To say Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is unpleasant to watch would be among the more profound understatements in cinema. Even now, nearly 30 years removed from its original release, the film is disturbing, revolting and a deeply troubled exercise in nearly unparalleled spectatorial discomfort. In fact the film's remarkable impact is precisely owed to its rather raw, independent and amateurish quality inasmuch as that formal lack of a Hollywood sheen lends the affair the feeling of being a nightmare.

Basically about five young adults traveling through Texas who bump into the worst possible circumstantial adversary, Hooper's movie is cleanly divided into two parts. Opening with a radio broadcast describing a cemetery desecration as the first shot of the film, the movie's first half deals with the "heroes" of the picture. They include a winy, wheelchair bound paraplegic named Franklin (Paul A. Partain), his blonde sister Sally (Marilyn Burns), Sally's glasses-wearing boyfriend Jerry (Allen Danziger) and the trio's horny friends Kirk (William Vail) and his girlfriend Pam (Teri McMinn). Each of them is unsympathetic. Each of them is carefree and oblivious. Each of them is affect less save for Franklin who a conscious fifth wheel and, most importantly, each of them is nominally interesting "meat" for the horror genre's inevitable killing grinder.

Among their adventures is the discovery of Sally and Franklin's grandfather as one of several bodies that have been mysteriously molested by an unknown person in a previously unremarkable graveyard. Continuing on their way towards that grandfather's abandoned family estate, the group picks up a spooky Hitchhiker (Edwin Neal) who creeps them out with stories of slaughterhouse practice and a bit of self-mutilation.

Dumping him off on the side of the road they pull into a gas station but are forced to wait out the afternoon so the station's tanks can be replenished since they're currently empty. The Old Man (Jim Siedow) attending the station advises them to stay close by and wait, citing the potential to cross the wrong Texas natives and end up in trouble, but they end up spending their day at Sally and Franklin's ancestral home.

Kirk and Pam leave the group to find an old watering hole, spy a neighbor's house with gas-generated equipment and approach it hoping to barter for fuel. Inside the two-story prairie home nobody answers their calls until a mask-wearing, chainsaw and hammer-wielding terror called Leatherface (Gunnary Hansen) dispatches them in a homemade butcher's shop.

Growing worried about their friend's disappearance, Jerry tries to find them but is killed with a hammer in similar fashion. Night descends upon Sally and Franklin and they agree to search with a flashlight for their lost friends. Then Leatherface kills Franklin with his chainsaw after leaping out as if from nowhere leaving Sally to flee for her life.

So begins the grim second half that is, simply put, an extended chase wherein Sally repeatedly escapes her pursuer, each time with increasing personal horror after being recaptured. In her flight to safety she discovers how the Old Man at the gas station, the Hitchhiker and Leatherface are all members of a dysfunctional family of former slaughterhouse workers displaced by industrial killing techniques. Having resorted to cannibalism, hunting and careful conservation, they now hunt whatever game comes their way. Intending Sally as the centerpiece of a feast for Grandpa (John Duga), an extraordinarily decrepit old man and the family patriarch, a pleasant summer sojourn in Texas becomes an unremittingly terrible fight for survival.

When Sally finally breaks free of the family at daybreak she runs towards the nearby country highway. The Hitchhiker slashes at her back with a switch but is accidentally run over by a passing semi. A pickup truck drives past and Sally hops in the flatbed with her hysterical screams and laughter bleeding together as Leatherface spins his chainsaw in a fit of miss opportunity as the final credits role.

"Once you stop screaming, then you'll start talking about it", read the film's ad copy. Without implying too much marketing brio the sentiment is largely true and allowed The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to usher in the later '70s rush of slasher and sexploitation horror movies largely based on the final-girl model of Sally Hardesty. Of course there were other contributors to the model like Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left although Hooper's movie was undeniably unique with its celebrated status as a cultish midnight movie over the passage of years. Then Halloween organized the final-girl form with more sophisticated technique but Hooper's film remains the granddaddy of them all with its hellishly unbelievable world in which the killing takes place as a task of everyday life.

Budgeted for $140,000 the film also went on to gross some $31 million dollars domestically making it a hit by any stretch of an accountant's imagination. Moreover it served up several sequels in the intervening years between then and now and spawned countless rip-offs, knock-offs, spoofs and homage in various movies and TV programs.

What's most profoundly disturbing about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, though, stems from its formal qualities and from a content-based analyses of the finished film. In short, Hooper made an 83-minute long picture heavily indebted to hand-held camerawork, zooming lenses, very little music, virtually no character development and the entirely grotesque premise of cannibalism as an alternative way of life. The focus is frequently put on the décor and costume of the killer family or centered on the fear and hysterical terror of Sally as she grapples with the reality of her world that's been flipped upside down to make her dinner instead of a welcome dinner guest.

Extreme close-ups of her eyes, in particular, give the film a disembodied experience absent the normally contained lines of a linear narrative. Even though there is a story here about five young people, their cross-country travels and a big bad house in the metaphorical woods, or in this case the wide plains of Texas, there is an equally strong resistance to telling the story in such a straightforward fashion. To this end the film is frequently interested in looking at the looming terrors of killing and being killed but never without the darkest of gallows humor piled on high with a trowel as if to underscore the ludicrousness of the plot with enough natural detail to make it seem real.

Thus Leatherface is an all-but-mute bumbling idiot who wears different masks depending on his duties and the time of day. The Hitchhiker is a psychopath but one with understandable motives since he's been barred from the only profession he's ever known and is in isolation among a house of horrors stretching back, it seems, to the beginning of time. Then the Old Man of the service station is their father but one who is averse to killing despite its necessity both to stock his barbecue business at the roadside gas pump and to feed his wildly dysfunctional family.

An advertisement for the beef and poultry lobby, the film wholeheartedly is not. Likewise its five presumed heroes are nothing more or less than unlikable, self-centered young people without discernible aspirations or interesting quirks that might make them human. Seeing them dispatched by the well-trained technique of Leatherface's trade is satisfying since it satisfies the needs of the genre but also because each of the five, but especially Franklin, are ciphers for inciting murder. Naturally Sally earns our devotion because she's so ruthlessly pursued by the cannibal family for endless minutes of screen time but even she is sympathetic only because she's set upon by amoral evil and not because she's particularly attractive, pleasant or interesting.

So then, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a justifiable high mark in American independent films. It's also a tribute to the University of Texas at Austin's developing film studies and film productions programs in the 1970s plus it's a fitting study of the malevolent modern age with its marginalization of working class people.

Said differently the cannibal family is highly symbolic of the dispossessed American hinterland. Having been partially disabled by the changing economy and rapid technocracy of which the United States has been the poster child since competing with the Japanese in the '70s and '80s, this wide swath of non-mainstream workers live in world that time quite literally forgot. Enjoying none of the benefits of a more civilized world with refinements like processed foods, instantaneous communications and consumer electronics, the cannibal family is in relative isolation, fighting to earn a subsistence living while trying to fulfill the ambition of thrift, creativity and invention so necessary to the American dream.

Unfortunately for Sally et all, this laudable display of national virtue comes at the expense of losing all mooring to an ethics of right versus wrong. The result is an Ed Gein-inspired motion picture with a context setting radio narration by John Larroquette that's filled in with small moments of terror. Witness the Hitchhiker's self-mutilation as a baptism by fire for the five young adults who should've taken a clue. Witness Pam's reluctant view of Kirk's dismemberment as she hangs, dying, from a blood-rusted meat hook and whimpers in pain and disbelief. Witness Grandpa's repeated attempts to kill Sally with a slaughter hammer although he lacks the strength to deliver a much-mythologized single deathblow. Witness Leatherface's mania at letting Sally escape after cutting his own thigh and watching his brother, the Hitchhiker, being run over by a passing truck.

Altogether 1974 may have been the year of Francis Ford Coppola's Oscar winner The Godfather Part II, Roman Polanski classic thriller Chinatown or the big budget Paul Newman and Steve McQueen action-adventure vehicle The Towering Inferno. Yet it was equally the year of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, an ad hoc mixture of high and low art, good and bad technique, strong social commentary and horrific sequencing to deliver one of the most powerful wallops American cinema has ever seen.

See it at your own peril but see it just the same. As future sequels would intone, "the saw is family."