The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

This abattoir of a movie boasts sledgehammers, meathooks and chainsaws, and the result, though not especially visceral, is noisy, relentless, and about as subtle as having your leg sawed off without anaesthetic.

The picture gets to you more through its intensity than its craft, but Hooper does have a talent.

Despite the heavy doses of gore in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Tobe Hooper's pic is well-made for an exploiter of its type.

The movie is some kind of weird, off-the-wall achievement. I can't imagine why anyone would want to make a movie like this, and yet it's well-made, well-acted, and all too effective.

Along with Night of the Living Dead and The Last House on the Left, it ushered in the modern age of horror in the 1970s. It is one of the great transgressive American horrors and is still the film upon which Hooper's reputation is built.

My personal philosophy remains unmoved by skill and prowess when it comes to an idea this drastic. A chainsaw is a cheater's instrument, a device that disrupts all threads of rhythm and psychology.

No matter how many filmmakers have attempted to recreate the all-out insanity of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," very few have even come close.

Morally retrograde it may be, but then so are nightmares. The point is that this one, though often crude and raw, really leads the imagination. What also works in its favour is that it doesn't pretend to do anything more than scare the pants off you.

A genuine classic of the genre, a punishing, unrelenting nightmare that never allows viewers even a moment of sanity or security.

Tobe Hooper's grindhouse masterpiece abounds in snuff ambience and cacophonous trauma

Hooper and his art director Bob Burns conjured up a picture of hell in rural America...absolutely essential for fans of the horror genre.