i recently took advantage of the halloween season to rewatch the texas chain saw massacre for the millionth time. no one needs another long-winded blog about how great director tobe hooper‘s quintessential american horror movie is, but i do want to draw attention to a half-minute sequence from the film i adore and think out loud about why i find it so striking.

the texas chain saw massacre follows five young adults — hardesty siblings sally and franklin as well as their friends jerry, pam, and kirk — as they travel rural texas to ensure sally and franklin‘s late grandfather still rests in peace after a spate of graverobbing incidents. despite a traumatic run-in with a violent hitchhiker, the group decides to stick around and visit an abandoned house once owned by the hardesty family. pam and kirk head off to find a watering hole, but instead end up at another home where they separate. kirk is caught by leatherface and killed while pam waits a little ways away from the house on a bench swing, oblivious to his fate. when kirk fails to respond to her pleas to leave, pam stands and heads towards the home herself.

the camera is situated in such a way so that, as pam approaches the house, it appears to grow larger and larger until it’s completely blocked out everything else in the surrounding environment. even the sky disappears behind the building’s magnitude, almost as if it’s alive and cresting the horizon with the slow terror of a massive beast. soon, pam is enveloped as well, first by the home itself and then by the pitch black screen door through which kirk disappeared. she leans into the dark chasm of the doorway, unaware of the horrors awaiting her within, and it surrounds her like the waiting, open mouth of an ambush predator. its patience is soon rewarded when she too enters the house and becomes leatherface‘s second victim.

hooper and cinematographer daniel pearl constructed this shot while on set. it doesn’t appear in the shooting script — the whole sequence is based on a single sentence: “she mounts the steps” — and didn’t even make it into the storyboards, the latter of which production was keen to adhere to for scheduling purposes. fortunately, the duo had their way, at least according to commentary hooper, pearl, and leatherface actor gunnar hansen recorded for the movie’s 1996 laserdisc release.

“we ran into quite a bit of resistance from production about us shooting this shot,” pearl explains. “but this is just the kind of thing that comes up in the course of making a film. if my memory’s correct, tobe, we had to pretty much have a mexican standoff over shooting that shot.”

“we did have to say, ‘no, we have to have this shot,’” hooper adds.

“they threatened to fire us, we threatened to quit,” pearl continues, “i think it has emerged as one of the most memorable shots of the picture.”

the texas chain saw massacre is a lot of things. it’s a horror movie. it’s bloody and messy and lurid and stifling. it’s an indictment of the death and decay behind american consumption. it’s also beautiful, at least in bits and pieces, and i think that tends to get lost when remembering all the other feelings this movie elicits. it’s unfortunate hooper and pearl would never collaborate on another film, but we’ll always have the texas chain saw masscre — not to mention this brilliant, 30-second sequence before the carnage begins in earnest — to remember their single, fleeting partnership by.