The “rule of four” is the Supreme Court's practice of granting a petition for review only if there are at least four votes to do so. The rule is an ...
JK
Happy Halloween
But seriously
Watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre again and boy is it a stunning piece of cinema. This time I was particularly tickled by the radio, the sausage, The Eye Shot, and the number 5. Each time I watch TCM, it gets better, a statement I can say about uhhhhh very few things.
* Now that my thoughts have coalesced a bit I felt it was write to scribe them down -on the side of a van full of young adults speeding away from me down the highway- here.
The radio
Shit sucks yo. It feels like things will never get good again. At least that's what the newspapers say our perception of it is. That more of my generation thinks that we've missed the golden aged, only to be born into the Big Decline. The newspapers also say that the rocket attacks continue in Gaza, civil unrest is widespread in central America, the food is unfit to eat, etc. So hearing that broadcast as the kids get out of the van to let Franklin rock a piss does more to tie it to the current day than any modern clothing or pop culture reference could.
The sound design is also pretty neat on account of how intentional it is. The radio broadcast was added in post (cuz the couldn't get speakers set up), which means the timing is very intentional, with trucks driving by drowning out parts of the broadcast, keeping it generic. You catch the bit about the young couple who chained their daughter up in the attic, but not where it happened. Another odd touch is that the radio broadcast is not present in the subtitles. This further suggests that the radio is more atmospheric, than meaningful. A window-dressing like lighting.
The Sausage
Damn those sausages look tasty, even Franklin finding gristle in his can't stop me from getting hungry. BBQ sauce is probably the crowning achievement of southern US cooking.
†The Eye Shot
YO LET'S TALK ABOUT THE EYE SHOT.
To set the stage: Sally is bound to a chair at the family's dinner table. She's already seen them kill her friends and is absolutely losing it. And they're losing it too, howling like coyotes, laughing manically, yelling. Leatherface and the other brother are constantly getting up and sitting down, throwing a whole extract layer of chaotic movement. Sally thrashes in her chair trying to break free. And then the eye shot. It's good for two reasons: It's weird and it was hard to shoot.
It is weird. It's often the case in movies where emotional state is conveyed through the expressions on characters' faces (or music). The brilliant part here is that TCM manages to convey emotion with the tiniest of shots, eventually losing all detail and just focusing on a blurry, veined eyeball as it darts around. Part of what makes this work is that we know we aren't missing what the eye is seeing, it's the same hellish room that Sally has been in since she woke up. We don't need to be clued into her mental state for the same reason, we know it's panic. The Eye Shot is a clip of film that isn't trying to tell us anything we don't already know, it just cranks the level of discomfort way up.
You're only going to get a closeup like that if the camera is pointed directly at the target and the target isn't moving. The Eye Shot isn't from when Sally is trying to escape, it is shot while she is sitting still, trying to act out the eye motion that she would have while trying to escape. It's actually composed of a couple shots and it's cleverly edited so when the shot cuts, the pupil remains in the same place it was. From the first couple seconds where it looks left and right, back and forth until it ends up looking right, then the camera cuts to a side view with the pupil in the same place (about 2 seconds in)
The Number 4
Scooby Doo, Ninja Turtles, Sex and the City, DiSC, the Marx Brothers, Myers-Briggs, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. What do these all have in common? There are 4 or 5 main personalities.
The big four personality types being represented in pop culture is kinda played out at this point but I want to talk about the
Final Girl: TCM, Just Before Dawn, Rituals, The Mutilator, Evil Dead, Chopping Mall, Alien, and many more all have the Final Girl, one last survivor out of a group of friends who challenges evil and lives.
Everybody loves the Final Girl/Ash Campbell for all number of reasons they look good, are competent, offend nobody, and always win. But what about the shmucks who die? The other thing about the above movies is that they start with a cast of 5. Subtract one FG from that and BAM!
4! Now according to HireSuccess there are 4 types: Director, Socializer, Thinker, and Supporter.
‡ I'm gonna assume that you're with me here and you believe me because here comes the thesis. Horror movies have 5 main characters so you get to see how different types people would react to a situation (your own type included), then you get to watch a looker beat the bad guy.
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