Texas Chainsaw Massacre and A Nightmare on Elm Street Retrospective

Today’s episode of Sounds of Cinema took a look back at the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Each of these films inspired a series of sequels and remakes, which I’ll examine below.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
There are a handful of movies, especially in the horror genre, that have acquired a reputation that is bigger than the movie itself. When that happens viewers are almost always bound to be disappointed with the film when they finally see it. The expectations that are built up in the viewer’s mind are rarely matched by what is on screen. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of those rare films that lives up to the hype and it does so because its filmmakers employ cinematic techniques that, four decades later, remain a punch to the gut and the film tells a story that taps into primal fears.


When The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released in 1974, sequels were not in vogue. A few years later, when sequels became commonplace for slasher films, the rights to the movie were stuck in legal limbo and a sequel wasn’t released until 1986 when the slasher trend was beginning its decline. Director Tobe Hooper returned to write and direct the follow up but he took a decidedly different approach to the material. At that time movies like Return of the Living Dead, Friday the 13th Part VI, and Evil Dead II brought a campy and self-conscious approach to the horror genre and Hooper followed suit with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Jettisoning the nihilistic terror of the original film, Texas Chainsaw 2 was a Grand Guignol farce. The sequel took a deliberately cartoonish approach which was not greeted warmly by critics or by fans of the original movie. This was too bad because, taken for what it is rather than what viewers thought it should be, Texas Chainsaw 2 is a very entertaining picture that combines mainstream slasher movie thrills with a madcap sense of humor and it is climaxed by a chainsaw duel between Leatherface and a Texas Marshall played by Dennis Hopper. It’s a flawed film but its originality, humor, and energy have made it a cult favorite and it is well ahead of later installments of this series.


The rights to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series were eventually acquired by New Line Cinema, which had found great success with its Nightmare on Elm Street series. The influence of the later Elm Street films is apparent in 1990’s Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III. The makers of this movie were clearly trying to make Leatherface a commercial bogyman that could be exploited for franchising as had been done with Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger. The results didn’t work out in New Line’s favor. The theatrical version of the movie was a mess due to cuts that had to be made to appease the MPAA’s ratings board and the attempt to turn Leatherface into another Freddy Krueger was ill advised.

Another sequel was produced a few years later. Directed by the screenwriter of the original film, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation was an attempt to return to the basics and was billed as the “true” sequel to the 1974 film. It was actually closer in its style and tone to the second film than to the first but it didn’t have the over the top horror of part two or the grittiness of the original. The film was originally shown at film festivals in 1995 under the title The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Columbia/Tri-Star agreed to distribute it. The movie then went through a re-editing process in which it was retitled. In the interim its lead actors Renee Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey became movie stars. McConaughey’s agent allegedly put pressure on Columbia/Tri-Star to bury the film and so it had a very limited theatrical run before showing up on home video in 1997.

After The Next Generation, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series remained dormant until the rights were acquired by the Michael Bay affiliated production company Platinum Dunes. The company released a remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 2003 and it was a box office success that kicked off a fad of remakes of virtually every classic horror film from the 1970s and 80s. As a piece of cinema, the 2003 version of Texas Chainsaw was slickly made and managed a few scares, especially from actor R. Lee Ermey, but it was ultimately a by-the-numbers slasher picture that bore little resemblance to the qualities that made the 1974 film a classic. Platinum Dunes followed their remake with a prequel, 2006’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. Where the 2003 version seemed like it was made by people who didn’t understand and maybe hadn’t even seen the original movie, the prequel was made by filmmakers who had apparently only seen the remake and it was a soulless rehash.

In the years since, things haven’t gone any better for the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series. In 2013 Texas Chainsaw 3D was released. The film was another attempt to be the “true” sequel to the original film and it began with a prologue that grafted this installment onto the ending of the 1974 picture. But it was all downhill from there and Texas Chainsaw 3D was the most useless installment of the franchise to date.


Despite the remakes, sequels, and imitators that have come since, the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre soldiers on. The movie started as little more than drive-in fare and for many years that was the way it was seen, in scratched prints projected at second rate theaters and later on poorly sourced VHS tapes. It’s been slammed by critics, banned and prosecuted by politicians, and had its name raked through the muck by opportunistic hacks exploiting a familiar title for a quick buck. Yet, this film survives.

It does so largely on its own merits. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is extremely well made and in an era in which movies are increasingly violent this film manages to be a punch to the gut while tricking the audience into believing they’ve seen more viscera than they actually have. The movie also survives due to its legions of loyal fans who have kept this movie afloat and invested time and energy into websites and conventions and documentaries. Texas Chainsaw Massacre has also remained a relevant title due to film preservationists who have recognized its value and made efforts to present the film in increasingly better editions.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre isn’t a title that suggests itself as a psychological thriller. That term is usually used to describe movies about law enforcement and serial killers or to “class up” titles whose makers shirk from the horror label. Yet, that is exactly what it is. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a film that penetrates the viewer’s unconscious and subconscious fears. It upsets our rational expectations and plunges the viewer into madness and wanton destructiveness that is as thorough of a representation of the id as cinema has ever produced. In the words of writer and academic Carol Clover, “The unconscious is not a pretty place and movies are fantasies and fantasies are exactly to tap into these things. That’s what movies are for. Movies are not to be nice or to be politically correct. Movies are exactly where we go to revisit things that sometimes need revisiting on an unconscious or semi-conscious level.” This is precisely what The Texas Chainsaw Massacre does and it is why the film remains so potent forty years later.

A Nightmare on Elm Street
During the 1980s, slasher films were all the rage in the horror genre. Following 1978’s Halloween, which was one of the most successful independent films of all time, major Hollywood studios started looking for their own slasher films. Paramount picked up Friday the 13th and released it nationally in 1980. The film was such a success that many other filmmakers and distributors got into the horror business and in the twelve months after the premiere of the original Friday the 13th over eighty slasher films were released. These movies generated tremendous box office but were derided by critics and media watchdog groups. By 1984 the market was saturated with movies about masked killers maiming teenagers and the genre was in decline. It was in this context that the original A Nightmare on Elm Street was released. The movie adapted the format of the slasher film but approached the genre with intelligence, filmmaking skill, and introduced one of the most memorable villains in the history of the movies.


One of the funny ironies about the making of A Nightmare on Elm Street was that writer and director Wes Craven had taken his script to virtually every studio in Hollywood and was universally rejected on the grounds that the script wasn’t scary or that the conceit of the movie wouldn’t work. Craven finally got a green light from New Line Cinema, which at that point was a small operation that was primarily distributing movies to prisons and college campuses.

New Line’s founder and president was Bob Shaye and Shaye saw the potential in Wes Craven’s script. Shaye raised the money to get the film made, primarily through co-financing deals and presales of the video rights. Because New Line was in a weak bargaining position, the deals that Shaye worked out wouldn’t result in New Line getting a lot of money from the box office revenues or rentals but it would at least get the company established as a movie producer as well as a distributor.

When A Nightmare on Elm Street was released in 1984 the movie was a hit. In order to get his original script produced, Wes Craven had relinquished all rights to the property and New Line, because of its financing deals on the first film, didn’t make a tremendous amount of money from its theatrical run. What the studio did come away with was a copyright on a potentially valuable property and the decision was made to start producing sequels. The first of those was released the next year.


1985’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge is one of the oddest installments in this series. The movie reverses the gimmick of the original film in that Freddy Krueger attempts to exit the dream world by possessing a vulnerable young man. This sequel was a hit at the box office, actually out grossing its progenitor, but it was regarded as a disappointment by fans, critics, and even the filmmakers themselves.

A Nightmare on Elm Street creator Wes Craven had nothing to do with the second film but he participated in the third installment, subtitled Dream Warriors. The initial script was co-written by Craven and returned the series to its roots while expanding the conceit. A new group of teenagers are haunted by Freddy but they find their own superpowers in the dream world and band together to fight Krueger. The film was directed by Chuck Russell, who would later direct 1994’s The Mask, and the script went through massive rewrites by Russell and Frank Darabont, who would later direct The Shawshank Redemption.

Nightmare 3 was an even bigger success, grossing nearly as much as the first two installments combined. It also fundamentally changed the series both in its tone and in its marketing and all subsequent films would have more to do with the style of Dream Warriors than they would with the original picture. Dream Warriors was lighter and more fantastic and Freddy came out of the shadows to become the centerpiece of the franchise.


Dream Warriors benefited from a national advertising campaign and widespread merchandising. Freddy hosted his own MTV special (back when the network actually played music) and all manner of products were peddled to consumers including Freddy dolls, model kits, Halloween costumes, board games, comic books, and record albums.

Throughout the remainder of the 1980s New Line Cinema continued to grow on the exploits of the Nightmare on Elm Street series, earning it the nickname “The Studio That Freddy Built.” In addition to the movies, Freddy Krueger landed on television with the syndicated series Freddy’s Nightmares, a horror anthology in mold of Tales from the Crypt and hosted by the Elm Street slasher. However, as New Line continued to bleed A Nightmare on Elm Street for all it was worth the series became increasingly diluted. The films continued with 1988’s The Dream Master and 1989’s The Dream Child but Freddy was no longer recognizable as the villain from the first movie. He almost never used his trademark claws and filmmakers emphasized humor over horror, turning an edgy villain into a consumer friendly corporate logo.

The Nightmare on Elm Street series formally ended with the sixth film, 1991’s Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. Unfortunately it wasn’t the sendoff that the series and its fans deserved. Whatever the problems of The Dream Master and The Dream Child, they did manage to tell engaging stories and had a scary moment here and there. In Freddy’s Dead the series collapsed into self-parody.

The trajectory of the Nightmare on Elm Street series from the original film to its underwhelming finale is an interesting example of what seems to inevitably happen to all icons of evil. Dracula began as one of the most formidable villains of literature and film but eventually became a puppet who taught mathematics to children on Sesame Street and more recently has been reimagined as a virtuous superhero in Dracula Untold. Between 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs and 2007’s Hannibal Rising, the character of Dr. Hannibal Lecter gradually transformed from a madman and into a cannibalistic antihero.

The case of Freddy Krueger and A Nightmare on Elm Street is not entirely unique but it is one of the most dramatic examples of the tension between art and commerce. Horror is a subversive and transgressive genre which does not lend itself to mainstream appeals or mass marketing campaigns. When a horror character or series eventually does strike a chord with the audience and especially when it does so under the banner of a major Hollywood conglomerate, the logical impulse is to replicate it so that there are more versions for consumers to purchase and pressure is exerted to make that character or that series as accessible to as many people as possible. The result is a gradual flattening of the original idea that usually ends with it becoming a parody of itself.

However, things weren’t quite over for A Nightmare on Elm Street just yet. Three years after Freddy’s Dead and ten years after the original picture, Wes Craven returned to the series with New Nightmare, which tells the story of an actress terrorized by a specter who looks a lot like Freddy Krueger. Craven took the opportunity to correct the course of a series that had veered drastically from his original conception but instead of rehashing the original movie, the filmmaker adopted a radically different approach. By taking the film outside of the continuity and diegesis of the existing series, New Nightmare allowed Craven the opportunity to reflect on the success of the series and what it meant to its makers and to the audience. The film is a smart riff on the original picture, prefiguring the rise of self-referential trends in popular culture, which Craven would do again two years later to great commercial success with 1996’s Scream.


New Nightmare is also a thoughtful dramatization of the psychological and social function of fairy tales and horror stories. Throughout his career, Craven had butted heads with the MPAA ratings board and had fended off accusations that horror films were somehow harmful to viewers. In the context of the movie, Craven suggested that stories allowed people the opportunity to deal with difficult, irrational, and frightening aspects of life and that stopping these kinds of stories would cause those things to show up in real life.

Robert Englund would play Freddy Krueger one more time in 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason, which pitted the Elm Street slasher against Jason Voorhees of the Friday the 13th series. The movie was a satisfying romp and benefited from energetic direction by Ronny Yu; it was funny and campy but also vicious. In some ways it was a look at what Freddy’s Dead could have been with a higher budget and better direction.

Following the successful remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th, Platinum Dunes acquired the rights to produce a new version of A Nightmare on Elm Street, which was released in 2010. Robert Englund had signed off from the role of Freddy Krueger and the glove was passed to Jackie Earle Haley. The new version retreaded a lot of the visuals and set pieces of the 1984 picture but didn’t do them nearly as well and the redesigned look of Freddy’s facial scars was especially terrible. The one positive note about the film is that it provided actress Rooney Mara one of her first leading roles in a feature film.


Thirty years after its original release, A Nightmare on Elm Street continues to frighten its audience. The movie was a mainstream breakthrough for filmmaker Wes Craven and it remains one of his greatest contributions to American cinema. Although Craven’s career has seen dramatic highs and lows, his movies are consistently intelligent and frequently include a political subtext. His characters deal with violent manifestations of social injustice as seen in The People Under the Stairs, and the stories often take place on the seam between the idealized notion of American life and the blemished reality of it as seen in The Last House on the Left. Craven’s films also frequently tread on the boundaries of reality, whether that is the relationship between life and media as seen in the Scream series or the malleability of cultural realities as in The Serpent and the Rainbow. Part of what is special about A Nightmare on Elm Street is that it captures all of these dimensions of Craven’s work in a single film. The movie balances the unsettling and horrific with intelligent filmmaking and presents all of that in a storytelling mode that is generally accessible to a mainstream audience.

Whatever may have happened to this series over the years, the original A Nightmare on Elm Street remains one of the great American horror stories. Whether or not the series has a future is unclear but the central conceit of Nightmare and its memorable villain continue to keep viewers up at night.