The last film that truly scared the pants off of me as an adult was Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). I was 21, a late-bloomer, when I saw it for the first time in 1988. The film was showing in a small theater with 150 seats. The screening was packed. I was alone until I noticed a friend in the audience who joined me. The lights went out. I nervously turned to my companion and confided in him that I’d smoked something I shouldn’t have, that I was feeling paranoid, and that this film was probably not what the doctor had ordered. He looked at me with sadistic glee. We then both anxiously stared at the screen as the opening narration by John Larroquette came to an end and visual bursts of a decomposing corpse came to light under the sporadic glare of a dirty old flashbulb, and then we looked at each other like Steve Martin and John Candy in Planes, Trains & Automobiles when they think they’re about to hit a truck and die, and we both screamed. The movie proceeded to disturb me on such a profound level that I turned into a vegetarian for many years (not a joke). If you were to tell me that eleven years later I’d be driving the same grave-robbing goul with a penchant for doing nasty things with his Polaroid, I’d have given you another Steve-Martin-turning-into-a-skull scream. But that’s exactly what happened when I brought the film to town in 1999 for a presentation with Edwin Neal (who played “the Hitchhiker”), and I’ve decided to approach The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which has been written to death, from the angle of the documentary that was made about it in 1988 (and later remastered onto dvd in 2000) called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: A Family Portrait – Revisited. My reasoning for this is simple enough, I think The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is genuinely horrifying, in part, because of authenticity, and Neal (and his Chain Saw family) talk about this in the Family Portrait doc.

No, A Family Portrait is not scary viewing. It’s a talking-heads documentary featuring John Dugan (Grandpa), Jim Siedow (The Cook), Edwin Neal (The Hitchhiker), and Gunnar Hansen (Leatherface). Missing from the sit-down interviews were director Tobe Hooper, writer Kim Henkel, and lead actress Marilyn Burns. Well… I guess that’s why they decided to call this “A Family Portrait” and thereby focus solely on the cast who gave life to the deranged family of Texas slaughter-mad cannibals whose antics are loosely based on Ed Gein. But the behind-the-scenes stories provided by Dugan, Siedow, Neal, and Hansen illustrate one of the reasons why I think The Texas Chain Saw Massacre remains such a scary bit of business: it captured real pain, real misery, and real insanity. Consider the following points made in the documentary:

Siedow gives an account of how he genuinely got rough in slugging Burns (Sally Hardesty) through eight gruelling takes because “They couldn’t use anything fake, ‘cuz that looked fake.” Although Siedow describes Marilyn as encouraging him to let loose, he also observes that she was getting genuinely bruised and almost fainted at the end.

Neal talking about how he went in to audition on a lark because Hooper was looking for somebody really weird, and Neal’s friend said “He gives good weird.” Neal read his parts and immediately imagined the character as his real, brain-damaged, paranoid-schizophrenic nephew. It is one of the most disturbing performances you will ever see.

Neal talking about Siedow beating him in front of the truck lights at night with a real hard-wood stick (“I could hear my skull-cracking inside my head”) because nobody thought about using Balsa wood.

Hansen, in resigning himself to the fact that his performance was going to be mostly a physical one: “In preparing for the part I went to the Austin State School, a home, a large campus for retarded persons, and I spent several days walking around the campus pretending I was a student there, or inmate, trying to pick up the physical mannerisms of the way wome people walked.” He also studied squeeling pigs at a friends farm (although these were never used, and dubbed in later.) Mainly, he admits, he was hired because his 6-foot-four-inch frame (made even taller with heels) could fill a doorway so completely as to make you lose all hope.

The infamous dinner scene: 26-hours in oppressive heat, “105 degrees outside” and “115 degrees inside” (Hansen) “hot as the devil” (Siedow) – made even hotter by the film lights. Add: rotting meats, formaldehyde filled sausages, decomposing chicken heads, no ventilation, tarp-covered windows, overwhelming smells, burning skeletons (from the light-bulbs within them), this was “the hardest scene to shoot” (Hansen).

Neal on his death scene (his most painful scene): “Lying on the asphalt… I could hear my own skin cooking” while a rock was wedged under his jaw and everyone waited for a slow-moving cloud to pass by so the light would match the previous shot. A shot that wasn’t even used in the final print.

And it goes on: Three weeks of uncomfortable makeup, stinky clothes, ad-libbed moments, unexpected wounds and bruises, near-death chainsaw accidents, surreal dementia, fatigue, rope-burns, and more.

Reviled by many for its name alone, the film is also justly celebrated by academic intellectuals and genre fans alike as a tour-de-force, a fortuitous collection of actors, technicians, and filmmakers each bringing something new to the table. Their inexperience was an asset. As was the low budget. And although there was a lot of real pain and misery, it would all coalesce into a cult movie that would enter the pantheon of all-time greatest horror films ever made, one made part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art.

I’ll close now with the same image I started with (see below), one given to me by Edwin Neal back in 1999. He brought out his son to see The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for the first time – deeming him now old enough to see it. I drove them up to Estes Park to see the Stanley Hotel (that’s their picture in the insert) and he shared with me other horrific stories about the shoot (as well as some fallout afterwards). He also brought along a 35mm print of the film, which I was excited to screen to an audience, along with some props (like the actual apron used by Leatherface). Alas, his 35mm print had serious damage, so we opted for a 16mm print, but even that was cursed by a malfunctioning projector that required us to stop the projector every 20-minutes. A film programmer’s nightmare. Oh, and that little piece of newspaper you see taped to the corner of the image? That’s a quote from Tobe Hooper, answering a question from The Onion. The question was: “Who would you take in a fight?” And Tobe’s answer was: “Oh, my goodness. I probably wouldn’t be in the fight to begin with. I can’t kill anything or hurt anything, not even insects. I take spiders outdoors.”