planned spectacle, and they begin to laugh—a few shaky chortles building to a howling swirl of hoots and deep-lunged guffaws. A couple people start clapping, and soon the auditorium is a concert hall, everyone cheering for the absent, masked marauder. They are so worked up they hardly notice the two ushers briskly walking down the aisle.
“Ma’am,” the taller of the two says when he reaches Mom, who is standing with a wild gleam in her eyes. He has to shout over Sally Hardesty’s screams. “We’d like you to come with us.”
In the relative calm of the lobby, the taller one asks, “Are you all right?” He and his coworker are scrawny, crackly-voiced teenagers who scratch the backs of their heads when they talk.
Mom nods and rubs her crossed arms.
“Did you know that man?” the shorter one asks accusingly, his brow hardening.
“No!” she practically shouts. “This guy just came out of nowhere and started chopping at me with a chainsaw! But I’m fine. Look. Everything’s still attached. See?” She wiggles her fingers to prove it.
They nod and fade away a moment later when a young man wearing a name tag stamped “Manager” approaches.
“Are you all right, ma’am?”
“I’m fine, really.”
“Are you sure? Is there anything I can do?”
“I’d just like to go home, that’s all.”
“Well, I’d like to give you some free passes—”
“Oh, no, that isn’t necessary,” she says, shaking her head and raising her palms like stop signs.
“I insist,” he says, pressing several tickets into her hand. “Enjoy your evening, ma’am. We look forward to seeing you again.”
What the audience and the Balboa Theater staff didn’t know—at least, not right away—was the Leatherface imposter and the young woman in the red skirt were in cahoots, staging a prank they might tell their friends and future children. Had Mom kicked her skirt up a bit as Dad purchased their movie tickets, or had she skipped through the lobby, someone—a Massacre fan or an employee—might have noticed the flesh-colored nub swinging in the folds of her skirt, just above her sandaled feet. Had they looked more carefully, they might have noticed the outline of a thin rope wrapped around her skinny waist. They might have thought that funny. She sure did.
As she walked, the severed arm bumped against her legs. She wondered why a man would want his penis to be so long. It was downright uncomfortable, that extra limb knocking against her knees and tickling the skin of her calves. But what made her blush was the thought of the hand, the tips of its wiggly fingers suspended mere inches below her crotch, reaching like a zombie from the grave. The rope chaffed as she walked, and she was glad when she could finally sit down and untie the gruesome limb. She kept it tucked between her and my dad as Sally Hardesty and her unlucky friends screamed in the thickening darkness.
When Mom told me this story twenty-five years after she helped Dad hoodwink the unsuspecting audience at the Balboa, I couldn’t imagine her doing anything so juvenile.
“Why, Mom?” I asked on the phone.
“I think I did it because, living at home when I went to college meant I missed out on the social scene. Pulling this stunt with your dad was kind of like my chance to be a real college student.”
I didn’t need Mom to tell me the prank had been Dad’s idea. He had a dark sense of humor, a self-serving consideration of social conventions, and no fear, especially when it came to his art. I recognized the severed arm from the story as the one Dad set out at Halloween, sometimes affixing it to the back bumper of his car so that it appeared someone was crawling out of the trunk—a gag that unnerved me as much as it thrilled me. He often took risks with scant regard for his own safety or the feelings of those who cared about him, as evidenced by countless photos of him hovering on the tips of rocky ledges, his tie-dyed t-shirts billowing against a background of mountains and evergreens, sunglasses strapped to his face so he wouldn't lose them on his adventures. And while most people took cover when lightning struck, he grabbed a rain jacket and his recording gear and blazed towards the crackling sky, eager to immortalize the storm. But perhaps the best example of his artistic tunnel vision is captured in the story of how, when he wanted to snap a photo as a teenage passenger in his older sister’s van and she refused to stop driving to let him out, he jumped, tumbling onto the shoulder of the road while wrapped around his camera like an armadillo protecting its heart.
Art was Dad’s highest priority. When he wasn’t working, he was often backpacking through one of California’s many state parks, his pack stuffed with camping supplies, camera gear, and audio recording equipment. When he married Mom, she became a more permanent part of his art, his witness and subject. He posed her in his pictures and wrote roles for her in his recordings. Later, when they had children, he had new faces for his photos and voices for his tapes, new eyes and ears to direct.
While Mom appreciated being part of Dad’s artistic process, not everyone did. He regularly made art at other people’s expense, once even bumping a woman out of his way at the Grand Canyon to gain a better position for his picture. I suppose in his mind, the ends justified the means. His photos won awards in the clubs he belonged to, and every audiotape he made constituted a complicated and thoughtful constellation of sounds, songs, and conversations. But his art was largely scripted, and several of his favorite human subjects were repeatedly pressured into parts they didn’t want to play.
“Look out at that mountain,” he’d order, and my brother, sister, and I would have to stop groaning about how hungry, tired, and sore we were after hours of slouching under our packs and many long minutes of waiting for Dad to perfect his shot. We’d have to straighten our crumpled spines and turn toward where he was pointing, whether or not we felt like it. “Come on you guys, smile,” he’d command, and we’d move our lips and cheeks into position, write fiction on the lines of our faces. We’d grin, point, tilt our heads, and angle our feet, crafting Dad’s story, all the while wishing that, for once, our needs trumped his.
His motives confused me and in fact confuse me still years later as I finally listen to the tapes he made when I was a child. On the “Carol at 9” tape, my six-and-a-half-year-old voice reads an entry from my first grade class’s collective journal. When I stumble over the year, Dad corrects me. He ends the segment: “That was Carol Claassen, first grader at Mount Diablo Elementary School, doing her homework.” If Dad were making the tape solely for me, or for the two of us, he wouldn’t have addressed a broader audience. Even if he planned this recording to accompany a slideshow for friends and family, they would have known me well enough to not need a formal introduction. It’s like he thought the whole world might hear his tapes—like he expected them to. There is something unsettling about being the purported object of someone’s affection when in reality that person’s primary reason for paying you attention is to gain recognition and praise—for being a good artist, friend, husband, son, brother, and father. When that person is your dad, that “something unsettling” becomes sad, tawdry, and, at times, indecent.
When I was a kid, Dad took me to the park, pushed me on the swings, and cheered me on down the slide. He shuttled me through amusement parks, balanced me on his shoulders for chicken fights in the pool, and played hide-and-seek with me. But coursing through our time together were questions I never dared ask. Was my request to ride the carousel the reason Dad paid for a ticket, or was he merely interested in the shot? Was my desire for a thrill the reason he accompanied me through the dark halls of haunted houses, or were my screams, forever captured on tape, his true motive? When he said “I love you” to me in the presence of a recording device, to whom was he talking?
Even after my parents divorced when I was eight and Mom moved us kids across the country, Dad still insisted we help him with his tapes, recording our protracted phone calls which consisted almost entirely of him talking about himself, with tiny breaks in which we offered clipped responses along with the canned lines we knew he expected. When he listened to his recordings, he heard what he wanted to hear: we liked the tapes he made us and appreciated the photos he took, we were looking forward to seeing him again, we missed him, we loved him.
Was the Massacre prank part of Dad’s artistic vision? If it was, had the audience failed to embrace the joke; had their discomfort outweighed their appreciation; had they believed they were in real jeopardy and felt as helpless as the victims on screen, would he have been a monster? On a scale of Godzilla to Leatherface, how much of a monster would he have been?
When Ed Gein’s mother died, he didn’t know how to come to terms with the pain of being alive in a world without her. Faced with the inconceivable reality of his mother’s permanent absence, he chose to keep her present, crafting masks and suits of human skin he could inhabit, a gruesome costume he could wear to play the role of his lost leading lady. Morbid, but sentimental, and thus, relatable. Unlike Gein, Leatherface is not blessed with a backstory. But of course he has one, even if the audience isn’t privy to it. We all do. Backstories are what turn the world’s Leatherfaces into Norman Bateses and Norman Bateses into sympathetic characters. Out of context, everyone has the capacity to be a full-fledged monster, with or without a mask.
Carol Claassen's work has been published in The Pinch, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and noted in Best American Essays. She is the 2019 winner of The Forge Flash Nonfiction Competition. She earned her MFA in creative nonfiction at California State University, Fresno. Currently, she resides in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she is completing a memoir.
Photo by Leo P. Hidalgo (@yompyz) on Foter.com / CC BY-NC