Trick or Trailers: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

Say what you will about Platinum Dunes' Texas Chainsaw remake but one thing that must be agreed on is that New Line totally sold the shit out of this movie.

When this project was announced, horror fans were apoplectic at the idea of remaking Tobe Hooper's 1974 classic. Sequels were one thing but a remake just seemed...sacrilegious. And the fact that it would be produced by Michael Bay was a further cause for concern.

One thing Michael Bay knows about, though, is making hits and whatever expertise he lent the new TCM paid off in terms of this movie's commercial appeal. Director Marcus Nispel (working with original TCM cinematographer Daniel Pearl) gave this movie a slick sheen, miles away from the raw vibe of Hooper's film and the trailer celebrated that, grabbing the attention of a new audience.

While my experience of watching TCM '03 with a very packed, amped up crowd on its opening night of October 17th, 2003, was as ideal as it gets, there was plenty to find fault with (No cannibalism in TCM? What?) and it's a movie I haven't felt the need to go back to since.

Platinum Dunes' subsequent remakes weren't any more memorable, with their 2005 revamp of The Amityville Horror probably being the best of the bunch.

Prior to this, it was assumed (at least by me) that the horror classics of the '70s were sacred ground - that they would forever stay untouched. Why I thought this, I don't know, because I grew up seeing classics of the '50s, like The Blob and The Thing, remade throughout the '80s. Somehow that seemed logical, though.

Special effects had made so many leaps since the '50s that it seemed reasonable to apply that new technology to older classics and go state of the art with them. The advantage of remaking films like Texas Chainsaw, on the other hand, seemed harder to figure.

Hard to figure or not, the TCM remake gave me and fans of my generation a rude awakening as we had to get accustomed to specifying "remake" or "original" whenever we referred to movies like TCM, Halloween, Dawn of the Dead, or The Hills Have Eyes.

And that is when I knew I had gotten old.

Evil Wears Many Faces

Coming of age during the glory days of horror franchises in the '80s made me soft-hearted towards shitty horror sequels so I'm already predisposed to giving the latest installment in the Chainsaw saga (due January '13) a fair shake but that said, the above poster piques my interest in the new Chainsaw an extra notch.

I don't know what kind of approach I expected the marketing for this movie to take but this is definitely grislier than I expected so thumbs-up for that. Back when the '03 remake was released, the poster was a real ho-hum affair. Remember?

I guess they were trying to stay classy, what with remaking a classic, but when you're working with one of the most brilliantly exploitative titles in the history of horror, why not incorporate that spirit of exploitation in your advertizing? After all, it worked for the original:

To be fair, we're talking entirely different times. And hey, the remake's poster was still arguably better than the poster for TCM 2, which - for reasons I don't think have ever been explained - spoofed The Breakfast Club.

But anyhow, back to this new poster...

It's ironic that the most graphically gruesome Chainsaw poster yet is for the first film in the franchise to have no Massacre in the title but dropping "Massacre" is no more offensive than squeezing another buck out of Hooper's masterpiece in the first place so I'll let it slide.

My reaction to this poster is pretty simple - I like how straight-up nasty it is. It reminds me of the kind of garish VHS box art that would've demanded that I take a movie home back in the day. It revels in surface level grossness rather than promising to explore true terror (we'll see how the film itself is) but my inner adolescent will always have room for crassly marketed horror.

As genre franchises go, Texas Chainsaw Massacre doesn't have the best track record but it's no Howling or Return of the Living Dead either. It's true that post-Hooper, there's never been a great TCM movie but when you're talking horror sequels, "great" seldom enters into the equation. Sometimes the closest you get to that is with the marketing material.

That's not ideal, but you've got to take great where you can get it.