The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Cost $300,000 - Box Office, $31 Million
Tobe Hooper was working as a documentary camera man at UT Austin when he had the idea to use the new portability of cameras to focus on a horror bred from the isolation of the Texas landscape. Using elements of Hitchcock’s psycho and the true life story of Ed Gein, Hooper took advantage of a public who were now desensitized to violence through coverage of the Vietnam war on the nightly news to create a new American nightmare…to be trapped in the middle of nowhere with crazy rednecks. The film was a drive-in sensation, and the birth of the slasher genre.
