The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Though not the bloodbath its title suggests, Tobe Hooper’s 1974 horror classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has an uncanny home-movie quality that makes it more effective than a thousand slasher films, because all the scares seem so chillingly real. En route to their grandfather’s grave, which may have been desecrated by vandals, Marilyn Burns, her wheelchair-bound brother Paul A. Partain, and three others pick up a sinister hitchhiker and drop him off after he brandishes a knife, slashing himself and Partain. When the siblings visit their old family farm, they run across the hitchhiker in a neighboring home inhabited by cannibals, who in turn chase after them with various power tools.

Updated 10/29/2009