When you're a male kid growing up in the seventies, decapitation scenes in movies are your version of porn. I remember having this scene described to me by other kids. far more vividly than when I actually saw it.
LJ: During high school I took summer school for a history class and the teacher randomly busted this movie out. He claimed it was incredibly important that we watch this movie in order to get a passing grade. Having never seen it before, I naively sat through the entire movie trying to figure out what it had to do with U.S. history.
When it finally finished he turned it off and gave a 30 minute lecture on how imaginative the death scenes were. I didn't learn a thing about U.S. history until community college.
My mom swore up and down that this was the scariest movie ever made when she made me watch it. Kids today are way too desensitized to even blink at stuff like this.