How MoMA Made The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Respectable

Tobe Hooper’s seminal horror film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre will forever be identified with Austin, the city where it was conceived and filmed.

But this month the Museum of Modern Art is reminding everyone how New York played a pivotal role in its history.

The celebration starts with a series of screenings of Hooper’s classic at MoMA. This isn’t just to mark the movie’s 50th anniversary, but also to celebrate a half-century of the film being inducted into the museum’s permanent collection. This will be followed by a season titled "Tobe Hooper in the 1980s," a celebration of his remarkable, diverse, and prolific output across the decade, starting with 1981's The Funhouse, followed by Poltergeist (1982), Lifeforce (1985), Invaders from Mars (1986), and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986).

In hindsight, Chain Saw’s presence in one of the leading archives of American art and culture seems only fitting: But in 1974 it was the source of outrage and debate, as the film faced bans and censorship in several countries. MoMA film curator Ron Magliozzi explained, “People don’t realize how hard it was to see and what the controversy of it being banned was. That’s why it coming into the museum’s collection was such a big deal.”

Magliozzi credited MoMA Department of Film curators Larry Kardish and Adrienne Mancia with the decision to give it MoMA’s seal of approval – not just screening it but making it part of the permanent collection. “It was a radical thing to do,” he said. “It wasn’t politically correct to bring that in, and a lot of people didn’t like it.” However, its inclusion fits with the department’s unique and independent history within MoMA. When Alfred H. Barr Jr. was selected as MoMA’s first director in 1929, his belief that film was a modern art was controversial – so much so that when the department was founded in 1935, it was as the semi-autonomous Film Library and would not become a full department until 1955. So there was a sense of dissidence built into its history when Kardish and Mancia decided to take Chain Saw into their prestigious vaults alongside Battleship Potemkin and All Quiet on the Western Front. “Showing it is one thing, but bringing it into the collection is another,” Magliozzi said. “I think they saw that it was reinventing genre, reinvigorating horror.”

Moreover, its inclusion reflects the booking philosophy of Kardish and Mancia. “Hollywood was dying,” Magliozzi explained, “and programmers were looking for different kinds of films – American avant-garde filmmakers like Brakhage, European art films and New Wave, and American independent films from New York and LA and upstart places like Austin.” Kardish and Mancia looked beyond dismissive terms like pornography, drive-in flicks, and b-movies to appreciate films on their merits, championing the sexually graphic works of queer provocateur Fred Halsted, the fetish satires of Russ Meyer, and Ralph Bakshi’s inimitably depraved animation, “all of which caused a lot of controversy.”

So while The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was undoubtedly an exploitation flick, designed to give Hooper some commercial success after the outright failure of his debut feature, Eggshells, it’s exactly the kind of film that would attract Kardish and Mancia right from the opening credits. “The title is threatening; the title is offensive,” Magliozzi said, and it only gets more intense from there.

Magliozzi also sees similarities with another film that was initially written off as just another piece of horror trash but has now become part of the cinematic canon: Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 road trip into terror, Psycho. “They should show them together,” he said, to highlight how Chain Saw echoes the earlier film – not least in that both have extraordinary first halves that are overshadowed by the more maniacal closing act. “The first half (of Chain Saw) is amazing. … The opening is very claustrophobic, inside the van.”

The biggest Hitchcockian influence may be on the camera work of cinematographer Daniel Pearl, who would later lens the Friday the 13th and Texas Chainsaw Massacre remakes, as well as filming music videos for musicians from Amy Grant to Pitbull. “Daniel’s camera movements are very elegant,” Magliozzi said, “and mostly they’re about leading you into the house. Whenever anyone’s about to get it, there’s this camera movement. … Obviously these guys are cinema guys. That’s what makes it so amazing, that so much of it is rooted in classic Hollywood filmmaking – like Hitchcock.”

Indeed, there are many elements of Chain Saw that don’t get the appreciation they deserve, such as Paul Partain’s performance as Franklin, subjected to constant indignities from his wheelchair. “He’s like Leatherface before Leatherface comes on screen," Magliozzi said. “He’s this strange, intense character that’s slightly scary.”

The ongoing "Tobe Hooper in the 1980s" series will give audiences an opportunity to reappraise other elements of the Austin native’s filmography, which Magliozzi called “remarkable, and all very different from one to the next.” He’s found that people are most excited to see arguably the earliest and most obscure film on the calendar, carnie horror The Funhouse. “For me, it’s the film where he says, 'I can do a more structured, straightforward film if I want.’”

Yet no other movie in Hooper’s filmography had the impact that Chain Saw did on filmmaking, not least in how it injected humor into its grotesquerie – something horror films didn’t do before then but has now become standard in the industry. “It’s a horror film that gives pleasure,” Magliozzi said, and that stands in stark contrast to another landmark chiller released only a year prior: Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left. “That film does not give pleasure. It’s a very harrowing, [but] Texas Chain Saw has a heart; it has a sense of humor. People enjoy watching it, and if you watch it from shot to shot it goes humor, horror, humor, horror, in an amazing way.” Those tonal switches reach their height in the dinner sequence, where Leatherface and family are torturing final girl Sally Hardesty, played by Marilyn Burns. “It’s kind of this family comedy, and all of a sudden it’s this series of closeup shots of eyes and her screaming. It gets very dark and frightening.”

This series of screenings at MoMA has proved not simply how powerful a piece of cinema The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is, but how right Kardish and Mancia were to recognize its greatness early. “It’s matured,” Magliozzi said. “It’s passed the test of time. It’s low-budget, analog, gritty filmmaking, and that’s one thing that sets it apart from any remake or anything you do that’s not going to have that quality to it. It’s just so raw.”

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre screens at New York’s Museum of Modern Art through Aug. 15. "Tobe Hooper in the 1980s" runs through Aug. 20. Tickets and info at moma.org.