re: Original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

Part of what makes it great is the grittiness of the filming. I saw it for the first time when I was about 10 in 1983. Having grown up in Shreveport, I was very familiar with a lot of the small towns in northeast Texas where this was supposed to have taken place. The movie did a great job of capturing what these small communities were like in the 70’s and even early 80’s. This coupled with the fact that it was not monsters or ghosts or aliens but regular people is what made it so scary to me.