The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Soundtrack, “Holy Grail Of Film Scores,” Finally Getting Released After 51 Years
In 1974, first-time director Tobe Hooper put together a mostly-unprofessional cast and crew, many of whom were students at UT Austin, to make The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a low-budget horror movie inspired by the Ed Gein murders. The result was a harrowing, fucked-up classic that became hugely important to the history of horror cinema, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre spawned many sequels and reboots, while its iconic Leatherface character has a place on the Mount Rushmore of movie slashers. More importantly, the movie’s murky, chaotic tone echoed down through entire generations of horror movies. It’s the gold standard for ugly, uncomfortable cinematic experiences, and a lot of that comes down to the haunted, experimental score. Now, after more than half a century, that score is finally about to come out.
Tobe Hooper and soundman Wayne Bell composed the Texas Chain Saw Massacre score, a disquieting collage of clanks, scrapes, buzzes, screeches, and this one recurring sound that sounds like a flash camera going off. Hooper and Bell recorded some of it with everyday household objects, like can lids and a saucepan half-full of water. The score became an object of cult fascination, and it was often bootlegged, sometimes just in the form of the entire movie’s audio track. Hooper, who died in 2017, never showed any interest in giving that music a proper release. Next year, however, the film-score label Waxwork Records will release it.
Stereogum contributor Christopher R. Weingarten has written a New York Times feature about the process of releasing this score, which was not easy. Waxwork co-founder Kevin Bergeron says that that the label has spent more than a decade trying to release that score, calling it a”holy grail.” The master tapes were donated to UT Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, where they were archived, but Hooper and Bell had them haphazardly labelled, so Bell had to go back through the tapes to organize and reconstruct them. He says, “It’s putting together a thousand-piece puzzle of very similar-shaped and similar-looking pieces.” Check out the main title theme below.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is out on vinyl in March, via Waxworks. Read the Times story here.
