The Saw Is Family And Family Is Forever: The Enduring Power of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
There's been a recent flurry of discourse about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Specifically the direction of its next iteration, with musings on how you can modernize the slaughterhouse. There will always be discourse about it, which speaks to the inherent power of Tobe Hooper's Southern-fried nightmare. What I know in my bones is that whatever comes next, no matter how much it inverts elements or subverts expectation, it won't topple the king. To quote a ramblin' man with a polaroid camera, "The old way... with a sledge! You see, that way's better. They die better that way."
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not meant to be a pleasant viewing experience. After a member of Night Court warns us about what we're about to see, (Larroquette was paid in weed for his vocal work) we begin in darkness with the sounds of digging. Illumination from an intermittent camera flash provides glimpses of the moldering dead, yellowed fingernails and sunken stomachs. Then, at last, light... But, not salvation. A hazy morning hangs over a defiled totem of corpses. The abomination sits atop a gravestone, hair plastered to the melting coagulation of decayed flesh, mouth agape in a silent scream. Hooper zooms out, a proud father, forcing us to face the grandeur of the abomination. If this isn't hell, the world this thing inhabits is close enough. Welcome home.
We know what happens next, but it's how it happens that imprints so indelibly into the folds of our head cheese. Our gang of five roll deep into an arid nowhere, portends wavering before their eyes like a heat mirage. Is Pam's talk of malefic planets mystical nonsense or inescapable destiny? Franklin obsesses over the blood that the Hitchhiker smeared across their van. Was it a symbol marking them for slaughter or just the ramblings of a mad hillbilly? Hooper will never tell. You can smell the Sawyer homestead through the screen. The ammonia stench from chicken droppings, mixed with copper and burnt bone. That's where, to borrow Franklin's words, we meet the whole family of Draculas.
They're just like us. They bicker and grouse, then set it all aside to sit around the dinner table. But unlike so many squeamish Americans, these patriots intimately know how the sausage is made. The husk of a patriarch used to run em' through the chute like lightning, but now his hands struggle to hold the hammer, his eyes sunken black voids. There's little time to shed a tear. You're too busy staring at the face stretched tight over the light hanging above Sally, her shredding psyche drowned out by shrieking laughter. As her eyes dart in search of a single molecule of sanity, you fear they may burst from their sockets.
Hooper knew he had struck bedrock (Somewhat, check out Eaten Alive for more of his brand of bleak oblivion). The world of misery he created, where the implication of hook through flesh hung heavy was absolute. So like Raimi, he dove headfirst into farce. Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 puts everyone from yuppies to a self-appointed Dirty Harry through the meatgrinder. Dennis Hopper tests his tools of vengeance while an elderly squinting man exclaims about his aching banana. He's either in agony or ecstasy. Hooper will never tell. This sequel is the corpse of Elvis wearing the Stars and Bars, gyrating to the sight of Daisy Dukes on a killer pair of legs. Leatherface brings us back to bleak, but the world has changed and this tale of the Sawyer clan feels like a half-remembered urban legend, not unlike those of Aussie wanderer Max Rockatansky. By 1995 the bones of the original have turned to dust, and if you huff that dust you get The Next Generation. A cast of future A-list actors inhabit a world that feels like a dream you'd have if you left the first movie on the TV, then fell asleep after taking extra-strength cough syrup. I'd like to tell you I'm repelled by it but it has a quality so bizarre that it fits right in on my island of misfit toys.
It has been sometime since a new Sawyer family tale been put to celluloid (Nothing else has come out since The Next Generation. I will not take questions on whether a diet Rob Zombie movie was made by Platinum Dunes, or if there was ever a food-poisoning induced nightmare that was passed off as a Netflix movie) and the newest buzz suggests we'll be getting a television show from grief-mongers A24. So of course there's talk of Hoopers rabid original, and even some reductive language suggesting it's shallow fare in needs of a more complex coat of paint. Candidly fuck right off, and maybe pay attention next time. Texas Chainsaw lives where the lead paint peels, in corners where swarms of daddy longlegs vibrate as they breed. At dawn, you either either dance madly in your dinner best, or unleash a primal scream that's eaten by the blazing sun. We worship the hellish heat here, just like we worship the teeth of the saw...It's family after all.
-Dr. Benny Graves
