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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974), directed by Tobe Hooper, follows a group of friends terrorized by a family of cannibalistic killers in rural Texas, and its raw, low-budget, documentary-like visual style gave it a level of unsettling realism that distinguished it from more polished later slasher entries. Despite its title and marketing, the film contains remarkably little on-screen gore, relying instead on suggestion, sound design, and the sheer relentlessness of its chase sequences to generate its effect, a restraint that later critics have credited with making it more unsettling rather than less. Its villain Leatherface, wearing a mask made of human skin and wielding the film's titular chainsaw, became one of horror's most enduringly disturbing icons, and the film's low-budget, guerrilla production approach influenced decades of subsequent independent horror filmmaking. Its combination of its genuinely unsettling documentary-style realism and its introduction of Leatherface has made "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" one of the most influential and historically significant films in the entire slasher genre.
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Black Christmas
"Black Christmas" (1974), directed by Bob Clark, follows a sorority house terrorized by an unseen killer making threatening phone calls during the winter holiday, and it is widely credited by film historians as one of the films that essentially established the slasher genre's template years before "Halloween" popularized it commercially. Its use of point-of-view camera shots from the killer's perspective, its focus on a killer whose identity and motivations are deliberately left unresolved, and its holiday-season setting all became conventions that subsequent, more commercially successful slasher films directly adapted. Despite its genuine historical significance, the film remained relatively under-recognized for years compared to the slasher films it influenced, a gap film historians have increasingly worked to correct as the genre's origins have been more carefully studied. Its combination of its genuinely foundational role establishing slasher genre conventions and its unresolved, unsettling central mystery has made "Black Christmas" one of the most historically important, if historically underappreciated, films in the genre.
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