The following notes on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 were written by David Vanden Bossche, PhD Candidate in the department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A 35mm print of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 will screen at 7 p.m. on Saturday, October 21 as part of our 1980s Fan Favorites series. The screening will take place at the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave.

By David Vanden Bossche

Much like contemporary George A. Romero, whose Night of the Living Dead (1968) invented the modern zombie film and inspired a generation of low-budget horror directors, the Texas-born Tobe Hooper stormed onto the horror scene with his very first film. 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre impacted the genre to such a degree that it became a landmark and set a standard that dozens of other filmmakers would try to achieve (or, barring that, copy wholesale). It was a dark, upsettingly visceral feature that used the sensationalistic tropes of grindhouse horror films like Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972) and turned them into a grizzly nightmare that stripped away the thrill of violence and replaced it with a sense of palpable dread and nihilism. It was such a sickening descent into despair and depravity that even Paul Schrader, no stranger to the seedy underbelly of humanity in his own work, famously ran out of an early screening of the film. Audiences loved it though, earning it close to $30 million on a mere $140,000 budget (roughly equivalent to a $150 million box office adjusted for inflation). Still, it would take Tobe Hooper more than a decade to revisit the cannibalistic Sawyer family and the film that established his reputation.

After a successful re-release of the original in 1981, Hooper signed a three-picture deal with Cannon films that included plans for a sequel. Israeli producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus— who had transformed Cannon from a small production company into a mini-major—expected Hooper to deliver a straight horror flick that would build off the first film’s style and reputation. That was, however, not what the director had in mind. Faced with the nigh-impossible task of topping the original’s shock value, Hooper wanted to find a new angle and – as he put it in a 1986 Entertainment Weekly interview – “be different from all the Halloween and Friday the Thirteenth sequels”. The answer, as it turned out, was to have The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 be as different from its infamous predecessor as possible. Hooper’s initial plans were simply to produce a loosely-connected continuation of his signature film—the working title was Beyond the Valley of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre—but after some tussles with the studio, Hooper himself landed back into the director’s chair.

The script was rewritten by uncredited hired guns, while Hooper kept insisting on a different tone, mostly getting his way. Combining explicit gore and dark humor—although Hooper himself once admitted that he was probably the only person on earth who saw the original as a dark comedy—TCM2 brings back the bloodthirsty Sawyer family from the first film, including the lumbering, Ed Gein-inspired brute Leatherface (though no longer played by the hulking Gunnar Hansen). Gone was the original film’s oppressive atmosphere of dread or the encroaching specter of the counterculture in decline. Instead, the supporting characters brought in as potential chainsaw fodder are more in line with the eighties teen movie (the advance poster famously parodied John Hughes’ 1985 hit The Breakfast Club) than with the scraggly young burnouts of the original.

The biggest change from the original was bringing a genuine star into the cast. Dennis Hopper’s career was still recovering from the critical and financial fiasco that was his 1971 film The Last Movie. Through supporting parts in Apocalypse Now (1979), Out of the Blue (1980) and Rumble Fish (1983), Hopper slowly worked his way back up the ladder, but was still struggling to find work when he was approached to star in the horror sequel. Ironically, Hopper was on the cusp of a full career rehabilitation with his role in Blue Velvet (1986), released a mere month after TCM 2. Hopper plays Lieutenant “Lefty” Enright, who, more than a decade after the slaughter of the first film, is still chasing the murderers responsible for killing his brother’s kids. He teams up with local radio host “Stretch” Brock (Caroline Williams, who carved out a career in horror sequels and threequels) to lure the carnivorous clan out of the comfortable anonymity they have cultivated as local butchers and chili connoisseurs. Meeting the enemy on their own terms, Lefty stacks up on chainsaws at a local department store, frightening the shop-owner out of his wits with a little demonstration of his skills in a hilarious early scene. His little shopping trip sets the stage for an outrageous, gore-filled climax that sees director Hooper pull out his entire bag of tricks and star Hopper reach new heights of unhinged performance in a parade of outlandish scenes that recall the similarly over-the-top ending Hooper concocted for The Funhouse earlier in the decade. Not content to let Hooper and Hopper have all the fun, Williams, too, gets a movie-stealing moment, freeing herself from Leatherface’s clutches through an impromptu seduction that makes explicit the phallic connotations of the killer’s signature chainsaw.

Hooper’s iconoclastic, tongue-in-cheek approach, combined with top-notch efforts from gore maestro Tom Savini, make for the rare sequel that has the audacity to subvert the audience’s expectations rather than simply rehash what made the original successful. Presented by the Cinematheque in its uncut form and on glorious 35mm, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is sure to delight and disgust anyone celebrating the Halloween season. Maybe just skip family chili night beforehand.