I wonder if it is supposed to have any allusion to the fact that the first got a X rating (which is so strongly associated with sex and pornography in the USA).
The director Tobe Hooper had supposedly expected the first movie to get a PG and it got an X. Maybe he thought to hell with it.
'The director Tobe Hooper had supposedly expected the first movie to get a PG and it got an X. Maybe he thought to hell with it.'
Hooper thought the first would get a PG?
🤣
shareHe thought he could make a PG horror film that was psychologically terrifying and yet had minimal blood and gore.
Not that it made a difference to the censors. When The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was submitted to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Hooper was confronted by his greatest fear. Rather than bestowing the movie with a PG rating, they instead condemned it with the dreaded X rating – an outcome that would forbid anyone under the age of seventeen from attending a screening. Understandably, Hooper was rather disheartened. According to John Russo's Making Movies, Hooper had been phoning the MPAA every week during production for advice on how to get the film a PG rating and had happily taken onboard whatever ideas they had suggested. One such example came during the sequence where Pam (Teri McMinn) is hung on a meat hook, a graphic set piece that the MPAA had prematurely signed off on under the assurance that no penetration would be shown (exactly how Hooper eventually shot it). In the end, several minutes were removed from the runtime to get the film a more agreeable “R” rating, with it presumably being agreed that further edits would be pointless lest Hooper submitted a version that cut straight to the end credits.