Rated R

Starting with “Frankenstein” and “Dracula,” and throughout the 1960s with such films as “The Haunting” and “Psycho,” horror movies were once a rich canvas on which to explore the psycho-sexual longings of some characters that would not normally be afforded, or even allowed, much screen time. At its most sublime, the genre gave us not just great scares, but ones that were made all the more memorable because they arrived in an atmosphere of sexual and psychological uncertainty.

In the 1970s—perhaps beginning with the original “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”—the fusion of horror and what came to be known as the slasher film flowered, and we started on the slow but sure descent to the genre’s present condition. Horror and slasher films are now basically the same thing. Nuance got cut.

The apotheosis of this de-evolution is on display in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning.” It’s a prequel to the 2003 remake starring Jessica Biel, which means the team of filmmakers on this film, which includes producers Tobe Hooper, the director of the 1974 classic, and his partner, Kim Henkel (who co-wrote the first outing), have basically disemboweled their beloved original. By making this prequel, which includes some of the same cast of the 2003 version, they are essentially saying the 1974 version doesn’t exist.

It does, of course. The original is a masterful exercise in mood and in the precise yet indispensable element of tension. The prequel has none of that. It has one primary method of murder and torture—to have the character we know as Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski) ram an over-sized chainsaw through the chest of a screaming young person. This is always done in the presence of a cackling psycho, who laughs louder as the blood continues to spray and spurt in a rain-like deluge.

You know the story: a group of beautiful, oversexed young people (they’re not teenagers in this version) starts on a trek that takes them through the desolate Texas countryside. It’s 1969. The fact that one of the young men, Dean, played by Taylor Handley, is on his way to re-enlist in the Marine Corps for a second hitch in Vietnam is supposed to, I think, add an element of pathos. What the filmmakers inadvertently do is diminish the heroism and meaning of real-life Marines (and other servicemen and women) who actually had to go through that.

Dean’s decision to re-enlist is supported by his girlfriend (Jordana Brewster), but he finds out during the trip that his brother Eric (Mathew Bomer) has decided not to enlist and instead plans on going to Mexico with his girlfriend Bailey (Diora Baird).
No matter. They get hijacked by the crazy Hewitt family, which lives by eating the entrails of the various people they kill. In “The Beginning” we are supposed to be the getting the backstory to Leatherface and Sheriff Hoyt (R. Lee Ermey), a character who first appeared in the remake three years ago. Ermey’s acting career is a horror show in itself, having almost the same trajectory as Bela Lugosi, who started out making classics and ended up in the cheapest horror films imaginable. Whatever. The details of how these grotesques came to be are uninteresting and unenlightening.

But we don’t go to this kind of movie for that stuff. It’s the thrill of how people get mangled that’s the true attraction.
If Hollywood has trouble creating a thriller with nuance and disturbing psychological undertones, it has become quite adept at creating blood and gore and goo and viscera. This entire film, directed by Jonathan Liebesman, is rank with stagnant, repugnant pools of water and vats of stinking liquids. Everything is covered in some kind of filth, and it all looks amazingly real. The throat-slashings and leg amputations and knee-cap crushings and skin filleting all crack and spew as one would imagine they do in real life.

The movie concludes with none of the members of the Hewitt Family dead, which means they will be back. “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” movies, which started when a group of young filmmakers had the fortitude and talent to reimagine a genre and get it all down on screen, are a full-blown franchise now. This is great for the filmmakers’ bank accounts, not so good for us.