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.