Our Proud Texas Heritage-Halloween edition

With Halloween coming, I’ve been watching a bunch of classic horror movies, either revisiting ones I’d seen a long time ago (Night of the Living Dead, Creepshow) or movies I should have seen—-Craven’s Last House on the Left, which honestly didn’t do much for me, and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Not saying anything people don’t already know, Chain Saw builds a sense of dread early on and stays in that creepy groove for its entire running time. I had previously seen and enjoyed the remake, come to discover that everything I liked about the remake was lifted straight from the original (especially the camera whine Hooper uses to such great effect at the beginning of his film). And like Psycho, much of the horror comes from what you think you saw from what you actually do see on screen.

But beyond that, as I watched TCM—and this may well be one of those ideas you get that has long been obvious to everybody else—it occurred to me that here is a movie that in addition to being in the horror section of the video store should be shelved in . . . Texana.
Right next to the McMurtry movies like Hud, The Last Picture Show, and Terms of Endearment or—more pertinently, Richard Linklater’s Slacker and Eagle Penell’s The Whole Shootin’ Match, a classic 1970’s indie that inspired not only Slacker, but supposedly also the creation of the Sundance film festival.
Think about it: Chain Saw was shot on location out and around Bastrop in a specific, backwoods, county farm road, off the interstate Texas that no longer exists, or at least doesn’t exist anywhere near as close to Austin as it did then. It’s worth watching just for the glimpse back to that lost world. Compare it to the remake, which ostensibly is set in Texas, but is really generically “rural.”
So I was already thinking about this notion—while watching Leatherface busily chase after a leather-lunged Marilyn Burns—-and then the end credits roll and I see that Lou Perryman, who actually starred in Shootin’ Match (and sadly was murdered in Austin this year) was on Chain Saw’s crew. On top of that, John Henry Faulk is in the damn thing. If that doesn’t scream Texana, what does? Oh, and in the end (spoiler!) the whole movie is about barbecue. Move over, J. Frank.