Not infrequently the boundary between fiction and reality takes on such blurred contours as to be difficult to identify. It is true that cinematic fiction is sometimes a distorting mirror (by default) of the reality that surrounds us, and glaring proof of this is the schizophrenic Ed Gein, a sexually deviant multiple murderer who, in his madness, repudiated being a man. He wanted to be female and believed that by wearing women's skin, he could transform himself in turn into a beautiful girl. And so Ed Gein went down in history as one of the most ferocious and ruthless serial killers: he not only raped his victims but also made them die slowly, skinned them, and clothed himself in their skin. Sometimes he fed on the remains, which, at any rate, he kept in his squalid hellish abode. Few crimes he committed, but they were so brutal and indescribable that they consigned him to history as the bearer of one of the most twisted and diseased minds Earth has ever seen...
So when Hitchcock asked Robert Bloch (masterful thrill writer) to script a film based on that character, Psycho (1960) was born. The same character, 14 years later, inspired director Tobe Hooper, to whom we owe, in part, the typical conformation of the genre assumed in the late 1970s.
Ed Gein, perhaps not everyone knows, is the reference "model" behind Thomas Harris's book The Silence of the Lambs, which, in turn, inspired the character Buffalo Bill (androgynous leaning toward sexual metamorphosis) in Jonathan Demme's celebrated and award-winning The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
Thus was born, we said, in 1974 the serial chainsaw character and that is Leatherface (Leatherface, precisely). The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (original U.S. title translatable as "the chainsaw massacre" is renamed in Italian with the prohibitive title Non Aprite quella Porta and, given the premise, the film is an instant success. The unhealthy atmosphere, the perfect set design (the house full of bones and human remains), and the purest thriller characterize this solid film that, at the time, caused a huge stir (on par with William Friedkin's almost contemporary The Exorcist '73). A dark and cursed film that, only in the late 1990s, found an outlet on the home-video market after having literally disappeared from the Italian film circuit (and having passed through TV, obviously on private networks, in a cut version in the cycle presented by Dario Argento in the early 1980s).
The film tells the story of a group of young people stranded in Texas who find themselves guests in the home of a family of crazed killers practicing, with the bodies of their victims, to garnish a butcher shop.
One of the craziest and most indecent characters Leatherface dresses smartly (he wears a shirt and tie), but covers his deformed face with the facial skin of his victims.
However, one survivor, who escaped the massacre, will find an unhappy fate awaiting her: madness.
Exceptional nighttime chases through the woods, moonlit, chainsaw blazing, and beautiful, highly thriller sequences make Do Not Open That Door a must-see staple of the horror genre.
Despite the hype and enormous success, Hooper would return to direct the series twelve years later, in 1986 with Don't Open That Door 2 (Written by L.M. Kit Carson, known for his screenplay for Paris, Texas. The film, remarkable in its first half, lapses in the final part, characterized by scenes seasoned with too much superficiality and irony (a constant this one dear to the director, who can pack masterpieces as indescribable ugliness: see SC-Spontaneus Combustion '91 or, even worse, The Mangler '94 ). The film is worthy of mention solely for the scenes featuring the main character (Leatherface) intent on carrying out massacres, in the beautiful scenic layout due to effects wizard Tom Savini (author later, in 1991 of the remake of The Night of the Dead-Living and in the sympathetic performance of Dennis Hopper as a sheriff.
Apart from Claudio Fragasso's Italian apocryphal Non Aprite quella Porta 3 (1988), which takes the form of a thriller, inspired more by the figure of Freddy Krueger than by "leatherface," we find the subjects of the original film in the successful Leatherface (1991), directed by Jeff Burr.
Although the Splatter effects are rather restrained, the film comes across as engaging and distressing, and at times, perhaps due in part to the performance of the black man as the hero, it is hazily reminiscent of The Night of the Living-Dead.
Definitely negligible fourth chapter, which adds nothing to a now saturated story, presenting the same ingredients but in a context of "sweetening" and glossy photography typical of the horror current (aimed at teen-agers) of the new millennium...
Excellent, on the other hand, is the result achieved by the remake of the first chapter directed by Marcus Nispel in 2003, which features the same characters as in Hooper's original film, with interesting variations (e.g., the initial suicide of the survivor, or the unexpected and dazzling ending) and with a decidedly intense and faithful approach toward the subject matter.
There are many films that refer (more or less overtly) to Hooper's film. In recent years, mention can be made of Rob Schimdt's Wrong Turn (an undeclared remake that mixes Hooper's film with Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, the brilliant debut film signed by musician Rob Zombie, The House of 1000 Bodies and a rather original version (and also critical of Society and certain racist attitudes) where, instead of the deviant characters of the reference film, a kind of virus with devastating effects appears: Cabin Fever (Eli Roth, 2003).
It is worth mentioning the good characterization of Gunnar Hansen as Leatherface in the first film directed by Hooper, who would often be recalled to play similar roles such as in Freakshow (1995), or in the more recent thrill gems The Demons 5 (2005) and Hellblock 13 (2000, the latter distributed by Lloyd Kaufmann's Troma).
The character of Don't Open That Door, therefore, will often be taken up, reworked and reworked in various horror films, until the recent "biography" (with unexciting results) brought to the screens by Chuck Parello in 2000, with the eponymous title Ed Gein. He, like many other evil horror movie stars, is one of the most highly regarded characters who, paradoxically, draws his origins from real events.
On the other hand, it is well known that man is attracted to horror and death and, often, places on an altar (of blood) idols that have very little that is human.
"The impulse had become irresistible. There was only one answer to the fury that tortured him. And so he committed his first murder. He had broken the deepest taboo and felt neither guilt nor anxiety or fear, but ... freedom!
Every human obstacle, every humiliation that barred his way, could be swept away by this simple act of annihilation: murder."
(From the book TENEBRAE, by fictional writer Peter Neal, in the Argentine masterpiece of the same name).
Special edited by Fabio Pazzaglia
