Tobe Hooper & Wayne Bell

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

published in The Wire No.493, London, 2025

Excerpt

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The first time I saw The Texas Chainsaw Massacre decades ago, I was overwhelmed by its abject terror. Waxworks’ release of the film’s restored soundtrack now makes it easy to parse the film’s sonics from its images. For despite bearing a music score credit—post-production sound designer Wayne Bell and director Tobe Hooper—the film arguably does not register as having been scored. In place is a shifting soundscape that is frighteningly acousmatic: sound sources are implied, deflected, aroused, evaporated. Cymbals, chains, thunder sheets, piano strings, shakers, files, rattles, bird whistles, guitar slides, gongs—no matter the device, its sound contributes to a dried pool of dissonance that evokes the choral cacophony of crickets, snakes, flies and mosquitos. The din burrows into your ear like those creatures sensing meat. The ‘cues’ perform as if trapped in the fetid stockroom of the make-shift slaughterhouse, presented with echoic feedback, fretful rubbing, entropic equalization, dissolute wailing, tape degradation and distorted clangs. No wonder the film’s sonics have been attributed to subliminally affecting all stripe of Industrial musicians and noisicians since.

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Text © Philip Brophy. Image © Waxworks.