Get the latest tech news
In "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," Feeding Your Family Comes First
Fifty years on, the film reads like sociology: assembly lines make the working class deranged, technology makes them irrelevant, and unemployment makes them hungry.
The shoot was probably illegal a dozen times over: the narrator who reads the scrolling prologue text had to be paid in weed, and the art director, unable to afford prop animal carcasses, drove around picking up actual skulls and roadkill. The film’s first half hour strides curtly forward, doling out the who and the where and the what, with occasional twitches of lyricism in between—a dead armadillo by the side of the highway, say, or a long, mournful shot of the van as it drives off to certain doom. You can’t learn about how this film was made without gagging, but you can’t watch the results without marvelling: not one frame or line or sound effect goes to waste, since Hooper couldn’t afford any, and this gives everything a tautness that you sense somewhere in the gut before the mind catches up.
Or read this on Hacker News
