The Horror, The Horror

When I was a student in Edinburgh in the 1970’s, I belonged to the University’s Film Society. This was a very good deal, for an annual  membership fee of about three quid, you could see two or three double bills a week. It gave me a window onto cinema that I wouldn’t otherwise have seen, films by Chabrol, Lelouch, Pasolini and so on. During the week, the movies were shown at George Square Theatre, a university auditorium, but as I recall on Sunday nights they were in the Odeon, a big, comfortable cinema in Clerk Street (the one in which I had a sneezing fit during The Sound of Music as a child- see a previous blog).

Let me digress for a moment. One Sunday, I think in 1977, on an afternoon out in East Lothian, I came upon a semi-ruined wooden building, it wasn’t clear whether it had once been a residence or an institution such as a school. It looked very photogenic, and I took some pictures of it, first from the outside, and then rather gingerly made my way inside, through a side doorway from which the door had fallen away some time before. I didn’t expect anyone to be in, but I did call out nervously as I walked carefully along the corridor, looking from side to side and holding the camera in front of me as if it were a defensive weapon. Anyway, the visit passed without event and I took some pictures, which when developed weren’t particularly impressive.

Back to the Film Society. The following summer term, one Sunday night the Society showed a double bill of The Day of the Locust and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at the Odeon. The first of these was brilliant and disturbing, an adaptation of Nathaniel West’s novel, directed by John Schlesinger. It deals with the sleazy side of Hollywood in the 1930’s and ends with a horrific event where an inadequate and unhappy man kills an unpleasant (but not deserving of death) child outside a big film premiere, and is in turn torn to pieces by an outraged crowd.

Then came The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This did not have the production and direction values of The Day of the Locust, but it seemed to me at the time to have a certain power in conveying a menacing atmosphere in rural America. The story centres around a group of young people who stumble into the territory of a family of cannibals. There is a sequence a few minutes into the movie where a young man ventures into a wooden house calling out nervously to ask if anyone is there. Suddenly a metal door slides open and a powerful man wearing a nasty looking leather mask leaps out and beats his brains out with a sledge hammer (or at least that is how I remember it). Round about this point, I had to leave the cinema and sit on the steps outside, feeling rather sick.

My pals the next day were rather derisive of the film and surprised that I had found it upsetting. I thought no more about it for around thirty years. Then I noticed one day, when the children were on the verge of their teenage years, and I was pushing 50, that it was going to be on television late on a Saturday night. After Linda and the kids had gone to bed I switched to BBC 2 and watched it. I was amazed at how non-scary I found it, and wondered how I had ever found this drivel disturbing in the least.

I suppose my original reaction had been caused by the unconscious memory of my own venturing into a half-wrecked wooden house with the same nervous reticence, and by my having already been softened up by the extremely powerful Day of the Locust. And I speculate that my later life reaction to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre owed something to the fact that when you get to middle age and have seen some contemporaries leave this life before their time, you realise that real life is considerably more frightening than film.

However, the events of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre do speak to primeval fears of legendary monsters who prey on unsuspecting travellers. Two egregious examples are Procrustes from ancient Greek mythology and Sawney Bean in Scottish history or folklore, depending on how sceptical you are.

Procrustes used to offer lodging to travellers, and once they were in bed, would stretch them if they were shorter than the bed, and cut sections off them if they were longer. Sawney Bean was, according to the story, the head of an extended family in the sixteenth century. In preference to doing a proper job, they lived in a cave on the Ayrshire coast, and emerged at night to rob, murder and eat passing travellers. The story goes that when they were eventually captured, they were executed without trial. It is not clear that Sawney Bean and his family actually existed. However,  given the number of similar stories of cannibalism in Scotland from the Dark Ages onward, it is unfortunately likely that even if the Sawney Bean clan did not exist, other people like them really did, at some point in Scottish history.

I am told that Leatherface (the murderer above with the hammer) in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Norman Bates in Psycho, and Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, were all inspired by the same person, one Ed Gein, a murderer and necrophiliac in Plainfield, Wisconsin.

As I say, when watching the TCM as a middle-aged man, I did not find it in the least frightening. There are more powerful films around the theme of predatory behaviour in rural America, notably Deliverance and Southern Comfort. However, if you want something really horrifying, read In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote. This is a novelisation of a miserable event in the history of US crime, when two pathetic, small-time crooks murdered a whole family in rural Kansas, in the process of robbing them. The perpetrators were later caught and executed, but to the reader, their retribution is as dispiriting as their crime. If you can get over its bleakness, you will find it a gripping piece of writing, and much more unsettling than a low-budget slasher movie of the 1970’s.