I was 8 years old when the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released into theaters in 1974. Being from the titular state, and hearing talk that it was one of the most horrifying things ever to grace the screen, of course I wanted to see it. My parents were fairly open-minded, but they certainly wasn’t going to allow an 8 year-old watch a film about Texans being slaughtered via gas powered hand tools. For years I thought the movie was about a group of maniacs driving into Texas and wiping out innocents. I didn’t know said maniacs were from the lone star state as well. When I was able to finally see the film in a theater, it played almost like a documentary to me. Why was that? To explain, I need to go back several years:

I grew up at Lake Mexia Texas, which was really more like a very large pond surrounded by what were called farm-to-market roads. These roads were made either of gravel (mostly limestone) or covered with an oil and tar mixture called “Black Top”. The latter would soften under the blazing hot summer sun, and stuck to EVERYTHING that ran over it. Car tires and bumpers would be covered in the shit for the remainder of the vehicles life. The lake itself would stagnate during summer draughts and usually smelled like feet and old piss.

There was a family that lived on the other side of the lake from us. They were always known as “The Johnsons”, and I can never recall a first name of any of them. It was always “The Mother Johnson” or “That youngest Johnson girl”. They lived in what looked like a big refurbished barn and there were always scrawny chickens and roosters running around in front of the weed covered front lawn. They were rarely seen doing any business in town, and it was always said of the Johnsons that they “keep to themselves”. I’d been to their house a few times, because my sister was friends with the oldest Johnson boy, and would take me with her when she was babysitting. I once saw the father of the Johnson clan lead a sack of bones goat into the backyard and tie it to a tree. He then shot the poor beast in the head with hunting rifle and hung it upside down over a large metal bucket, then skinned and gutted it with a huge butcher knife. Just about every organ of that goat, heart included, was saved and wrapped carefully in brown butcher’s paper. The metal bucket was filled halfway with blood at the end of it all, and was taken into the house by the youngest Johnson girl. I never found out what was done with all that blood and I’m glad of it.

The youngest of the Johnson family was a boy a few years younger than me. He rarely spoke and his eyes were just a little too far apart. He never went to school that I know of, and had the glazed-over stare of lobotomy patient. That little motherfucker once burned me on the forearm with the stub of a lit cigarette, and laughed like a loon while doing it. I think his punishment was that his cigarettes were taken away for a week. His was about 5 years old. I never saw the oldest Johnson girl with anyone outside of the family, and yet she got pregnant at least twice that I know of.

The Johnsons kept to themselves you see.

In 1976 my parents went to Waco and bought me a brand new Honda Z-50 dirt bike. This was literally a mini motorcycle. It was kickstarted, had three gears, and could do about 40 mph on a good day. The rule was that I was supposed to ride the bike only on the gravel roads and within a few miles of home, but such a rule was impossible for an 11 year-old boy with his own motorcycle to obey. I loved to explore the unknown back then, and I’d circle the lake on my Honda looking for old dirt roads I’d never been down before. There was an old wooden sign nailed to a tree at the entrance to one of these roads. HONEST RIDGE it read in fading black paint. Dusty and so narrow it was barely wide enough for one vehicle; Honest Ride road was a goldmine of new discoveries. There were barbed wire fences on both sides of the road, that seemed to protect nothing but barren fields of weeds and old abandoned houses. I’d park my little Honda behind a tree and crawl under the fences, often ripping a hole in my shirt and getting a nice sized scratch on my back in the bargain on the barbed wire. I’d walk through those decaying wooden houses, usually finding nothing but empty rooms, or sometimes they’d be filled with bales of hay. Once though I found a home that was almost completely furnished. There was a rotting chest of drawers in one room, with moth eaten clothes in some of them. The skeletal remains of an old piano lay in the middle of the living room, and a moldy box spring mattress in the largest bedroom. Strangely the floor of this same room was covered in chicken feathers and bones. There were also several used condoms on the mattress. I remember thinking there was a very disturbing story in the history of that old house. I believe I even had a few nightmares about it. Honest Ridge also had a cemetery, which I’d explore on those forbidden trips on my Honda. A rusty gate opened onto rolls of stone tombstones, long forgotten. Moss covered the markers like a cancer, and the few dates that I could read were from the late 1800s and early 1900s. Many of the graves were of children, no older than 5 years of age. Most of the markers were severely damaged and covered in graffiti.

I saw The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1985 at an old two-screen theater in Corsicana Texas, while attending Navarro Junior College. As the movie unfolded for the first time in front of me, I was stricken with what I can best describe as a sick nostalgia. There was that old house, full of bones and feathers. There was the desecrated graveyard. There was the blistering heat of Texas summers, and there was a cackling maniac (Ed Neal) who I imagined must be a spitting image of the youngest Johnson boy as an adult, if he lived to see that age.

I wore out my poor little Honda and gave it away years ago. The Johnson family moved away, and their old barn house was torn down to make way for a bread and breakfast.

I wonder what happened to them…