The iconic figure of Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) This mini-genre of Backwoods Brutality films circle around the theme of ordinary people forced to defend themselves by an assault that comes out of the blue without rhyme or reason the sense of a home or a placid middle-class way of life at siege from forces of lawlessness beyond the door and the impression of there being a clear dividing line between civilized America in the cities and the backwoods where people have become inbred, brutish and harbour a deep-seated resentment of interlopers. Straw Dogs, Deliverance and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre formed the basics of what one has termed the Backwoods Brutality cycle.

In more mainstream fare, there was Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971) about a mild-mannered mathematician who is driven to brutal acts of survivalism during an assault on his home by unruly locals, and not long after that John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) about four men whose wilderness idyll is brutally overturned as they are tortured and raped by a group of backwoods hillbillies. The seminal work here was Night of the Living Dead (1968) with its image of the dead come back to life to devour the living, which came with a rawness that broke down all doors in terms of expectation in a horror film. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Last House on the Left were part of a genre of independent horror films in the 1970s that went out on a limb and were determined to shock. It was not the first – Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972) was there a couple of years earlier and went even further than The Texas Chain Saw Massacre ever did in its brutality and savagery themes – but The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was the most notorious. So began one of cinema’s most famous attempt to push back the limits of the permissible. He says at that moment the film “opened up before his eyes”. He was accidentally pushed against a rack of chainsaws by crowds in a hardware store and had a flash fantasy where he wished he could use one of the chainsaws to demolish the crowd. Former schoolteacher Tobe Hooper claims to have gotten the idea for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre while Christmas shopping.

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