Dir. Tobe Hooper
No, I'm not being purposefully contrary and not choosing the chainsaw as the object for this film. ok, maybe I am a little bit. So why the family table and not the chainsaw? Well:
The horror of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is encapsulated to me in two things, two central things, with a hell of a lot of subtext underneath. Those two can be symbolised by the chainsaw, and the family table. Personally, I find the family table to be scarier.
i) The Chainsaw: Primal, raw energy. Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen), who we see has little more mental development than that of a child, using heavy machinery to chase teenagers through an old house and a field. The horror is of a twisted child, completely let loose with the ability to kill you with a rotating saw of death. This is physical horror, tied to the weapon, and tied to the location - bumfuck nowhere U.S.A, where nobody can here you scream - and oh boy, is there a lot of screaming.
The second half of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is almost wall-to-wall with sound, mostly the screams of 'final-girl', Sally (Marilyn Burns), the revving of the chainsaw. It's exhausting to watch and listen to; it assaults you, a feeling that the film excels at. The scene that always strikes me as I view the film, is when Sally and the disabled Franklin (Paul A. Partain) are come upon all of a sudden in the treeline surrounding the abandoned house. Leatherface, clad in his iconic butchers apron and skin-mask, slashes his chainsaw into Franklin, who is helpless to escape.
Sally screams, naturally. Now what a lot of people get wrong about the film, is that it's bloody or gory - it isn't. The early kills involve a meat hook and a hammer, yes, but not much blood is shown. Here, despite it actually being plausible, only some blood spatters Leatherface's apron. If that freaks you out, don't worry about it here.
Sally runs through the tree-line, screaming and bashing away branches, and Leatherface pursues, grunting and slashing his chainsaw clumsily at the branches to clear a path. Sally runs and runs and runs, and all we experience is pursuit. To me, this is fantastic horror, and horror at the most basic level. You went for a trip with your friends, a murdered picks you off one-by-one. You see the last of your friends, the cowardly Franklin, torn apart in front of you by this demented killer, and you are now completely alone, in a field, with this human monster chasing you. This could happen, it's damned unlikely, but your daily life could be visited by a crazed murder. In the final scene of the film this returns as the car/truck drivers see this insanity, and are all of a sudden fighting and fleeing for their lives. That's what I think the chainsaw symbolises - the primal horror that all of a sudden, like most of the animal kingdom, you will have to flee for your life, or die. All that stands between you and death is a maniac with a weapon, in this case, a chainsaw.
ii) Family Table: I touched on it above actually, because that's my bias. The other horror of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the notion of the twisted family. After the scene above, Sally reaches a gas station, and begs the owner (Jim Siedow) to call the police. Eerie silence sets in, as Leatherface does not burst through the door (brilliantly framed constantly to the right of Sally, making you anticipate the door being burst), but a worse fate comes, as the owner restrains Sally - this bastion of safety has been subverted, and it is revealed that the owner is part of the Leatherface family, being an older brother, alongside the hitch-hiker (Edwin Neal) seen earlier.
Sally awakes, restrained, at the head of a family table, pictured above is her point of view. At the opposite end is the grandfather (John Dugan) of the family, seen earlier but believed dead, who wares a face-mask, likely made from skin and dyed white. Leatherface has gussied up, with blusher and lipstick placed on his, well, leather face. It is a parody of the wholesome American family. The house is full of bones, animal and human, Sally's friends are in a freezer down below, and even the chair she sits on has human hands on the arms of it. It is distorted, and disgusting. The food served is likely human meat from past kills - there is a history of violence and insanity that seems to be imbued in the house itself.
Sally begs for her release and is mocked by the hitch-hiker, and there is a fantastic montage of close-ups of Sally and the family, particularly Sally's eye-ball, which bulges in fear and horror at the situation she has found herself in. The family has the subtext of being butchers, however whether they were originally and became murderers, or used the techniques to dispose of the bodies is unclear. But what this achieves is a link to the slaughterhouses of the American South, the South also traditionally associated with more backwards social views, and the importance of family, and also, being rural and isolated, as we can see here as this family can operate with no worry of discovery or of anyone hearing the screams of their victims. This is reinforced by the gas station owner being part of the established world, with a job and responsibility, while also gleefully taking part in this twisted life.
The Grandfather also carries with him untold backstory, and the impression I got was that it's he who twisted his boys to join his psychopathy, bringing them into the fold to kill travelers and innocents. What this carries with it is generational history, these murders have been occurring for decades and it's now that we have the endpoint- Leatherface, an ugly child who is a monster through and through. After his first two kills in the early part of the film, Leatherface is shown frustrated by the act, and stomps around the living room, sitting down with this head in his hands - it's actually sympathetic. He is a victim of his family upbringing, only able to express himself by lashing out and killing, or through the adopted persona (subextually at least) of his leather-face. He is pitiable, but horrifying.
The moment that is most revolting sees Sally's finger cut to drawn blood, and the grandfather wheeled over so that he can suck on the blood. This is where we see for sure that the grandfather is still alive and despite his age and weakness, he seems to take pleasure from the taste of the blood - again, giving us a wealth of untold back-story. Sally is naturally horrified at this perversion. She is the only woman here, and I think this is a parallel to breastfeeding, again tying it back to family, but so twisted as it is done with blood, by force, and given to the eldest member of the family. We see in Sally's eyes the fear of rape from the family, and indeed the thought is terrifying, particularly from Leatherface, however I think this is the true rape, as her body is sucked from by the decrepit old man.
Later the younger members try and help him to have one last kill, hammering Sally's head but he is too frail to carry it out - it's almost compassionate and inclusionary to an older family member but as ever, is completely twisted. Similarly twisted is the 'female' presence of Leatherface, as his make-up colours him as either the mother of the group, or a daughter - and this in and of itself just shows how mentally ruined he is by this family - with no female presence to balance out this family, we can only wonder what happened to the mother, or mothers, of these children.
Both types of horror are fantastic in this film, but I think the family table, as a symbol of traditional American family-values being perverted is the most strong. It is the psychological perversion of this family unit by the grandfather, and the end-point of this perversion, Leatherface, that are truly horrifying, as it is harder to write off as the insanity of one murderer, but rather, the legacy of insanity throughout the years, and the notion that insanity can be passed on. The iconic final image of the film hammers this home, as the stunted child-like Leatherface dances with the chainsaw in silhouette against the sun, frustrated at the escape of his prey: a temper tantrum, with a chainsaw.
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