10 Best "What's Around The Corner" Horror Movie Moments

Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a masterpiece - a clammy, rusting, industrial terror that lays bare a generation's post-war trauma with one menacing credo, exemplified in its most iconic sequence. Hooper's guerilla-style production excised genre tropes, cultivated new ones, and turned daytime into nighttime, transforming the sun's comforting glow into an oppressive heat from which there was no escape.

The backend of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a delirious waking hell, in which Marylin Burns' Sally Hardesty is tortured by and then escapes from the Sawyer family in an incredible moment of catharsis. Before that, though, the film almost revels in its lack of motive. Sally, her friends, and her brother Fanklin head out into the countryside to see if their grandfather's corpse has been mutilated by a reported grave robber. This, along with Franklin's discussion of the slaughter industry, his errant truck-driver-induced tumble and their encounter with the Hitchhiker obviously serves as a portent to their ultimate fates, but each event is spontaneous, abrupt, and soon vanquished from memory.

These sequences all lay the groundwork for Texas Chain Saw's most abrupt moment of horror - one that crystalises its central motif with a crushing hammer blow to the head.

After looking for a place to go swimming, two of Sally's friends, Kirk and Pam, discover a house with a gas generator that could be used to get their van on its way. They approach the house from the rear, which while in a slight state of decay, doesn't seem incredibly ominous. Anxieties are further laid to rest when they reach the front of the house, which is gleaming white, complete with a swing chair and a neatly trimmed lawn - an almost suburban oasis in a landscape of dying industry and overgrown vegetation.

Approaching the door and getting no reply from the occupants, Kirk cautiously lets himself into a dark, drafty interior, a blood-red room adorned with skulls the lone source of colour. Hooper lingers on this moment of trepidation expertly - framing the red room at a distance and then cutting back closer as Kirk approaches. We know nothing good is behind there, and yet the rift is soon crossed. Kirk jogs forward, trips, and out of the red comes Leatherface, bearing down with so much menace it's almost impossible to process.

The sequence is maneuvered expertly by Hooper, opening the reveal with the camera at a disarming distance before switching to a high-angle shot of Kirk's bewilderment, and then a low-angle zoom as Leatherface raises the hammer over our heads. The weapon comes down, Kirk twitches, the metal door slams shut. In a moment, life was there and then it wasn't.

That grizzly spontaneity is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre's secret weapon. For as much as we may want to explain Leatherface and what happens to Sally and her friends, the reality is that so much earthly horror emerges from nothing. Most of the time, you won't even know what hit you.