Several Hot Takes About the Texas Chain Saw Massacre
An ongoing series on movies that, though I hate to admit it, fucked me up. Discussion of the Sawyer family and capitalism in part 3 inspired by this episode of Faculty of Horror 1. This movie is here to fuck you up (but not in the way you think). There was a time when no movie could send a certain kind of critic, scholar, or film classification board member clutching for their pearls quite like this one. It was banned in Britain until 1999, and in at least eight other countries at one point or another. The deliberately provocative title promises dismemberments, carnage, and gristle, and its high profitability sparked plenty of imitators who took a similar tact, such that even the word “chainsaw” was banned from titles in the UK during the video nasty scare of the’80s. As a kid flipping through my beloved monster movie book, I was careful to skip past the picture of Leatherface. Though by then thirty years old, and inexplicably di...