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Fridge / The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

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Fridge Brilliance

  • Arriving at the Grandfather's house, Franklin examines the blood symbol on the van with a dried up "sausage" in his mouth. As the plot unravels, it's obvious on second viewing that Franklin has a dead man's penis in his mouth. Gunnar Hansen and Daniel Pearl point this out on the DVD Commentary and the shy director Tobe Hooper laughs it off unconvincingly.
  • The iconic shot of Pam's red shorts is gorgeous and ominous as this beautiful girl is slowly lured into a death trap like a fly in a spider's web. But on second viewing, you realize that this was a hypnotic camera effect that highlights her exposed back, which will soon have a rusty meathook rip through it.
  • Before arriving at the house Kirk and Pam pass a car graveyard (and in a Deleted Scene, a disheveled campfire), suggesting that the kids aren't their first 'live' victims.

  • Drayton Sawyer warns the victims not to go onto other people's property, as the others won't take kindly. Whatever his motives (see Alternate Character Interpretation), if they'd taken his warning seriously and stayed on their property, then they probably would have survived just fine. The Sawyers may be cannibals, but they don't kill everyone, and it's only due to Leatherface that the entire thing becomes a massacre. His warning is blown off but is actually serious and to the point as he says that it'd be dangerous to leave their property.
  • As the Hitchhiker is the only family member that full on embraces psychopathic, ghoulish behavior, and we see that he plays with corpses for fun, Leatherface's masks are probably gifts from his brother and not actually made by the big infantile man himself.
    • Which means it was the Hitchhiker who defiled and photographed the corpses from the starting sequence.
  • Franklin calls the Hitchhiker's family a "a whole family of Draculas" and, in the end, a corpse-looking Grandpa sucks Sally's blood to revive himself.

Fridge Horror

  • The worst Fridge Horror of all was revealed on the DVD, where Gunnar Hansen discusses filming conditions in the climactic dinner scene. Not only did he actually cut Marilyn Burns' finger with the knife, but at one point he believed he was meant to literally kill the actress.
  • A kind of terrible Fridge Dramatic Irony, but the protagonists get themselves killed by going into the Sawyer family residence uninvited. There's actually places that it would have been legal to kill them as intruders. It becomes Too Dumb to Live as they're explicitly warned against it by Drayton not an hour before.
  • It's only apparent on rewatch, but when the kids pull up to the gas station and Drayton tells them that the tank is empty, he's standing on the side of the car that the Nubbins put the symbol on. There is no apparent signage saying so at the gas station (which is also still open despite apparently being non-operational) and Drayton doesn't point them in the direction of another place that could fill their tank. It's possible that Nubbins marked the van (much like the Urban Legend of sex traffickers putting zip ties on the car mirrors of women commuting alone) and Drayton lied about the gas, knowing they'd eventually break down and become easy targets.

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