Then I got up during the night, I and a few men with me; I told no one what my God had put into my heart to do for Jerusalem. The only animal I took was the animal I rode.
I was caught in that square little chunk of awkward time last night, that time where you want to go back to your bed from the library but the library is closing in thirty minutes anyway so why not just wait it out – I was in that chunk of time & I went searching for some book to scan; I came across the film history & theory section (add this section to the long list of sections, including Children’s Books and Hymnals, that I had no idea existed in our dear beloved Simpson), & fell into a brief history of the “greatest” horror films.
I scanned the Table of Contents & passed what I expected to see (Nosferatu, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Psycho) in order to land on first The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (I love it when sometimes people spell chainsaw as two words) & second, Cannibal Holocaust, the latter of which really surprised me in the most joyful way one can be surprised (seriously, see this movie at some point – homework before you die). So anyway, the point of all this prologue is that I really dug into the Texas Chain Saw chapter & re-fell in love with that movie just by reading about it, discovering how weirdly it straddles the line between performance & reality.
A small handful of examples about what I mean: in what became a notoriously grueling scene to film on set, the Grandpa actor, discovering that it would take nearly seven hours to apply the necessary make-up for his character, demanded the “dinner scene” from the film be shot in one continuous take – one that ended up taking 27 hours to complete, at the end of which Gunnar Hansen (Leatherface, man I love Leatherface) remembers wanting to seriously “kill the bitch” (Sally, dear dear Sally) with Grandfather’s hammer; almost every major character sustained real-life injuries from the various acts of “performed” violence in the movie – when Jerry is knocked unconscious in the door-frame (AMAZING), the actor playing him found his head bleeding afterwards, & when Pam is hoisted onto the meat hook, she received bruises and other injuries from the harness necessary to create the illusion, & when Sally jumps from the window (for the first or second time, I can’t say), she ended up walking with a limp for several days afterwards [although a stunt-woman performed the actual jump through the glass, Marilyn Burns herself had to jump from the roof onto the ground in order to get the right effect of the actual landing].
If you & your friends (most of the “actors” in Texas Chainsaw were old Texas college buddies of director Tobe Hooper, after all) are filming a movie in which your character & your character’s friends are tortured and murdered, & you find yourself physically battered & emotionally unstable at the end of each workday…there has to be something somewhere that studies unintentional character-association acting (I think this is a fake term). There’s so much more to be said about the way this movie works in on itself (the mirror imaging the plot plays with, the whole idea of doubling & reversing actions to create a sense of hopeless timelessness, etc.!!); I can’t recommend losing yourself in this movie more.
I forgot to talk about Cannibal Holocaust – now that I think about it, I’ve already written about it at some point last year. I can’t tell you if I like it or not. Well, I don’t like it. But do I think it’s important? Incredibly so.
So, thus far on the Watch List: Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Cannibal Holocaust. Let’s keep track & see if anything that isn’t a horror movie/gore-comedy makes this list by the end of the year.