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This essay will look at the Texas Chain-Saw Massacre and how it relates to the concept of freakery in film culture. The definition of freakery is something that is out of the ordinary or seems strange. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre explores this definition on all sides.
Texas Chain Saw Massacre is one of the few films that proved as an independent sector that produced the most original and stimulating films, such as Wes Cravens Last House on the Left (1972) and David Lynchs unsettling Eraserhead (1977) all marked out different territories for their respective creators (Jonathan Ross, 1993). How this film breaks the taboos of conventional horror cinema is that it heavily relies on the time of day it is and chooses to have most of the horrific events during the day and out in broad daylight. Making the film itself a cut out of the ordinary expanding the thoughts of freakery with this film breaking the conventional telling of how horror is supposed to be, the film itself stands out in the ranks of every other horror.
Through the 1970s, this alignment developed into the cult of horror. It was spearheaded by a relatively small cohort of high-profile controversies, those involving Night of the Living Dead, Last House on the Left, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Shivers. Facilitated by increasingly lenient censorship regulations, these films presented themselves as radical, political, and independent-minded. Their horror involved starkly realistic depictions of the detailed, explicit, and abusive violation of bodily integrity with rape and cannibalism taking a prominent place. (James Sexton and Ernest Mathijs, 2011. pp. 196)
How this film connects with the term freakery is with its dependence on context-specific reception conditions, in particular because of its singular focus on deviant human bodies as sites of transgression (James Sexton and Ernest Mathijs, 2011 p. 103). The film has a prominent character named Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) who has his face hidden under a mask that is made of human skin. He is seen as a freak in his familys eyes. How would other people seeing him perceive him differently from his family? His having a mask made of human skin is some sort of freakery, as in freakery being a distortion of the human body, making them freaks. So, having him wear that kind of mask would put another layer of freakery, since his mask is also decomposing and rotting. The audience would never see his face even, though he is always seen wearing a mask and dirty clothing. Even the cannibalistic family has a bunch of decomposing bodies in their home. When the friends are at the gas station, they see different people who have deformities and are acting very strange and one person is drunk. Even on the topic of strange, it shows that the whole state of Texas is being put forward as a sense of freakery.
In normative society, freakery is premised on unequal viewing and social relations. A non-disabled audience retains the power to subject a non-normative body to an ableist gaze as an entertaining spectacle enjoying, a mixture of shock, horror, wonder, and pity. Although it has taken many different cultural forms (David Church, 2008. pp. 3)
The whole dysfunctional cannibalistic family is all a bunch of freaks set in a town that is filled with other people that are their versions of freaks, it even goes as far as to set the alcoholics in the town as freaks, in the eyes of our protagonists. The alcoholics do not seem out of place in their town, but the outsiders who come from a different state view them as a bunch of weird social outcasts. This shows how you will always be a freak yourself, if someone from a different culture or a different country would look at you with their view of how things should be, then that makes you a freak or a social outcast in their eyes. If the term freakery would stretch that thinly as if something as little as just a way you behave out of the ordinary, if it is the way someone walks or the way someone talks or if they have a speech impediment. Although the Texas Chain Saw Massacre is very prominent with the term freakery touching upon the very extreme to the very light. The extreme is the decomposing bodies and the skin that Leatherface uses as a mask the light is the alcoholic being there not caring about what people think of him, to the real world where there are a lot of alcoholics walking around not caring what others think of them.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a film about a group of friends, two siblings, and three of their friends, that goes on a road trip to visit their grandfathers grave. During their trip, they pick up a lonesome hitchhiker (Edwin Neal) who seems harmless in the beginning. This hitchhiker is seen as this babbling crazy maniac, putting him as the first freak. There is a big red flag for the protagonists when he is sitting there talking about all this creepy stuff and showing them photos of animal carcasses. Then suddenly, completely out of the blue the hitchhiker pulls out a knife and starts to attack a friend called Franklin (Paul A. Partain) who is in a wheelchair. The friends stop the car and kick the hitchhiker out. As they continue their trip, they stop at a gas station and discover that the locals are not exactly normal , they are quite the opposite. Some have disfigurations, others seem to be drunk all the time and others seem to talk nonsense and get their friends to believe in crazy theories about their life. The friends get back in the car and then drive off, after a while they come across this mysterious house. It seems abandoned so they go to check it out. Inside the house, they find all these different animal carcasses and they explain that it smells awful in there.
The friends split up to look around the house, this is happening during the day. Suddenly one of the friends named Kirk (Willam Vail) hears a scream and he runs towards it. In the very next room, he stumbles, and right in front of him comes Leatherface who hits him in the head with a hammer. Leatherface proceeds to drag him into the room while making weird noises. The audience gets to know that the scream came from Leatherface himself. Later we see Pam (Teri McMinn) go into the same room where Kirk is, and she sees his corpse and starts to scream. That is when Leatherface comes out again and starts running after Pam, only to catch her right outside the door in the bright daylight, she is screaming and terrified for her life while he is having fun laughing and making weird noises. Leatherface brings her to a room where there are two hooks and a freezer. He hangs Pam up on one of the hooks and proceeds to cut into Kirks’s body. Where this film fits into the subject as a cult film, is when we look at the cultural diamond, we have the social world that has garnered the film as a staple in the horror world of its unconventional narrative. The creator Tobe Hooper stated that he wanted to break the barriers of the way horror films are supposed to be made, he broke the rules of what people intended horror films to be. Then we have the receiver, the regular horror film audience, the film had a great opening, impressing both horror fans and critics alike. All the appreciation and following the film has had over the years makes it a definite cultural object. Horror directors are still to this day inspired by Tobe Hooper and his work with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Dustin Kidd, 2014. Pp. 8)
After that, the viewer follows Jerry (Allen Danziger), as he continues to walk inside the house as he was outside the whole time. He comes to the freezer room and is very curious as to what is in the freezer. He opens it up and Pam is there waking up screaming, Jerry starts to scream as well and then obviously Leatherface comes in swinging his hammer in Jerry’s head. This scene is considered one of the most terrifying scenes ever filmed, as it was building up to the perfect execution and the jump scare is justifiable with Pam getting warm and waking back to life as Jerry opens the freezer. Why would Leatherface keep her in the freezer? She is seen as a somewhat mummy. But for Leatherface, she is seen as an outsider, she is the freak for him, and that is why he kills them and uses them for his family to feast upon. This could be a connection to when Julia Pastrana a woman billed as the ugliest woman in the world, was embalmed after her death and continued to be exhibited by her husband and manager (Helen Davies 2015 pp. 17). She in a sense became feasted upon after her death, just because of her being a freak of nature in the eyes of other people and becoming an attraction for others to look upon her ugliness. She became a freak just because of her nature of being. Just like Pam being a freak in the eyes of Leatherface, and his family feasting upon her body.
The story then goes back to Franklin as he scoots around in his wheelchair completely oblivious as to what is going on. The darkness has been bestowed upon the land, and Franklin seems helpless, he calls out to the other friend that he was just with called Sally (Marilyn Burns). As he is calling her name, the audience gets a sense of dread since Leatherface may be out lurking after killing the other persons. The film cuts to Sally as she walks around the woods looking for Franklin. After a while, Leatherface comes out chasing her with a chainsaw. She manages to run away from Leatherface, only to run past Franklin who is sitting helplessly in his wheelchair. Leatherface comes out of the dark woods with his chainsaw and kills Franklin with it, making it the first and only killing with the chainsaw. An interesting phenomenon that Leatherface would go on to become synonymous with the use of the chainsaw as a murder weapon becoming a staple in the horror genre. How is it that he was seen using the chainsaw only two times during the whole of the film and using his hammer to kill more people, but the chainsaw was the weapon that became synonymous with the character of Leatherface rather than his use for the hammer. It is mainly because of the sheer shock value it has in the film, being the most grotesque killing and with the film ending with him going crazy with the chainsaw in his hands. Becoming the most memorable scene in the whole film.
Leatherface got to wield his power tool of choice twice more after the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre in 1974, with the first sequel not appearing until 1986 (Jonathan Ross, 1993. pp. 231).
Sally runs into a house; there she is confronted by an old man (Jim Siedow) she thinks is kind and caring. However, she soon figures out that the old man is a sinister person. He knocks her out and when she awakes, she sees the hitchhiker, Leatherface, the old man, and an even older man (John Dugan) who they explain is their grandfather, sitting around a table eating human flesh. She is terrified of what she is witnessing, being strapped to a chair and panicking. There is a jarring sequence of close-ups and eerie music and cuts to the revolting food that is on the table. The family of cannibals is mocking her while she is in a helpless position. They are talking about their grandfather and how proud they are of him for killing lots of people in his youth, him being the catalyst for the family’s horrible behavior, here the audience gets exposure about who Leatherface is and why he is this maniac who is all about killing, and it is his family that made him this way, they told him that his face is too disfigured that he always have to wear a mask, so he wears the skin of his previous victims, this is proven to be inspired by the serial killer Ed Gein (Chris Sun 2018).
After the family keeps rambling on about their life and how horrible they are. Sally manages to loosen herself from the chair and makes a run for it, the family shouts at Leatherface that he needs to go after her. When she is running out of the house, she stumbles upon two corpses that are in wheelchairs symbolizing their liking for disabled people. Sally manages to run out of the house while Leatherface is right behind her with the chainsaw in full gear. She runs out to the street to stop a truck and seek help; the driver stops and tries to help the girl only to see Leatherface coming behind her that is when he starts to run as well. Leatherface trips and cuts his leg with the chainsaw, the driver gets back in the truck and drives away. Sally manages to stop a pickup car and jumps into the back barely escaping Leatherfaces chainsaw teeth. That is when the iconic scene of Leatherface spinning around with the chainsaw comes into play and Sally is finally saved. In the end, when Sally manages to get out, does Leatherface become a sort of whimsical freak? He starts as a monster and then gradually becomes this freak who did not get his way in the end so he freaks out spinning around. How Max Horkheimer and Theo Adorno coined the enlightenment logic the disenchantment of the world produces teratology, the science of monstrosity that eventually tames and rationalizes the wondrous freak (Rosemaria Garland Thompson, 1996. pp. 4)
Bibliography
- CHURCH, David Ryan. 2008. Freakery, Cult Films, and the Problem of Ambivalence. San Fransisco State University.
- THOMPSON, Rosemarie Garland. 1996. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. NYU Press.
- KIDD, Dustin. 2014. Pop Culture Freaks: Identity, Mass Media, and Society. Westview Press.
- SUN, Chris. 2018. ED. Source Point Press.
- ROSE, James. 2013. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Auteur.
- DAVIES, Helen. 2015. Neo-Victorian Freakery: The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak Show. Palgrave Macmillan.
- SEXTON, James and Ernest MATHIJS. 2011. Cult Cinema: and Introduction. John Wiley & Sons Inc.
- ROSS, Jonathan. 1993. The Incredibly Strange Film Book. Simon & Schuster.
Filmography
- Texas Chainsaw Massacre. (1974). [film] Directed by Tobe Hooper. Bryanston Distributing Company.
- The Last House on the Left. (1972). [film] Directed by Wes Craven. Crystal Lake Entertainment.
- Eraserhead. (1977). [film] Directed by David Lynch. American Film Institute.
- Night of the Living Dead. (1968). [film] Directed by George A. Romero. Universal Studios.
- Shivers. (1975). [film] Directed by David Cronenberg. Telefilm Canada.
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