The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Film That Terrified a Rattled Nation

Lanza turns his attentions to the production, reception, social climate, and impact of a movie that rattled the American psyche in the wake of Nixon, Watergate, and Vietnam.

When Tobe Hooper’s low-budget slasher film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, opened in theaters in 1974, it was met in equal measure with disgust and reverence. The film—in which a group of teenagers meet a gruesome end when they stumble upon a ramshackle farmhouse of psychotic killers—was outright banned in several countrie...