JW - Deconstruction of 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre' (Tobe Hooper, 1974)

After watching the opening scene of this, (which ended after 3mins 20secs), we get a sense of this film trying to more like a documentary. The whole feel of it signifies that this story really happened, and this increased your levels of fear about it, the thought of 'this actually happened to someone, and could happen to me'! The budget of this film was only $83,532. This is obviously very low in comparison to the remake in 2003 which had a budget of $9,200,000, however the general feeling is that the original is much more scary due to its realism it portrays, because of a low budget they couldn't get amazing cameras or state of the art editing equipment, but this fits in well with the idea that this is being filmed as it's going along. However, this is not reflected in how much each film made in the box office, the original made $30,859,000 in the USA, whilst the re-make made a huge $80,148,261. This could be due to a larger advertising campaign due to the larger budget, and also wider interest in the re-make because of hearing about the original. There have been three sequels to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2 (Tobe Hooper, 1986)', 'Leatherface: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre III (Jeff Burr, 1990) and finally, 'The Return Of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Kim Henkel, 1994). None of these three sequels particularly did well in the box office or in the imdb ratings (none scoring over 5.1), this could be due to a lack of originality or new ideas. Seeing the same thing (of people getting murdered by Leatherface) may become boring. One prequel was made to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Beginning (Jonathan Liebesman, 2006), this had a budget of $16mil, and made a gross of $39.5mil in the USA and £1.2mil in the UK.


This is the opening narration to 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'