A triumph of apprentices: sound in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Abstract

An influential lm in the consolidation of a very popular realistic semidocumentary aesthetics in contemporary horror films, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) has gained, over the years, innovative status for anticipating the boom of the slasher subgenre, and exploiting the rawness of its images. However, little is said of the bold nature of the sounds that contribute to frighten the audience. This essay aims to reconstruct the creative process of the soundtrack, highlighting the major presence of students and young aspiring professionals in the team responsible for the sound design, and emphasizing how the relative ignorance of professional post-production practices helped to scramble the boundaries between music and sound effects, thus reinforcing an innovative stylistic trend that in uences contemporary cinema.