#wayne bell

[scumgristle]

album of 2025

‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ Score, a Noisy Gem, Will Arrive at Last

Fifty-one years after the smash horror movie, its groundbreaking and unconventional music — long a “holy grail” — will arrive on vinyl.

In 1996, years before helping to found the experimental rock institution Animal Collective, David Portner and Brian Weitz were Baltimore high school pals who diligently hunted for the soundtrack album that perfectly meshed their love of the unorthodox sound worlds of musique concrète and the thrills of horror movies: “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.” “It wasn’t really till years later that I found out that it had never been released,” Portner said.

“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” changed the horror business when it splattered out in 1974, turning a spartan budget into a $30 million juggernaut and laying groundwork for the blood-soaked slasher genre that dominated the 1980s. Among its many innovations was its unconventional score, an abstract suite of bone-chilling scrapes, metallic clanks, ominous drones and mysterious stingers.

This symphony of discordance, recorded by the film’s director Tobe Hooper and the sound man Wayne Bell, emerged three full years before the first commercially available industrial music from Throbbing Gristle. It anticipated the tape-traded noise music underground that flourished in places like Japan in the 1990s and the American Midwest in the ’00s. But with the master tapes ostensibly lost and Hooper seemingly uninterested in an official release, the “Chain Saw” score survived mostly as a bootleg, often just the entire 83-minute film dubbed to audio cassette from a VHS or Laserdisc.

That half-century of tape hiss and YouTube rips will end in March with a vinyl release on the boutique soundtrack label Waxwork Records. (Pre-orders start this week.)

“It was kind of like a holy grail. Was it even possible to do it?” said the Waxwork co-founder Kevin Bergeron, who had been doggedly pursuing the release for more than a decade. “Everyone has asked. Literally every label from Sony to Waxwork. Major labels to independents to randos living with their parents. Everyone wanted to release it. What would it take to make it happen? No one had any sort of intel, like what would it cost or what would it take.”

Bell had held on to a few of the original tapes, but a majority were assumed lost. After the success of “Chain Saw,” Hooper left Austin for Hollywood, leaving behind a storage shed full of personal effects. But the “Chain Saw” tapes were not absorbing water damage or rotting away in some hot Texas garage: They would be quietly donated to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, lovingly archived alongside Albert Einstein’s notes, a Frida Kahlo self-portrait and a Gutenberg Bible.

“Suddenly they’re artifacts,” Bell said in a recent video interview. “Sometimes you need to wear gloves to handle this stuff. So the idea of threading it up on a machine and listening to exactly know what you’ve got? I just had to go by what little notes I had in 1974 and, by eye, just recognizing my handwriting and remembering what tapes we had.” He finally got to hear the digitized version of their audio this year.

With $16 in his bank account, Bergeron first reached out to Bell in 2013, before Waxwork even stamped its first LP. After years playing guitar in horror-centric punk and thrash bands, Bergeron started Waxwork with his girlfriend, Sue Ellen Soto, with the idea of becoming the “Criterion Collection of soundtracks” by releasing albums with newly commissioned artwork, liner notes from the filmmakers and whimsically colored vinyl. Bergeron sent almost-monthly correspondence to Bell for a decade. All emails to Hooper, up to his death in 2017, went unanswered.

“A big pitch of mine was, ‘Look, there’s a lot of parallels between how we conduct business and how you guys conduct business,’” said Bergeron, who sees a corollary between Waxwork’s D.I.Y. ethic and the spirit of idealistic hippies in the desert cobbling together a horror movie. “I would hate to see this precious thing that they’ve guarded for 50 years get in the hands of a major or someone that’s going to do some Hollywood accounting and rip people off.”

Getting the requisite tapes and permissions was an odyssey, but making a coherent album from them would prove a different challenge entirely. As an editor, Bell, 73, is now a seasoned veteran with credits on more than a dozen Richard Linklater movies. He said the estimated 10 to 12 hours of sound on the “Chain Saw” tapes was of good fidelity and would allow the listener to “really hear into this music.” However, nothing was mixed down. This meant a three-month process of reconstructing the familiar cacophony from the original raw materials, hand-scrawled notes and 50-year-old memories.

“It’s putting together a thousand-piece puzzle of very similar-shaped and similar-looking pieces,” he explained.

The tapes contained the sounds as they were originally recorded in the 1970s: Bell and Hooper experimenting and laughing on the carpeted floor of a spare bedroom belonging to the director’s then-girlfriend, Paulette Gochnour. The body of an upright bass was used as a reverb chamber and its metal bridge served as a mount for a mobile made of can lids. Cymbals were scraped against the strings of a lap steel guitar. Lithography plates were flapped around like dish towels. Children’s percussion instruments were chimed and rattled. When Bell heard Gochnour cooking with an 11-inch sauce pan, its bell-like tone inspired him to fill it halfway with water and strike it with a timpani mallet.

“Just because the sound comes from a stringed instrument, you could torture it such that you don’t know that that’s a string instrument or it doesn’t necessarily sound musical,” said Bell, who had already honed these techniques in playful jam sessions with Hooper. “Clearly these sounds had emotional properties, they made you think this or that, would trigger the mind. So it was a fertility that was right there already for us.”

After these sounds were pieced together and matched with the grainy footage of Leatherface’s murder spree, they took on a life that extended far beyond the borders of Texas. In ’80s London, where “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” was banned outright, the Iphar label sold cassette bootlegs of the score alongside first-generation extreme noise artists like Ramleh, S.P.K. and Consumer Electronics. Alternative metal bands in the ’90s including Nine Inch Nails, White Zombie and Marilyn Manson peppered their albums with “Chain Saw” dialogue and sounds. The fleet-fingered oddball guitarist Buckethead professed that he would solo over the drone feast that follows the actor William Vail getting bludgeoned to death with a hammer. The director Nicolas Winding Refn pushed the composer Cliff Martinez to put more “Chain Saw” influence in the game-changing synth soundtrack to “Drive” from 2011.

Aaron Dilloway, a solo artist and onetime member of the noise band Wolf Eyes, called the “Chain Saw” score “ground zero for noise music.” He recorded the entire film to audio cassette and would play it in the van on Wolf Eyes tours, and once accompanied the rest of the band using “Chain Saw” audio played on a variable speed cassette player. (He accidentally concluded the set with an incredibly spooky recording of the actor Paul A. Partain’s disembodied voice calling out for Jerry the van driver.)

“Nothing sounds like that. Nothing,” Dilloway said of Hooper and Bell’s score. “I mean, there’s little bits and stuff here and there, but nothing’s been able to get that screech like that — eeeeeerrrgh. There’s nothing else like it. And it’s always just been stuck in my head. You want to strive for that. Make something as scary and as unique as that sound.”

Portner, who records as Avey Tare, spent Animal Collective’s earliest days in New York without a practice space or much room to hold instruments. “It was a way of seeing that you could make music with anything,” he said of the score. “You could have as much of a dramatic effect or emotional effect just banging on pots and pans if that’s all that was around.”

With the official Waxwork release — complete with two never-heard-before cues — the “Chain Saw” score’s legacy is secure, though its story may not be finished. Bell estimated that he had 95 percent of the material, but said there was still a single missing tape he would like to incorporate to complete the picture.

“There’s a cue that I knew I didn’t have,” he explained, “and I didn’t want to do an ersatz version of that. ’Cause it’s very important that it be what ‘Chain Saw’ fans expect. I’ve felt a big responsibility to deliver this. A responsibility to myself and to Tobe and to the film, but also to the fans.”

Starting in 2022, he even started appearing at horror conventions. He found the gaggle of cosplaying “Chain Saw” fans to be interesting and likable.

Said Bell with a laugh, “I’ve never been around so many Leatherfaces in my life.”

[1whimsicalgal]

Shooting Daniel Pearl’s Infamous Dolly Shot (From Pam’s POV) Or How I Got Lucky In Spite Of Myself.

When I came on the set that morning in Quick Hill, Texas, our make-up artist Dottie was repairing my make-up. I looked out of the corner of my left eye, over at the swing where I knew I was supposed to sit for our next scene of Pam approaching the house. Perplexed, I noticed Daniel Pearl, our cinematographer, lying down on his stomach, hunched over his camera, UNDER the swing, and exactly where I was soon to park my posterior. I noticed Danny wasn’t moving. He was settled in. I asked Dottie as she was powdering my face, “Hey, Dottie, what’s Daniel doing under the swing?” She mumbled something similar to “Idunno…”, and quickly walked away.

They told me they were ready and where I was to sit. Huh?? No way. Yes, the stories are true. I freaked out, 😱 Pam and Tobe began to argue, me refusing to do the shot. Meanwhile, and totally Unbeknownst to me, this was immediately following a giant argument he’d just had with the money dudes, the investors, who didn’t want him to do this new shot that Daniel had come up with the night before, at all. They were ranting at him, telling him that they HAD to stick to the storyboard. .. or else (btw, dpearldp tells that delicious story on his IG - link below). Well, I had No Clue what it was either. I was protecting my cheeks… if you read me. Chewing on his cigar stub, and none too happy with his troublesome actress playing ‘Pam’, Tobe had had enough and said, “Aw, goddamnit, Teri, we’re gonna shoot all around it!!!” Hmmmm, I’m thinkin’, ‘shoot-all-around-it’? Just what the hell does that mean? Anyway, I shut up and sat down, however, remaining highly, highly suspicious. I later learned that everyone, except me, was in on the tracking shot.

All I could think of was my mother 😲 O.M.G. (who was unsupportive at best of my chosen career) and my Aunt Gerry, who were both super-duper religious. I could literally picture them coming unglued when they saw it. Before it was released a year later, I dreaded watching myself on screen and THAT scene, having never seen dailies, I was haunted by the thought of watching it.

When it was released in October ’74, I was living in Dallas and drove with a friend to see it at a Saturday matinee in Tomball, TX, along with 300 screaming kids. When the scene started, my eyes were covered 🫣 I watched through my fingers, scared to death, and NOT of Leatherface. There, up on the screen, in CinemaScope and vivid Technicolor, were my cheeks in those red shorts… O.M.G. 🥶🥵

They certainly did "shoot all around it"!!! The irony of all my worry, neither one of them ever saw it. 😂

That scene has been taught in directing classes across the world for decades, and the 1974 film is held in the film archives of MoMA, The Smithsonian, and The Academy /Oscars.org.

MoMA recently announced a weeklong celebration the 50th anniversary of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre August 8-14, when members of the film’s creative team will join to discuss The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s production and legacy.

How fortunate we are.

As many of you know, I didn’t come out of anonymity as 'Pam for ’35 years, till March 2008, when, Bill ‘Kirk’ Vail and I both first appeared at a humongous Cherryhill, NJ, Monster-Mania Convention.

Cut to 2008 when my sweet Aunt Gerry was in her 90's, I went to visit her in Arkansas at her apartment in Peachtree Village for a few days, and I told her, "Aunt Gerry, did you know I'm famous?" She said, "You are??" I said, "I certainly am." 😎 I got out my Mac, opened it to FB and showed her the shot above. She giggled and smiled. She loved it! We enjoyed a really good laugh together.💞😂

Tobe and Kim had apparently seen my picture in the Austin American Statesman for a play I was doing with Frank Sutton (Gomer Pyle's Sargent) at @Mary Moody Northern Theater. Somehow for many years, I always remembered my eyes were closed in the Statesman picture. When I recently looked at the picture, my eyes were open and it was Frank Sutton's and the corpse of the dead priest that were closed. 😂 Kim Henkel had called the theater and our director, Ed Mangum, gave me the message when I came in for rehearsals that afternoon. I was to return their call.

WHO KNEW??? Certainly, none of us!

🎥 Follow our amazing cinematographer, Daniel Pearl's 50-year career in his posts and stories and get his POV on filming TCSM '74 scenes

Instagram: @dpearldp https://www.instagram.com/p/CvtejukgJIP/ DP's website: danielpearldp.com/

[lilaclunablossom]

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Review

I saw 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for my horror marathon, the day before Halloween.

I might’ve seen this movie as a kid, I don’t remember, but I was definitely always terrified by the idea of Leatherface. As everyone knows, he’s a killer who likes to use a chainsaw, and wears his victims’ skin. He’s inspired by the real-life serial killer Ed Gein, and while Gein didn’t use a chainsaw, and didn’t have the same speech issues, he did in fact like to wear human skin.

It’s directed by Tobe Hooper, who also directed Poltergeist, which was on the marathon list, but I wasn’t able to get to it. The shot composition is great, with some amazing stand-out shots, like the skeleton sculpture Leatherface makes.

The acting is good, maybe a bit goofy at times, but I feel like that added to the psychotic feeling, especially when certain characters are expanded later on. And WOW, I didn’t expect this movie to focus so much on characters other than Leatherface. Suffice to say, this movie was also twistier than I expected.

It’s pretty well-known by now that this is a vegetarian work, and now that I’ve finally seen it as an adult, it’s really obvious. Even without knowing beforehand, I probably would’ve figured it out. The main characters explicitly discuss how horribly animals are treated in slaughterhouses. Leatherface makes bone sculptures, places his victims on a hook like animal carcasses, and there’s pig sounds when he’s killing. Hell, even him wearing human skin is a parallel to wearing animal skin, hence the name “Leatherface” even though human skin isn’t called “leather.” In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, the only reason the main characters start roaming around the countryside is because one of their family members had their grave robbed… like how humans mess around with animal corpses.

The music was made by the director himself and Wayne Bell, and is apparently one of the earliest works of genuine dark ambient music. It uses no “actual” musical instruments, and is meant to sound like what an animal would hear in a slaughterhouse. I LOVE dark ambient, and this shit slaps. It’s SO moody and industrial, it’s wonderful.

So yeah, I’m not a vegetarian, but it’s extremely clever to make a slasher where the victims represent animals, and the symbolism in general is very well-done. Guillermo del Toro became vegetarian for 4 years after seeing this, and it’s easy to see why.

This movie is also famous for making daytime feel scary, and while there is a night-time section, this is true – most of the movie is pretty bright, but still feels scary. Lots of movies have done this since (Midsommar comes to mind), but it must’ve been impressive for the 70s.

Fun side note, I love the way Leatherface acts at the end. It comes across like he’s dancing, and it feels strangely cathartic. 4.5/5

I’m sorry animals, you just taste so good and my diet is too accustomed to you ;A;

[frownyalfred]

Thinking about Bruce always feeling insecure about living up to his parents legacy, thinking about him feeling unworthy of using the master bedroom when he returned, thinking about him as Brucie uncounsciously taking his hookups to other rooms in the mansion, never to his (parent's), thinking about Bruce welcoming his kids in the master bedroom with open arms whenever they have nightmares, the same way his parents did to him, thinking about Clark feeling insecure about Bruce's true feelings towards him, thinking about Clark being totally oblivious to how big of a deal it is that he's alowed to sleep beside Bruce in the master bedroom.

The sanctity of the master bedroom is SO real. I grew up in a house with separate living quarters for staff (old old house) and the bedrooms for children were in a wing, and then the master suite and guest suites were in another section of the house. The implied distance between those sections is huge, even if they're only one closed door or a few feet away.

Bruce slowly accepting his place in the master suite -- now that's a fic I'd love to write. Keeping the hookups and random encounters to another equally lavish but different room or wing of the Manor, even. Somewhere that's easy to shuttle people in and out of, maybe near the laundry chutes or the servants' stairwells. Sleeping there even when he doesn't have guests, because the ghosts in the master suite are too much.

But maybe, once Dick is living with him, he can't justify it -- the master suite is near the children's rooms, and sleeping on another floor, away from a traumatized child, seems like a terrible idea. Alfred's rooms are too far away, nestled somewhere in the servants' quarters even though Bruce keeps trying to get him to take a guest suite.

So he takes over the suite, making it his own slowly but surely. Yet leaving portions of it untouched -- maybe the old floor to ceiling drapes, with their antiquated trim and beads. The double sinks in the en suite, made for a couple. He removes the four poster bed for a california king, modern enough to dispel any mental similarities. Big enough for a kid to come and hide, after a nightmare.

Clark being allowed in that room, even near that portion of the Manor? That's a huge step forward, a huge display of vulnerability and trust. It's not just Bruce's room, it's his parents' room, it's just off the children's wing, it is in many ways the heart of the residential portion of the Manor. All hallways, servant corridors, etc, lead there. And the more people that stay there, the more that suite is viewed truly as the center of the Manor itself, outside of the Cave and maybe Alfred's kitchen + butler's pantry.

[blueeyeddarkknight]

A compilation of Val being a stinking cute diva on set 😻💅

Val being painted by David choe

(I wish it was like a French girl 😃)

The result 🎨 🤩

Sleeping beauty

Val's interesting habit of sleeping before a show to beat stage fright which annoyed his Juilliard teachers 🤭

Goofing around in the batsuit

getting interviewed by Kristen Bell during his makeup session 😂

playing with the kids on the set of a soldier's revenge 🥹

hanging out with the rossovich family and Bill Paxton (rip)

Val:I love you 🥺

Buck:I understand 🙂

Val:.... 😃 💔.. Thanks for trying, buck 🙂

Giving candy to the crew of red planet from an alien shaped box 🍭👽

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[wanderingmind867]

It's a shame Music Meister was only invented in 2008 or so. Because he could work in any time period. Listen. We need a miniseries with him, where he begins a crime wave using gear, hideouts and disguises based around different historical eras. He ropes all the other rogues into it, too. From the 1920s to the 2020s. 100 years of Music, as delivered by the melodic master of mischief himself! (And yes, i did just think of that alliterative moniker). Think about it. A 60s psychedelic theme one week. A 70s Disco theme the next week. Then an 80s theme. And so on and so forth.

I actually can imagine two D list villians who help orchestrate everything: Clock King and Calendar Man. Who else would understand history and time nearly as well as two men obsessed with it? Those two could help with the planning and research stage of the symphonic crime wave, while the Music Meister does all the hard work of commiting the crimes. I think I just thought of a great miniseries here. One i'd read, at least. I'd expect it to be educational and entertaining. A crash course on musical and cultural history, all delivered via supervilliany.

[alonelylimes]

my scarlet hollow scrimblos - Luke is my main❤️

[itsprjc]

Bringing home a bronze for Canada? Wait! Something's...off.

Gotta draw the new jock in town to go with my already favorite jocks!

Total Drama belongs to FreshTV.

Disventure Camp belongs to Odd Nation Cartoons.

[hellhoundmaggie]

SH Love Interests (and Tabitha), would you fuck your clone? Why or why not?

[assassin-artist]

made a lil relationship chart with the main characters. anyone is free to use it with credit (:

[wassupmygays]

Anna K Bermudez, Ryo Kamibayashi, and Trevor Wayne are gonna be part of a 54 Below show!

February 10th! Get tickets here!!