Double Feature #6: 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre'/'Phantasm'

 

Since the earliest days of cinema, filmmakers have been trying to mimic the horrors we experience in our most terrifying nightmares. From The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu to A Nightmare on Elm Street and Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn, they've presented us with surreal, disconnected imagery in an attempt to dig deep into our subconscious and scare us on a primal level. But capturing the true feeling of a nightmare is an elusive goal - one that most filmmakers fail to achieve. Very often nightmare imagery is more absurd than frightening, and the insertion of Freudian symbolism heavy-handed and obvious. It's the rare film that manages to feel like a bad dream from beginning to end, inspiring the squirmy discomfort, disorientation and bone-deep horror we feel on those nights when our own minds decide to turn on us.

 

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper - 1974) and Phantasm (Don Coscarelli - 1979) both manage to feel like bad dreams you can't wake up from. Chain Saw is the nightmare you can't shake because it all seemed so real, while Phantasm is that weird-ass dream you only remember in bits and snatches, but sticks with you because it was just so bizarre. 

 

Filmed in the scorching heat of a central Texas summer, Chain Saw has become as legendary for how it was made as for what's on screen. The story of a group of young hippie kids who make the mistake of leaving the main highway for the side roads and slaughterhouses of rural Texas, the misery, grit, grime, sweat and blood of the arduous shoot seems to have been hand-ground into every frame. The film is full of iconic images: The flashbulb shots of graverobbed corpses... Leatherface's first appearance... that sliding metal door... Pam on the meathook... Sally pursued by the giant, chainsaw-wielding madman... the dinner scene... Grandpa... and Leatherface's final dance of angry impotence silhouetted by the rising sun.

 

But what makes the film feel like a nightmare isn't just these memorable images - it's the sheer relentlessness of the action. In many ways Chain Saw doesn't feel like a movie because the killers don't act like movie villains. They don't have plans, there's no deep motive, and they're far from subtle. If they see you, they kill you. Period. You're meat, they're butchers, end of discussion. It's the dream we've all had of being chased by some sort of monster - we know if we stop, we're dead. There's no negotiating. Monsters don't want money, monsters don't want sex, monsters want to feed. And you've wandered out of your safe life onto the menu.

 

Phantasm isn't scary because it's based in any sort of reality, it's scary because it never feels real at all. Following the death of their parents, Jody Pearson (Bill Thornbury) returns to suburbia to care for his 13-year-old brother Mike (Michael Baldwin). Mike is certain something otherworldly is taking place at the local mausoleum, which is watched over by the sinister Tall Man (Angus Scrimm). And, of course, he's right. But the things Mike witnesses are so bizarre and disconnected the film achieves an almost surreal quality - not just visually but within the pace and storytelling itself. When I think of Phantasm I have the odd sensation of floating, pinballing from one strange, barely connected event to the next. I can't remember the specifics of plot so much as random visions: The Tall Man lifting a casket into a hearse all by himself... hooded, scurrying dwarves... the strange chrome ball that flies through the mausoleum like a deadly security system... the Tall Man pausing on the street to inhale the cold air rising from the back of an open ice cream truck... the severed finger that becomes an angry, buzzing insect... and on and on.

 

Can I tell you in what order these images appear in the film? Not with any certainty. Like most nightmares, I can recall the things I find most disturbing, while the connecting thread is fuzzy and indistinct. For a typical film, this would be a criticism. For Phantasm - whose goal is to achieve exactly that dreamlike disorientation - it's the highest possible praise.

 

All horror wants to tap into your lizard brain - that primitive, purely instinctive part of you that remembers what it was like to not be at the top of the food chain. To be hunted. To be prey. To be meat. Both The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Phantasm successfully drill down (in the case of Phantasm, literally) to the deepest prehistoric corner of your DNA where monsters are real, threats are everywhere, and the reassuring safety and security of all you know to be true is obliterated by the concrete presence of a madman with a chainsaw or the hallucinatory vision of a demonic presence from another dimension. 

 

Bad dreams, everyone.

 

(Just a quick note: In addition to being an unforgettable presence in Phantasm, Angus Scrimm has one of the all-time great horror actor names. It's a shame he wasn't under contract with Universal in the 30's, joining their roster of immortal screen ghouls - Karloff, Lugosi... Scrimm. He'd have fit right in.)