The best thing about this film is the way it creates a harrowing, unforgettably horrible experience for the viewer without showing much blood. You’d think from the title the film would splash tones of red gore at the screen. Instead, the terrors are far more sophisticated, and director Tobe Hooper intelligently uses sound effects and visual suggestion to create a truly terrifying spectacle.
If you’ve seen some of the awful DVD editions of this film, badly formatted in incorrect and lazy aspect ratios, you probably think it doesn’t deserve a Blu-ray release. It certainly does, and thank god Second Sight saw fit to release it. The movie was shot on very dense, grainy 16mm film and remastering it in HD helps give a truer representation to the viewer of how the film should look.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), directed by Tobe Hooper, is released on Blu-ray and DVD in the UK by Second Sight, Certificate 18.
