by Daniel Owens
The routine was firmly established by now. I’d arrive home on a night after an hour’s journey from Oxford Community College where I “studied” music (“got high, failed to learn anything and screamed into a microphone in an attempt at being a metal vocalist” would be a more accurate description). I wouldn’t even go back to my own house first. I’d get off the number 29 Stagecoach at the phone box in the middle of the village and cross the road to the first house on the right, a house that backed onto the local football field.
I’d walk through the door – no invitation or knock necessary. Not only because I had been hanging around with these lads for a while, but it was also an extremely informal household. A household whose lack of formality matched its lack of cleanliness. A small three bed semi, it was piled up with opened envelopes, magazines, books, junk, motorcycle paraphernalia, unwashed dishes clothing in every corner and dog fur on every surface. It utterly reeked of cigarettes, cheap coffee, the cat’s seemingly never emptied litterbox, and their three dogs: an old collie, a mixed mongrel and a husky (bought because her owner saw one in The Lost Boys when he was young and had fell in love with the breed).
Before heading into The Garage, I’d poke my head into the living room and say ‘hi’ to Baldy and Mary. Baldy’s real name was Terrence, but his children had taken to calling him Baldy years before and had never stopped. Baldy and Mary were the parents of Liam, who, along with his best mate Carl, I’d met via a mutual friend at a party some months before. It was then, that I’d proceed into The Garage, where Liam and Carl would be, coffee in one hand and a ciggy or joint in the other.
That fucking garage. It was then that the horror would commence. The party where I met Liam and Carl was one of the regular summer rallies thrown by a small local motorcycle club at one of two local village pubs – The Plough. In the end that rally was the final one for that club. As I understand, the loss of interest in running it from its leader caused it to completely unravel in the space of the following months, much to Liam’s chagrin, it having been a massive part of his life up until that point. I’d been invited that day by a friend’s mother who happened to be in a relationship with the President’s brother. Members of the club and about 5 years older than me, Liam and Carl were heavy weed smokers and movie lovers. Within five minutes of meeting, we were sharing joints and comparing notes about the films we’d seen (I ended up spending no time with the friend I’d actually been invited by) and the subject soon turned to horror movies. Fairly standard titles were initially rattled off – Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, The Thing, and then one of us brought up The Evil Dead and its then recent re-release as a special edition “Book of the Dead” collectable (about fifteen quid when I bought my copy. The same version today will cost you at least fifty off Amazon or eBay now). We spoke excitedly about how much better it was now it was uncut, and this led us onto the more obscure titles of previously banned or heavily censored movies of the “Video Nasty” era.
For those of you not in the know, this was a draconian period of moral outrage and pathetic political pandering in the UK that lasted from the early 80’s to nearly the middle of the 90’s and saw 72 movies (usually low budget horrors and exploitation films) banned, prosecuted (with varying degrees of success) or begrudgingly released after being heavily censored. I’d not seen most of the film titles they reeled off. Some I had, but most of the others I had definitely heard of…oh yes, I’d heard of them alright…
My relationship with the more alternative side of cinema and culture at large started at a very young age. The Terminator, at aged five to be precise. I remember very clearly some 35 years later, coming into the living room from whatever I had been occupying myself with that afternoon, my father grinning at me, beckoning me over, with remote control in hand and saying, “come watch this Daniel, you’ll enjoy this!” as my mother clucked disapprovingly. I eagerly hopped onto his knee, and the afternoon flew by in a blur of gunfire, neon lights, vehicular chases, utterly captivating synthesiser music and thick Austrian accents. All of which has formed one of my truly cherished childhood memories. You might raise an eyebrow at a parent allowing a five year old to watch The Terminator, with its shoot outs, eye surgery, swearing (gasp! shock! horror! for some weird reason swearing seems the ultimate sin to The Boomers) and admittedly general unsuited-ness to my young eyes – but hey, it was the 90’s EVERY kid saw The Terminator. There’s a reason most Millennial men hero worship Arnie. If it’s any comfort to you, it was the BBC broadcast version my father had taped the previous night that I initially saw, and thus had the aforementioned nasties edited out. In later years my father would admit that allowing me to have the ‘proper’ 18 rated version on VHS for Christmas later that year might have been a mistake (I respectfully disagree).
Either way – I was hooked, and The Terminator became as much a part of my childhood viewing as Disney’s Robin Hood and Basil the Great Mouse Detective (much to my mother’s delight as I’m sure you can imagine). Terminator was the seed, but the other movies passed around myself and my mates or taped from TV were the water that allowed it to germinate.
After a couple of years, I and all the other boys in my village had absorbed Arnie’s oeuvre thanks to Central ITV’s “Schwarzenegger season”, and we’d routinely take to the local woods with our respective arsenals of toy guns to play Commando. My dad even got me a stick of camo face paint from the local army surplus store, the better to evade capture with! Another few years and we’d all seen Robocop, Total Recall, Tango and Cash, Demolition Man, the (then) Alien trilogy, the Bruce Lee movies, the Rocky movies, Van Damme, and anything and everything by Steven Seagal (back when he was still hot Hollywood action material and before had become both the joke and its punchline. That said, his early stuff still fucking rocks). But the most nourishing waters to feed the darker recesses of my mind flowed in the form of mail order video catalogues our household periodically received from companies that seemed to stock everything from child-friendly Disney classics and John Wayne westerns to softcore fluff such as Emmanuel and the lowbrow horror classics we all know and love.
It was the pictures and synopses of the lurid video covers in this section that drew my attention, and I’d often point them out and ask my despairing mother if we could get this or that video (short answer? no) or generally ask my Dad if he’d seen them and what they were about. It was from these catalogues and father-son conversations I gleaned that first tantalising knowledge of not just films such as A Nightmare On Elm Street and Friday the 13th – which were already known about by kids my age and firmly a part of the cultural zeitgeist – but Dawn of the Dead, Zombie Flesh Eaters, Death Trap, The Burning, and of course…The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You think my five-year-old dalliance with The Terminator was bad? I have an American cousin of the same age who had not only seen every NOES and FT13th then released but had been ALLOWED to see them by his parents. In contrast I wasn’t allowed anywhere near these films, but the delight I took in hearing of films about disfigured, dream-stalking, hockey mask-wearing, chainsaw-wielding freaks from my father was palpable (and, I’m pretty sure aged my poor mother by about five years) and the knowledge that a good portion of these films were either banned or censored led to the viewing of these films became something of a vague and unarticulated personal goal. Then, the internet and DVD revolution put it all within reach…
The night ended with an invitation to Liam’s house – which to my surprise was in the same village I lived in – to watch some movies and get stoned the next night. I turned up, a shy and unsure 17-year-old, wondering if the invite had just been made out of politeness. It hadn’t been. I found myself greeted with a welcoming grin and ushered into what had formerly been the garage. I say it had formerly been a garage, it was still a garage, but the door had been replaced with a uPVC dwarf wall, originally it was meant to have been converted into a utility room. That didn’t happen and it remained what it was when I first met them until the family moved out a few years later – a dumping ground for old white goods, more junk, and our socialising spot. Bare red brick walls festooned with dust and joint-smoke darkened cobwebs, overflowing ashtrays strewn about and the grotty rag that passed for a curtain always pulled across the window. There was no heating so it was freezing in winter and lit by a dim 40watt bulb that would always be turned off when the movies began. The rest of the night would be spent bathed in the glow of an old TV/DVD combo perched on a makeshift table made of an old door and some breeze blocks. Two of us would sit on a pair of comfy but dog-destroyed leatherette chairs crammed into a corner and the third would be forced to endure a cheap computer chair that makes my 40-year-old back scream just thinking about it. If there was a fourth, their choice was either the filthy floor or to perch atop the back of the pushed together chairs.
Looking back it was a vile place to spend time…but for a period I fucking LOVED it, and in the end I think I spent about two and a half years hanging out with a rotating cast of characters that mainly consisted of myself, Liam and Carl, a couch surfer named Pat (whose distinct profile resembled a Pterodactyl and earned him the nickname PterraPattdyl), Liam’s future (and eventually ex) wife Claire, and various others. Our sole purpose quickly became getting high, sometimes drinking, though none of us were big drinkers at this point, and eventually riding clapped-out second-hand motorbikes and driving around the local area in a heap of shit Reliant Realto we dubbed The Pig. Bought by Liam because it was cheap, and according to whom could be driven using his bike licence as its three wheeled nature meant it was classified as a tricycle. I found this dubious at the time, especially given that Liam never once sat behind its wheel – all driving duties fell to PterraPattdyl – but it turns out it was in fact true, though that particular legal loophole has been long since closed. Shame really. That fucking car would eventually leave us stranded on the side of the M1 – its engine having shat its own brains out during an impromptu road trip to Loughborough. However, underpinning all this, were the horror movies.
I had a smoking joint thrust into my hand and was given the honour of choosing the movie. Some of the titles we discussed the previous night were there, but one stood out. One I had in fact already seen thanks to a late night showing on TV back in ’99 but just had to see again. A film of towering notoriety that inspired the question: “Who will survive and what will be left of them?”
I opened the case, took out the disc and inserted The Texas Chainsaw Massacre into the player… There’s nothing that can actually be said about this film that hasn’t already been said by the countless film students and movie critics that have come before me, but this film honestly scared the shit out of me the first time I saw it, and it still gets under my skin to this day. It’s minimalist, experimental soundtrack, co-composed by Tobe Hooper and Wayne Bell, was (and is) the perfect counterpart to the masterclass in horror that unfolds onscreen, and one whose influence can still be felt to this day. The film is taut and raw from the start, a hushed-whisper monologue implying that we are about to witness an account of real events (spoiler – it’s not) followed by the whining drone of what we presume to be the mechanism of some kind of antiquated camera drilling into our psyches. The flash sparsely illuminates human remains mummified by the Texas heat. We bear witness to the aftermath of a horrific grave desecration and corpse defilement that serves as magnificent set up as to what brings the five friends to Muerto County, Texas. The tone of the film is further solidified by the skin crawling weirdness of The Hitchhiker the five unfortunate friends pick up barely 10 minutes into the film, and it only continues as the film progresses, a sense of inevitable doom looming over everything they do.
Banned nationwide by the BBFC in 1974, TTCM had achieved a status of near urban legend by the time it was finally permitted to be screened by the Camden London Borough Council in 1998, and as such one could be forgiven for thinking that it would contain some of the worst acts imaginable. Though admittedly, ramming a chainsaw through someone’s skull is pretty bad, and anyone doing that to one of my mates would certainly not be invited back to my house anytime soon. And whilst for years TTCM remained burned into my mind as one of the most brutal and genuinely unsettling movies I’ve ever seen, it’s actually not all that gory, the odd meat hook impalement aside. I rewatched it last summer for the first time in more than a decade, and though it’s lost none of its power or quality as a film, in terms of its violence it’s actually remarkably tame, especially when compared to modern horror such as the Terrifier movies or even the Saw films. A series which despite starting out strong as a Se7en-esque psychological horror, immediately descended into little more than so much sadistic bloodletting, infinitely more graphic and outright cruel than any act I ever saw Leatherface commit.
As UK-based horror Tony Newton writes in his book (co-authored with script writer, author essayist and producer David Bond) “VHS Nasty: The Video Nasties”: “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is so well made/shot you end up thinking you have seen far more blood and gore than you actually have in the film, most of this actually happens offscreen, leaving your imagination to run wild!” And he’s right!
Whilst the sledgehammer skull destruction of Kirk (William Vail), meat hook impalement and subsequent live entombment within a chest freezer of Pam (Teri McMinn), and savage chain-sawing of Franklin (Paul A. Partain) provides us the obvious horror, it’s the other less on the nose things we see and more importantly don’t see that make this film so unbearably claustrophobic, and that flesh out the story if one pays attention. It’s the furniture made of human remains (masterful work from Robert A. Burns, the film’s Art Director who would go on to work on The Hills Have Eyes, The Howling and Re-Animator for Wes Craven, Joe Dante and Stuart Gordon, respectively). Chairs adorned with skulls and ribcages, femurs and humeri strewn across the floor, and skeletal hands hanging from the ceiling. In this way we are told, but not shown the godawful fates that have befallen an unknown number of previous unfortunates scooped up by the Sawyers, and this macabre festooning of the house takes us back to the grotesque effigy at the films beginning emphasising that the victims in this film and those that came before them are/were at the mercy of very creative yet utterly sick minds.
We see the attic-bound Norma Bates-esque corpse of the Sawyer matriarch and seemingly zombified grandfather that sucks blood from the fingers of the living. We are shown the Sawyers perverse mockery of the nuclear family and the general degraded state of a property now resembling an abattoir straight from Andy Whorhols worst nightmares and now stands as a monument to insanity, suffering and the purest of terror, and has done for far longer than it ever did as a home. All this combines with tight cinematography that seems to leave just enough out of the viewers vision to tell you that there’s more…so much more. You have no idea the things that have happened in this place…
The Garage was by now thick with the haze of smoke. The three of us on the edges of our seats, barely aware of how far our joints were burnt down, nearly to the roach. As Sally (Marilyn Burns) endured her torment at the hands of the Sawyers the anticipation had become near unbearable. I remember laughing in relief when after finally having made a run for it, Sally is narrowly missed by an overhead swing from Leatherface as she climbs into the back of a pick-up truck, the driver of which roaring off with her hysterical, shrieking laughter forming a maniacal counterpoint to the frustrated and denied howling of one of cinemas most enduring icons of terror, silhouetted against the Texas morning sun.
Cut to black. As the end credits rolled, Carl piped up: “That was fucking AWESOME!!!” We all laughed in agreement. I looked at my watch. It was getting late, and not wanting to outstay my welcome, I got up to go. “Where are you going dude?” / “Well it’s getting late, I’d better get off” / “What?! Nah fuck that, stick around we’ll watch another one! Get a jay rolled! Who’s picking the next one?” I grinned, returned to my seat and began rolling. Whilst Liam and Carl began debating between Friday the 13th and Reanimator, I lit up and felt myself settle into my new friendship group but didn’t join in the debate. I was happy to watch either.
After all, we had all the time in the world. And there would be plenty more terror to come.
Daniel Owens is a construction worker & death metal fan who began writing inbetween bouts of self-unemployment. He found this past time to be so enjoyable that he now lives in mortal terror of the day that he inevitably has to go back to a ‘proper’ job.
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