The Meat Mallet

by Brian
(Point Beach, New Jersey, USA)

Growing up in the 90's, I hated horror. At my tender young age, kids were talking about going to see Wes Craven's Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer. Being someone who didn't want to be out of the loop, the first chance I got I watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I watched it with my eyes closed most of the time so as not to be frightened. I also had a recurring dream of the GhostFace killer coming after me, so I swore off horror for the rest of my life. Or so I thought...

In my middle teens I was watching a documentary about Ed Gein. It talked about how he influenced a good handful of movies, one of them being The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the original). They played a clip from the movie where one of the charcters goes into a empty home. He hears a sort of pig squeal coming from a room. He walks over, trips, and out pops a man wearing a leather mask with a mallet in his hand. The man raises his mallet and slams the head of it into the guy's skull, producing the most wonderful sound I had ever heard.

That day I went out to a video store and bought a copy of the film. I watched it not once, not twice, but three times that day. The whole movie was so great - the hitchhiker scene, the dinner table scene, the little chainsaw dance at the end. Ever since then I have watched any horror film I can get my hands on. Of course my most favorite is still The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and every time I see that mallet scene, I smile.