ScreeningNotes’s review published on Letterboxd:
"You'd probably like it if you didn't know what was in it."
"I wouldn't, and I wish you'd stop talking about it."
As our van full of horny teens drives to the old Hardesty family homestead, they pass a slaughterhouse and pick up a strange hitchhiker. Franklin Hardesty and the hitchhiker discuss the finer points of modern cattle farming and—to put perhaps too fine a point on it—the methodology of cow murder. Historically, farmers used a sledgehammer to bash the cow's head in, you see, but now they've sanitized the whole process and use what's called a captive bolt gun to penetrate the animal's skull.
Quite understandably, this whole conversation disgusts the rest of the van's occupants, due at least in some part to the two men's apparent enthusiasm for the subject matter, and they repeatedly request that they talk about something else. This conversation is too close to "how the sausage is made" for them to handle. Whether they personally consume meat or not, they would rather repress the reality of its production, they would rather repress the fact that these things are happening on a daily basis, that this is a regular and normal part of our society.
This is exactly what The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is about: not literally about how sausages are made, although there's certainly some of that, but in a broader sociological sense about investigating the things we'd rather not discuss, about looking at the things we'd rather not see. It's a deep dive into the Lacanian Real, but in it we find not the repressed trauma of an individual person but the repressed trauma of an entire society.
Before our van full of horny teens drives to the Hardesty homestead, they visit the Hardestys' grandfather's grave, where they encounter another strange man who seems to be speaking in riddles. "Things happen here about, they don't tell about. I see things. You see, they say it's just an old man talking. You laugh at an old man, this thing that laughs know better." Things happen there that people don't want to talk about, and the people who live there who do know about them are scorned for their unwanted knowledge.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is all about this type of unwanted knowledge, this trauma not merely at the level of bodies but at the level of societies; it’s about the way our repression of this trauma allows it to continue unabated and to spread to new victims. In this way, staring into the abyss and allowing it to stare back into you becomes something of an ethical act. There's some supreme metaphysical Truth to be gained from watching Leatherface swing his chainsaw around as the sun sets on our blissful ignorance.
Hooptober | Horror | Top 10: 1970’s Horror
Directorial Debuts | Low Budget | Short Features
Happy Hooptober, everyone! Enjoy your horror films knowing that you are doing the good work by staring into the abyss.
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