Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hopper, 1974)

After watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre I thought a lot about the nature of slasher films and how we relate them to the body. While reading Linda Williams "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess" I thought about the ways that make Texas Chainsaw Massacre one of those "gross" movies that she watches with her son. One of the first things that the article mentions, which caught my attention, was bodies, and Body Genre. One important line in the article is, "First, there is the spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion." (Williams 4) I thought of the many ways this film used images like this for all of the gruesome murders. It's interesting the way I think this theory has developed and is applied to older movies. Because this movie had a lot of images of the body being gripped in fear and pain, however, it came off as very amusing. It makes me think of the many ways in which we as audiences have developed new forms of fear. Scenes like the one where he is just catching people in his house and killing them, (like the girl he hung on the meat hook) are so explicit and ridiculous they come off as comedic. I feel like the intensity of sensation is not directly in correlation with how gross it appears as it once was. I feel like we are past the intense gore of fear. Maybe as viewers, we have graduated to a fear of the disturbing and the unseen.

The Untold Story

This movie is obviously horrific for many reasons that we can see plainly (even though there is nothing plain about it) on the screen. But one of the things that kept catching my eye was how the female body is used in the film. Towards the beginning of the film, we constantly see how the men in the police station ogled one of the young women. Their banter surrounding her body also causes them to belittle one of the women they work with, they ridicule (light-heartedly) for her lack of "body". This scene really catches my attention because it seems like something out of a sitcom instead of a horror film. The entirety of this film's light-heartedness makes the concept seem so out-of-place. The concept of cannibalism is one so taboo to common audiences but this movie makes it appear so typical within society causing a sense of terror. I truly feel that the way they make the violence seems mundane truly makes this film that much more unsettling to the viewer. I feel like this is one of those horror films that scare us because of how close to reality we imagine it getting. Concepts that are plausible by the standards of reality make us as watchers afraid in our own homes. We start to imagine the ways in which these things could realistically happen to us.