A lot of my memories, especially early ones, are associated with wisps of senses—the warmth of the eggs we had incubated in my 3rd grade class, the enormity of the first Fourth of July fireworks I watched, the smell of cinnamon buns cooking in the oven on an unexpected snow day. A lot of the American road-trip memories that I keep with me are feelings of vastness, of simultaneous emptiness and freedom; somehow, I remember the Southwest roads the best. The slightly dusty, clear-skied landscape seemed to stretch on forever, not paying the slightest attention to our little Mitsubishi Galant crawling on its surface.
And if a crazy-looking hitchhiker with a Polaroid camera turned up on the side of such a road, we definitely would not have let him into the car. But of course, since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a horror film, the characters had to give him a lift. And of course, this leads them into a chain (ha!) of unexpected events.
I’d never seen the movie before the October 19th midnight showing, though it’s such an iconic film that I’d heard of it and the horror stories surrounding its filming process. Apparently Entertainment Weekly even ranked as the second scariest movie of all time, just after The Exorcist; and given my history with scary movies, it’s a mystery as to why I decided to go at all.
Then again, if EW had been at the midnight showing last Saturday, they would have retracted that ranking pretty quickly. The midnight showing was a testament to how the viewing experience could change the reading of a film drastically, for better or for worse. In a nearly filled room at the State Theater at midnight, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre read more like an unintentionally funny movie rather than a legitimately scary horror film. For me, it allowed me to distance myself from the film and make it less scary to digest, which I liked better. But I also know that some people were less than thrilled to watch it in such an environment. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a great movie with genius pacing; the whole film details less than 24 hours and many scenes of just Sally running away screaming, yet somehow it still holds together. The creepy dinner scene at the end especially- the 27 consecutive hours of filming certainly paid off.
Maybe it was the time, maybe it was the audience, or maybe it was just that the ‘scary’ codes in the movie didn’t quite match up to 21st century standards—so many factors make up the viewing experience. There was a unique sense of community as well; the fact that all of us came out at midnight to see a classic horror film certainly added to this aspect. Personally, it didn’t detract from my appreciation of the film but made it more special. I’m looking forward to doing it again (Rock Horror Picture Show in a week- the Midnight Theater Experience, vol. 2!)
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