The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Tobe Hooper kept the violence outside the frame as strategy as much as style: during the shoot he repeatedly asked the American ratings body how to earn a PG. The board gave an X anyway; after several minutes were cut it returned as an R. Britain took far longer. BBFC secretary Stephen Murphy saw it on 27 February 1975 and the board refused a certificate on 14 March 1975; his successor James Ferman called it the pornography of terror, the problem being not explicit violence but the unbroken terrorising of Sally and her screams. It was passed uncut with an 18 on 19 March 1999. The censor’s reasoning describes the film: the weight sits in sound, not blood. It was shot in the summer of 1973 at a farmhouse in rural Williamson County, in sixteen hour days above 38 degrees Celsius. When the stage blood rig failed at the dinner table, Marilyn Burns’s finger was cut for real. The film is in MoMA’s permanent collection; on 17 December 2024 the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry. A good fit if you come for what censors objected to for years: an unbroken scream, not gore. Not for you if you cannot sit through a dinner table sequence where the camera never pulls back and nothing relieves it.