In this article:
- Postmodern horror uses violence, gore, and jump scares to challenge authority and question social norms.
- The original Texas Chain Saw Massacre looks like mindless violent entertainment on the surface but there are layers of social commentary underneath.
- 45+ years later, the film’s use of violence to question the political polarization and class stratification of morality and values in American society is as relevant as ever.
Despite the financial success Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre achieved when it was released in 1974 — produced on a budget of less than $140,000 and grossing $30 million at the box office — critical reception was mixed. It usually is with horror movies, which are seen by refined, civilized film critics as little more than mindless entertainment and gratuitous gore.
But all those buckets of blood and absurd kill scenes are not only not gratuitous in the context of a horror film, but the necessary tools for shocking audiences into rethinking our social norms and confronting our fears.
As the new sequel comes to Netflix this month, it’s a great opportunity to look at how postmodern horror movies like Texas Chain Saw Massacre can be full of gore and absurd violence but still have nuance and subtext that give audiences a way to question the systems and social order they’ve accepted as natural.
In Chain Saw’s case, violence is used to question the political polarization and class stratification of morality and values that’s only become more entrenched in American society in the decades since the original film hit theaters.
The Slaughterhouse Is a Commentary on Working Class Alienation
On the surface, Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a movie about a family of cannibals hunting down a group of hippies to make human sausage. But the not-so-subtle subtext can be read as a nuanced satire of a very real problem in low-income, rural life: When a community depends on a single company or single industry to make a living and that industry collapses or automates many of the jobs, the community disintegrates.
At the start of the film, the hippies first notice the nearby slaughterhouse by its stench. They complain of the smell and condemn the cruelty of the meat industry.
Later, the hitchhiker picked up by the hippies is talking about how his family has been slaughtering pigs and cattle the old-fashioned way for generations. It’s gross, demanding physical labor and ethically questionable work; but it seems to be one of the only reliable income sources in the area and it’s kept the family going for decades, so he speaks of the work with pride.
When he talks about the grotesque process of making head cheese, for example, he does so with awe and admiration, not unlike the way rural conservatives might romanticize the coal or oil industries that have been the sole or major employer in their hometown for generations.
But the advent of the bolt gun, the hitchhiker explains, was a faster and (theoretically) more humane way to slaughter animals. It ultimately put his family out of work, because it meant that more cattle could be slaughtered with fewer employees. In this highly remote, rural part of Texas, it’s not easy to just go out and get another job. So they’re left to eke out a living, using the skills they have.
In this case, those skills happen to be slaughtering and processing meat. And the rest of the community, similarly struggling to get by, eat the Sawyer family’s barbecue and don’t ask how the sausage gets made.
Leatherface and His Family Are a Parody of Conservative Values and Traditions
The Sawyer family is a model of the ideal family unit. Leatherface and his brother, the hitchhiker, are dutifully keeping the family business going. The traditional social hierarchy, complete with the patriarch in the form of Grandpa Sawyer, is well preserved.
“Well” being a relative term, of course, because the patriarch is little more than a corpse in a suit, who suckles meekly on the blood from Sally’s finger to survive. The decaying, frail patriarch is a pretty on-the-nose metaphor for “antiquated ideal” if there ever was one.
During the final dinner scene, the grandfather, father, and sons are sitting down to a nice family meal (with Sally screaming herself hoarse off-camera). Initially full of good cheer and praise for Leatherface’s exceptional talent as a butcher, the conversation descends into an argument revealing the tensions within the hierarchy.
The hitchhiker, who helps Leatherface catch and kill his victims, accuses their father of being nothing more than a cook — implying that the manual work of killing and butchering is more important in this grotesque social order.
This is a classic class-tinged debate, where working class people tend to place a higher value on (physically) hard work, taking pride in the physical strength and mental dedication required to do that kind of labor every day. Meanwhile, middle and upper class people tend to view manual labor as degrading, the kind of work you do if you lack the intelligence to do work that relies on cognitive skills.
That devaluing of manual labor by upper classes is represented by the father who, after being accused of “just” being a cook, counters with the fact that he personally finds killing people distasteful. Like a true upper class gentleman, he understands that killing is a necessary evil to maintain the society they’ve built, but he is much too refined to actually get his own hands dirty.
“Just some things you got to do,” the father says. “That don’t mean you got to like it.”
If you swap out the cannibalism and killing for, say, capitalism or war, it sounds exactly like a typical conservative talking point.
The Hippies Are a Lesson in the Moral Elitism of Liberals
While this rural Texas town tries to recover from the economic toll of losing so many jobs, the hippies, who come from more middle class roots — Sally’s family is well off enough to have left land for her to inherit — judge the apparently backward attitudes and violent means of survival (the meat industry, not the cannibalism they’ll learn about later, which is admittedly deserving of judgment).
They drive through this remote part of Texas, complaining of the stench and being disgusted by the residents they encounter.
Their behavior is a reminder that it’s easy to feel morally superior when you have the privilege of choice. As much as it might make sense to judge or condemn a harmful industry, it’s not necessarily fair to judge the working class people who have no other alternative but to work for the one employer in the area. As much as going vegetarian might help the environment and be more humane, it’s not fair to judge people who can’t afford or don’t even have access to vegetarian foods.
Their ideals may be honorable in and of themselves, but these hippies aren’t using them to work toward a better society; they’re just using them as a means of feeling superior to anyone who fails to live up to their standard of moral perfection.
By blurring those boundaries of good and evil, showing the guilt and complicity of our protagonists as well as the origins and motives of the antagonists, Texas Chain Saw Massacre is able to critique our polarized American society from all sides, while still making it clear where the violence ultimately stems from.