The Classic Horror Movie That 'Haunted' Stephen King

While Stephen King is universally beloved when it comes to horror, his actual stories tend to be very specific. Indeed, King revisits certain themes and horror scenarios over and over, clearly sticking with his own personal interests as an author. Many have likely noted that King has written multiple stories about alcoholic authors struggling to keep their lives together. This makes sense when you read King's personal tales of cocaine addiction, a problem he grappled with throughout the 1980s. Many of King's stories, from "The Body" to "It" to "Dreamcatcher," are based on his personal nostalgia for the 1950s, and the close-knit group of guy friends he had as a boy. 

King also often writes about the dangers of religious zealotry and the terrors of living with abusive parent figures. He often writes about killer cars or trucks, as he has a personal fear of vehicle accidents. Sometimes, though, King merely pays homage to the EC Comics of his youth by just telling fun, wicked, ironic monster tales. Sometimes, it seems, it's just fun to torture and maim some unsuspecting protagonists by feeding them to a beastie or a killer laundry mangle. 

It's rare, though, that King will get as raw as Tobe Hooper's 1974 horror masterpiece "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre." It's a film he adores, as he said in a recent interview with Variety. "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" isn't about alcoholism, irony, or nostalgia; it's a grimy tale of meat, viscera, skin, and bone. However violent King's stories can be, he brings a relatable degree of authorial elegance to his stories, painting suburban homes, working-class villages, or rural landscapes as void-like, haunted places (King rarely writes about the affluent). "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" is, in contrast, a living abattoir. There are times when it feels like a legit snuff film. 

Of course, saying that "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" scared you is a common enough sentiment. Tobe Hooper somehow made a grimy grindhouse movie for the ages, filming images so unvarnished and disgusting that they stained the world of cinema for generations. The film was made for a mere $140,000, but ended up raking in almost $31 million at the box office. There have since been eight follow-up films, including sequels, prequels, and remakes, making it a regular presence throughout popular culture. 

So King's feelings may not be unique, but they are come by honestly. He admitted that he missed "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" when it was first released in 1974, not catching up with it until 1982, when he was already famous and raising three kids. King remembers seeing it when he was by himself in the theater, saying, "That's when a movie really has a tendency to work on you, to get its cold little fingers under your skin." "Massacre," he said, looked amateurish enough to feel like a real movie. After all, Hooper's film looks like it was made by the cannibals we're witnessing. And seeing an old, scratched 35mm print only made it scarier. As King said:

"It had that kind of washed-out '70s look, for want of the better term. You could tell that this print had been around for a while, and it's better for it, because it just looks f***ing real. It works because there's no artifice about it. There's no buildup, there's no character nuance. I mean, there are scenes in the graveyard ... they're not extras, they're not Hollywood people at all. They look like they came from the nearest little Texas town. It's fantastic."

"Massacre" regularly tops lists of the scariest films of all time. It's comforting to hear that a master of horror was just as scared by Leatherface as the rest of us. He also discusses the film at length in Alexandre O. Philippe's documentary, "Chain Reactions," about the impact of the film on some of horror's greatest minds.