The story behind The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s iconic score | Dazed

Whether it’s Leatherface flamboyantly swinging his chainsaw around like Jimi Hendrix doing a guitar solo at Woodstock; the tortured Sally (played by Marilyn Burns) screaming so hard her vocal chords seem to be on the edge of rupturing; or a foaming-at-the-mouth hitchhiker explaining how his sledgehammer turns cattle into a delicacy known as “head cheese”, director Tobe Hooper’s gnarly 1974 film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, is filled with demented horror sequences etched into the collective psyche.

Despite recently celebrating its 50th anniversary, this legendary horror film has lost none of its stomach-churning powers. Debate still rages on about whether it’s really a metaphor for the miseries of industrial capitalism and, my personal favourite theory: the greatest pro-veganism statement ever committed to celluloid. However, one crucial aspect of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that often gets downplayed is its discordant, bone-scraping sound design and score.

Demonic howls of wind, rusty tremors of bass, and crashing metallic cymbals all combine to gnaw away at your brain matter, completely elevating the ugly images shown on screen. These raw musical elements create a guttural, unstable wall of sound, which feels like it could easily cave in and collapse onto your head at any given second.

“My job was to create this world that you don’t see, but it’s still a central part of building out the menace,” explains the veteran Wayne Bell, who masterminded The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s unsettling soundscapes and created its score in partnership with his “friend” Hooper. “It was about creating a musical tone so that when you’re watching these relatively mundane characters driving through the Texan countryside, there’s a feeling something dreadful is bubbling under the surface. There’s something mystical in it, for sure; the music could be perceived as nature taking its vengeance.”

Having worked for various local radio stations across central Texas, Bell was the perfect person to create the fuzzy van stereo transmissions that are a constant presence throughout the film. Jolly, banjo-based Hicksville jams are juxtaposed with a solemn newscaster warning listeners about graverobbers using decomposing corpses to create “grisly works of art” down at the local cemetery.

Bell’s father was an accomplished fiddle player, but because his dad was also blind, he didn’t get to experience images and music working in unison. Therefore, from a young age, Bell was taught by his dad the importance of instruments creating compositions so vibrant that they could conjure up whole scenes inside a listener’s head.

The reality is budget restrictions meant that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – despite its poster famously teasing “Who will survive and what will be left of them?” – doesn’t show any real gore. Yet due to Bell having such a unique talent for using minimalist noises to cinematic effect, you still go away convinced you’ve witnessed unspeakable horrors. This is perfectly crystallised by a scene where one character is “impaled” by Leatherface onto a meat hook. Bell’s juddering, warped drone synth, which sounds like Satan purring, works in tandem with a mis-triggering farm generator echo to build so much suspense that you swear you’ve just seen the hook twist into a human spine.

There’s a unique marriage between the diegetic and non-diegetic sounds, with the score subsequently feeling like its own lurking character. Bell, Hooper and producer Ron Bozman experimented with a mountain dulcimer, bleeding out all the weirdness from this diatonic, four-string instrument and then funneling its white notes through the slap-back delay of a busted-up cassette player. This resulted in a compelling unreality; the feeling of being lost inside a waking, blood orange sunshine-lit nightmare.

Back in 1974, industrial rock, dark ambient, and noise music weren’t quite established yet, but the aforementioned techniques were a formative influence on all these budding sub-genres. It’s not an exaggeration to say The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s score directly inspired the sadistic auras of influential artists and bands like Throbbing Gristle, Nurse With A Wound, Sun O))), The Haxon Cloak, and the Nine Inch Nails. In fact, the latter band sampled the horror film on their 1994 song “Reptile”. This makes Bell a forefather to so many classic albums.

For years and years now The Texas Chainsaw Massacre fans have begged for a vinyl release of the original score, which Bell is currently working on for Waxwork Records. Its release next year should finally cement the visceral power of the score. Perhaps Bell’s most famous contribution is the iconic screeching sound effect you hear in the opening scene. Over the top of visuals of decomposing flesh, a flashing noise mimics a whistling chainsaw. This stretched out noise is reminiscent of two piano wires being rubbed together, but also a pig squealing and the end of a garden pitchfork being forced over a metallic service.

Bell, however, outright refuses to reveal how it was created. “It’s not that complicated or sophisticated, I promise! In fact, I could play that noise to you right now in my studio,” Bell, who is currently managing the sound dialogue design for a new film with frequent collaborator and Boyhood’ director Richard Linklater, teased. “That noise just embodies the mystique and the aura of the chainsaw, but it’s sort of my Big Mac sauce recipe, too, and I won’t ever reveal it. I’m sure some kid will figure out how to do it one day.”

On set, we would take watermelons and throw them as high as we possibly could, letting them crash onto the asphalt of the highway. It was a lot of fun and created this glorious squelch

Luckily, Bell is more eager to divulge other secrets from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s shoot. So, to celebrate Halloween, I spoke to him on everything from the horror film’s influential score, being present on a sweltering set that stunk so bad it was “awful”, and just how he created that horrific clatter when Leatherface whacks his first victim in the skull with a sledgehammer.

I’ve always felt like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is primarily a film about the horrors of industrial capitalism, with the conveyor belt processes of contemporary meat production putting a lot of everyday Joes out of work and subsequently resulting in this overwhelming hatred. I feel like your score is a perfect reflection of all this. The ‘Death Room’ song, for example, has the noises of banging shelves and machine motors; it’s a symphony of everyday industrial noises. It was very important your music sounded rusty, right?

Wayne Bell: The film is about a family that worked in an abattoir for generations and suddenly their work was all gone. So, even though the work has been replaced by modern methods, they kept on killing, because they’ve never known anything different! I’d say the Vietnam War landscape definitely impacted the film’s point of view, too. It’s why there’s so much chaos in the air.

Rusty, huh? No one has ever put it like that to me before, but it sounds accurate, because metal is definitely a big part of the sound! There’s a metal and steel component to the reoccuring crash cymbals and the Fender lap guitar; we had this desire to create a metallic undercurrent to everything you hear. Remember: the chainsaw is a metal device and the thing that does all the damage is that spinning, seething rusty chain. We had no desire to create anything too electronic-sounding, but rather something raw.

When Leatherface swings that sledgehammer at the guy’s skull, there’s this cracking sound. Even though you don’t actually see it fully connect with his head, the noise alone is enough to create this dark image of a brain exploding. How exactly did you achieve that horrid noise?

Wayne Bell: I remember I submitted two or three different sounds. On set, we would take watermelons and throw them as high as we possibly could, letting them crash onto the asphalt of the highway. It was a lot of fun and created this glorious squelch. I also took the cracking of pecan shells and the essential thud of a banging fist. Those were the core components that were mixed into the sound you ended up hearing in the final movie. Our budget was so small that only Tobe could afford to go to LA for the final sound mixing, so I don’t know which of the three sounds that they ultimately used.

It’s interesting because The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was banned for many years in the UK and branded a ‘video nasty’ because of its supposed gore. Yet you never really see any blood, it’s more suggested. Would you agree it’s your sound and score that was creating the violent images that entered people’s minds?

Wayne Bell: Absolutely. I come from a radio background and the wonderful thing about radio is that it’s all in the mind! It’s about creating the right mix of sounds so that you can trick people into imagining something; if you do that, then you’ve succeeded at your job. A lot of the sound effects you hear, well, they are actually things I took directly from my time in radio. The unsettling noise of all the spiders scurrying into the corner of the ceiling, for example; that particular cue is created by tapping your fingers on the microphone in a special way.

I think a lot of the credit for how unsettling the film’s atmosphere is should really go to our art director Robert A. Burns and his set design for the cannibal family’s house. He made all these bone sculptures out of chicken and pig parts. It was the detritus that one might imagine coming direct from a slaughterhouse. I know Tobe and Bob had read a lot into Ed Gein, too, a farmer-turned-murderer who cut off his victim’s faces and wore them around his house. Ed Gein made lampshades out of human skin, which we re-created in our film. Ed’s macabre behavior is certainly a big part of the film’s wonderfully awful environment.

There’s so many urban legends about what The Texas Chainsaw Massacre shoot was really like. For the family dinner sequence, for example, I read you shot for an uninterrupted 26 hours and, because it was the Texan summer, the set was melting. What was it like actually being there?

Wayne Bell: So many of the stories are apocryphal, but I would agree that the dinner scene was the worst moment. As I recall, the youngest member of our team, 20-year-old John Dugan, well, he was made up to become the finger-sucking, 99-year-old Grandpa character. They transformed his whole body into this wrinkly skin. The problem was once he took off the make-up and skin suit, the process would completely destroy it all, so we had to shoot and fit all his sequences into one long day of filming.

Of course, there was no air conditioning and it was a hot Texas summer, so all the meat-based art pieces that Burns designed started to smell awful. Everyone was dripping in sweat and we shot for a good 26 hours. For the dinner scene I was actually on a ladder holding and swinging the boom microphone above all the actors; essentially dancing with their dialogue and screams. I was standing high up and we all know that heat rises, so I was in the hottest and smelliest part of that whole situation. It was awful, but it was kind of exciting too!

It’s about creating the right mix of sounds so that you can trick people into imagining something; if you do that, then you’ve succeeded at your job

I know the late Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface, became a close friend to you. As Leatherface he’s terrifying, sure, but he’s also a lost little boy in a way, especially in that close up shot by the window where he seems to be wondering where all these victims keep coming from.

Wayne Bell: I appreciate you bringing him up. Me and Gunnar used to always eat breakfast together at this 24-hour cafe in Austin, Texas called the Nighthawk. He was the loveliest man. He used to go to a lot of the horror conventions and I think the fans loved meeting the original Leatherface, because they realized that this big, hulking character was in fact an erudite, intelligent, and clear eyed guy. There’s a softness behind his mass of flesh, which comes out in his performance.

Of course, Chainsaw had massive success at the box office, but the actors made next to nothing. When it came to the sequels, Gunnar asked for more money, as he felt he was a big part of the success, but the low budget mentality prevailed and they recast him completely. It broke his heart! Gunnar Hansen is the reason the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre feels a little like a black comedy. When he puts the woman’s outfit on and fusses over the food like an old lady at Thanksgiving, it just gives Leatherface another dimension. That close up shot you mention, where he looks around anxiously, well his eyes just communicate so much worry and pain. It’s a genius performance.

And finally, why do you think people are still talking about this film’s music all these years later?

Wayne Bell: It was a special moment in my career, because it was Tobe who encouraged me to take up sound design and this led to a whole career. You know, I hoped he would become a bigger star in the picture business. Tobe had so much talent, so I think it’s a shame he wasn’t even more successful than he was as a filmmaker. I definitely miss him.

What we were doing together was playing around on that edge between what is music and what is sound. We found operating on that edge a fascinating place and I think the viewers did too. We were throwing out Western concepts of harmony and melody in the search of something abstract. You know, I was exactly where I wanted to be: at 22, I was being paid to make a film! The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as miserable as it was, it was such a delightful lark. I got cancer a few years back and have had to slow down, but having fans come up to me and say the score changed their lives has been the most wonderful thing. That film is filled with creative sparks, which the viewer will always find a way to latch onto. It’s a grisly work of art, that’s for sure.