The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (50th Anniversary 4K Restoration)

Part of Dundead Horror Film Festival 2024. Priority booking for members starts at 10:00 on Wed 3 April. Passes and individual tickets will go on sale from 10:00 on Fri 5 April. More information on Festival Passes can be found below.

Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is not just one of the finest and most terrifying horror films ever made, it’s an essential piece of cinema history. 

Credited as one of the earliest examples of the slasher genre, it features many of the genre’s tropes, including the introduction of the iconic Leatherface, played here by Gunnar Hansen. But while later slashers would focus on bloodshed and titillation, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a masterclass in suggestion and sensory horror. Famously, Hooper limited the amount of explicitly onscreen gore, but the film was found to be so disturbing that it was effectively banned in the UK until 1999. 

The discordant soundscape conjured by Hooper and Wayne Bell, in combination with Hooper’s nauseatingly intense close-ups and the general atmosphere of sweat and filth make the film feel like a grimy, visceral assault. Despite the myriad analyses and anecdotes surrounding the film, it is also one of those films that is hard to believe is made by human beings at all. So forceful and vivid are its horrors, it feels like an urban legend itself, some malignant artefact uncovered somewhere out there under the sweltering Texan sun.