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 displayed in black-and-white, it was the only image in the book that truly scared me. Like many people who knew the movie by reputation alone, I developed an imagined version of the brutality on display that no real movie could truly match.

For my final project in an experimental theater class, I performed a piece on the fear of the dangerous image, delivering a mock lecture on revitalizing megaplexes and reading a fake urban legend from a doctored copy of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark while the final 10 minutes of TCM played in the background, muted, on a cathode-ray TV. I told my audience that the unnamed movie had been banned in many countries and gave them sheets of paper which they could use to block the small TV from sight if they wished, encouraging them to develop a heightened idea of what horrors the movie might contain. One of my professors used the sheet of paper the entire time; one of my classmates watched and mistook the movie for a comedy. The idea was to replicate how a mess of associations and expectations form around an infamous, potentially dangerous film, that probably have very little to do with the film itself.

Because, as fans love to tout, the violence is minimal and largely off-screen. Director Tobe Hooper naively thought this would earn his movie a PG rating; he was instead rewarded with an X because, as every horror fan knows, we can imagine things many times worse than a movie can ever show. Once seen and confronted, an image tends to lose its power. What remains unseen is far more potent. Of course, what we do see is gruesome enough. Thanks to the grueling filming conditions, much of the onscreen blood is real, not to mention the cries of pain.

The verisimilitude carries over to the mise en scene. After the opening crawl claiming that the movie is based on a true story, the audience is greeted by shots of partially decomposed bodies and a scene of grave desecration. This hardened and callous viewer considers it one of the most grotesque images in horror history, though it includes no actual violence. The bodies are first shown in flashes and intense close-ups, so it’s hard for the viewer to figure out just what they’re seeing. As the camera slowly zooms out on the handiwork of the grave desecrator / artiste, we are treated to a soundtrack first of unpleasant industrial sounds and then an endless news report of grisly human-on-human crime. This combination of sound and vision, disorienting and merciless, combined with the matter-of-factness of the camera’s gaze makes it far more harrowing than the stylized and redder sequences of more overtly gristly films. (I think here of hyper-violent gialli like Bay of Blood). TCM is a movie where nothing is pretty and everything is gross, from the sound design which contains only diegetic music and undefinable screeching, to the scorching desert landscape. The violence feels realer, and more harrowing, and much less of it is needed to make an impact.

In this viewer’s humble opinion, TCM is the only of the infamously terrifying films that makes good on its promise. I was sure after watching for the first time that I’d escaped unscathed but, like it or not, the movie had sunk its crooked teeth into me. I know a movie has really gotten to me when it’s not the monsters that appear in my nightmares but the film itself, and so I dreamed of watching this movie on a tablet in a car rolling through the Texas desert, and then falling into the movie itself. You win, movie. On impulse, with a few hours to kill, I rewatched it on Shudder and I think I’ve figured it out. It works because it’s stylized to not seem stylized (realism is a style, not the absence of one). It works because of the matter-of-factness of its scares – Leatherface, more often than not, simply appears in a doorway or lunges out of the dark accompanied by chainsaw revving, but not with a signposty musical flourish. He is, to this day, a hideous sight to behold. Meanwhile, it is gross and gritty and visceral and loud, a disorienting assault on the senses that relies on form as much as content to deliver its terror. The famous dinner scene, with its screaming and cackling and careening angles and real blood, have what Robin Wood so aptly called “the authentic quality of nightmare.”

I don’t believe in the myth of the dangerous image, but as I reflected on this movie and the effect it had on me, I had to admit, this is the closest think I’ve found.

2.     It’s about a fear of death from a purely physical standpoint.

I had a writing professor who described the ultimate horror as the realization that something you believed to be true was not true at all. I’m mostly in agreement, though I’d use a broader definition. Horror can live in as simple a thing as the campfire jump-scare story but, to live beyond the jump, it is fundamentally about discovery, a reframing of what we thought we knew about the world. Often, it is that something safe or mundane has become dangerous. Other times, it is an exposing of an existential fear lurking beneath the plot structure and scene-to-scene frights of the story. I think there are two main existential fears within TCM. One, the fear of a decayed American dream and monstrous inner America, I’ll discuss in a moment. But the other is no less than a fear of death itself.

It’s no surprise that most horror stories deal with a fear of death – at least, death is always a threat looming over our characters. But death in TCM is not about afterlives or judgment or even a void of nothingness – it’s about the little trouble of bodily decay. It’s about the horror of having a body, and knowing that body is going to rot.

In the first scene, we are confronted with an image of decomposed bodies, the most viscerally unpleasant in the film. The Sawyer family is first threatening because they unearth the ugliness of death from under the sanitized version of mortality that keeps us sane, in which the body is celebrated, hallowed, and put out of sight. Instead, they expose the rotted body for all to see. The rotted body is deprived of individuality, unrecognizable from the person who inhabited it in life. The image of death in TCM is a fundamental loss of self, a reality we’d rather push to the back of our minds.

Even worse than exposing the ugly process of entropy, the Sawyers repurpose the body, reducing it to its raw materials. The dead body in TCM is of course meat, but for the Sawyers who, as the hitchhiker brags, use everything, leftover bones are wind chimes and décor while the face, that ultimate signifier of individuality, becomes a lampshade or, worst of all, a mask for Leatherface . The body becomes product, to be sold by the proprietor, and to be used by the hitchhiker and Leatherface to adorn their home in a grotesque parody of American nesting. If we, the idealist viewer, are fundamentally Kantian in that we don’t wish to see people as means to an end, it is horrifically dehumanizing to witness the human body reduced to material goods, and it is this threat, of not just death but of such an undignified afterlife, that hangs over the characters.  

TCM offers an unwelcome reminder that the bodies we inhabit, that we may treat as temples or use for pleasure or merely to get by, can be reduced so easily to meat and novelty wall hangings. Dust to dust never was so harrowing.

3.     It’s a story of two families.

Fans remember the movie for one family, the Sawyers, the inbred cannibal hicksploitation clan par excellence. They’re the ones who continue throughout the numerous sequels and serve as the template for every redneck torture family to come, from Cabin in the Woods to Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses. But it’s also a movie about the Hardesties – Sally and Franklin – the Sawyers’ latest crop of victims, whose family history brings them into the Sawyers’ path.

Many horror stories delineate a particular place as a site of terror – a certain house, a suburb, even a whole country or landscape. Many horror stories thus involve an element of travel, as a group of heroes or victims arrive in the dangerous place. In this essay, I discuss how, around the time of Psycho, travel horror increasingly took place within America, and I argue that hicksploitation movies like TCM are direct descendants of stories like Dracula, only with more overt and visceral violence and with stereotypically American villains instead of foreign ones. Within the movie, Franklin agrees with me. When his friends stop to pick up the hitchhiker, he laments: “I think we just picked up Dracula,” and when the hitchhiker brags about his family’s history in the meat industry, Franklin calls them “a whole family of Draculas.” Later, when they arrive at their now-rundown homestead, Franklin describes it as “the birthplace of Bela Lugosi.”

But there’s an important distinction between the Hardesties and the usual Renfelds and Jonathans. The latter are outsiders, arriving in an unfamiliar and foreign land without folkloric knowledge to protect them, greeted by locals who are by turns hostile and far too welcoming. The most recent contribution to the travel horror canon, Midsommar, follows that mold – naïve Americans travel to Sweden on the invitation of their friend, a sinisterly friendly exchange student. The other kind of cannibal film, the tropical jungle horror, involves white Americans or Europeans arriving in some interchangeably exotic locale and plays up (or, very rarely, subversively plays with), the racist stereotypes therein. But in TCM, Sally and her friends aren’t outsiders. They’ve traveled to the site of terror to check in on their grandfather’s grave after a series of grave desecrations, and to visit his old home. They have roots there that call them back. The mention of their grandfather, and perhaps the lingering twang in their voices, mean locals are actually quite friendly to them, even leading Sally by the hand to check in on her grandfather’s untroubled grave. By the movie’s nastier second half, it’s easy to forget that the kids are Texans too, but it’s baked into the movie’s set-up as the very reason for their arrival.

Both of our two central families, the Franklin-Hardesties and the Sawyers, are structured around the memory of a mythic grandfather. Back in the day, Grandpa Franklin was a cattle farmer who sold his livestock to the slaughterhouse. There, they were killed by Grandpa Sawyer, the most efficient slaughterer around, a real wiz with a sledgehammer whose skill is still celebrated by his grandchildren. Not only did the two contemporaneous men enjoy a symbiotic economic relationship, they were pretty much neighbors. The Sawyer place, as we soon learn, is a quick jog through the trees from the Franklin homestead.

But in the intervening two generations, something changed. Grandpa Franklin is dead and buried, his resting place now at risk of desecration by the younger Sawyers, while his descendants have given up cattle farming. It’s unclear where the younger Hardesties live, probably no more than a few hours’ drive away, but it’s clear they’re no longer locals. Though they treasure memories of staying at their grandparents’ home and visiting a nearby swimming hole, it’s been long enough that they need to ask for directions at the gas station, and the house has been abandoned and fallen into disrepair. Across the way, Grandpa Sawyer’s house has been kept up nicely, with a beautiful and clean white exterior. It’s his own ancestral home that Franklin compares to Bela Lugosi’s birthplace, not the Sawyers’ house of carnage. But inside the picturesque façade is another matter entirely. Grandpa Sawyer remains (barely) alive, preserved as a mummified blood-drinker by his devoted descendants. The younger Sawyers range from seemingly normal but secretly ruthless (the gas station Proprietor) to Leatherface’s gibbering monstrousness. What happened to make two families diverge, from equally necessary players along the chain of hamburger production to predator and prey?

The simplest answer is automation. As the hitchhiker implies during his brief ride in the kids’ van, advances in cow-killing efficiency have put people out of work, the Sawyers included. He proudly shows Franklin a photograph of himself at work at the slaughterhouse, but those days are in the past tense. Automation has restructured the industry the Sawyers relied on – “my family’s always been in meat,” says the hitchhiker – leaving them with a very specific set of skills and nowhere to apply them. So the Sawyers turn their sledgehammers and chainsaws on human prey, and Grandpa Franklin’s children take the place of his cattle. The Sawyers have even become their own little distribution chain, selling human barbecue at the gas station. Unable to adapt, the once-symbiotic relationship between the Sawyers and the Franklin-Hadesties becomes cannibalistic, with the Franklin-Hadesties reduced to product. The Sawyers’ monstrosity is a product of capitalism’s failures.

Look at it from one angle, and the Sawyers are a sad, grotesque parody of Trump’s coal miners, naively waiting for an industry that can never return. They keep their grandfather alive in the attic, depriving him of a dignified death and forcing him to impotently reenact the killing-by-sledgehammer that once made him a career success. The Sawyers pathetically cling to the past and refuse to move forward. Look at it from another angle, and the Hatdesties have abandoned tradition and family history, leaving their grandfather’s house to crumble. A second interpretation of the divide between families involves shorthand for a culture war. Pam’s fascination with astrology and Jerry’s fashion sense and hairstyle mark them as hippies. It’s similar to the kind of American cultural divide contemporary think pieces love to blame for Trump’s election – the trendy young snowflakes versus the crusty Middle Americans who, depending on the article, are a misunderstood working class doing the best they can or bigoted backwoods lunatics. The extremes of the film depict a divided America, but who is divided and why depends on the audience. I feel like, watching this film forty-five years later, I’m missing a lot of the cultural coding and context it contained in 1974, but the fact that the narrative of a great American divide still resonates means the film still feels relevant, even as it signifies something different.

The American travel horror film is about the fear of proximity, the possibility that the ultimate horror lurks within our own borders. In TCM that proximity is heightened by making the villains and victims ancestral neighbors. On rewatch, when Sally recalls sleeping in a room in the rundown Franklin house at age eight, one can’t help but think of the adolescent Leatherface nearby. As far as I’m aware, none of the numerous sequels and prequels have explored that connection, which is a shame.

In many horror stories, the dividing line between the good guys and the monsters is often more permeable than it first appears. Sometimes this is part of the enjoyment, the satisfying arc of the final girl fighting back, like when Scream’s Sidney dons the Ghostface costume or when TCM 2’s Stretch picks up the chainsaw. Other times it’s part of the horror – the contagion of vampires and zombies, or Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth turning to Kyle Maclachlan’s young hero and the camera to bellow “You’re like me.” Sometimes it’s both. In TCM, that permeability lives under the surface. Sally seems worlds apart from the Sawyers when they taunt her over dinner, yet one wonders what it would have taken for history to happen differently, for Franklin-Hardesties to slaughters Sawyers. Are they really so different? Franklin’s own morbid fascination with slaughterhouses and, later, with the hitchhiker’s blood suggest a similarity, even if his traveling companions do their best to discourage it. And as the truck drives off with the escaping Sally, her screams of terror turn to laughter not unlike the unbecoming guffaws with which the Sawyers so recently taunted her. Later versions of the story might chalk the Sawyers’ villainy to their backwoods breeding, but when the victims come from a parallel lineage, it’s not so simple.

Sally’s laugh-screams in the film’s final sequence carry another, more Lovecraftian connotation – Sally has knowledge that can only drive one mad. The Sawyers are anxious to keep their murderous way of life a secret – the Proprietor scolds the Hitchhiker for almost getting caught grave-robbing and anxiously asks Leatherface if he let any of the kids get away, for fear escapees would summon the cops. But Sally does escape and she, along with the two truck drivers who come to her aid, is driving down the road to (relative) safety with knowledge of the Sawyer family and all its horror. The existential terror at the heart of TCM is that the nightmare has taken the form of the American family, the new Draculas are American and far more awful than Lugosi could have dreamed, the American dream is rotten to the core, and the knowledge of that ugly secret, as Sally makes her escape, is coming into the light.