Chainsaw Meridian

The familiar sound of a spade slicing through terrain. A series of off-centre, inconsistently focused holiday snapshots; glimpses of the night before. Shadows stretch westward, the sky glows amber, its wispy clouds yet to disperse in the morning's heat. Two figures sunbake, limbs entangled, backlit astride a stony plinth, their faces glistening in the warmth. The sun, which remains out of view, encircles them with a glowing halo. As we edge backward, taking in the entire vista at once, delicate starbursts intersperse our vision. It's a scene that feels more like memory. Summer daybreak. A radio broadcasts local news. You can just about feel the heat. 

Here visual grammar redoubles the oneiric feel that is said to be the domain of all cinema. Real images transmute themselves into the hazy stuff of dreams, as though to literalize what Roland Barthes once described as the medium's singular capacity for "twilight reverie." But more than that, everything screams summertime. In form no less than content, we have been presented with all the signs of a consummate summer movie, or what the undeniable expert in these matters, Stephen King, refers to affectionately as "an ice cream cone for the brain."1 Indeed, this scene begins what the opening crawl and its accompanying voiceover explain is the "true story" of when "an idyllic summer afternoon drive became a nightmare." The setting is neither beach nor lakeside but a cemetery, and the sunbathers are two heavily decomposed, half-melted cadavers: an effigy built of meat and maggots. 

The first time I saw this scene, which opens The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, was Christmas afternoon in the year 2000. On the east coast of Australia, where I misspent a good deal of my youth obsessing over horror films, that day the temperature spiked at around 35 degrees. The dry air felt like a fan-forced oven and there beneath our depleted ozone ultraviolet radiation scorched the earth, preparing the nearby hinterlands for the next year's bushfires: a conflagration that engraved itself into historical memory as "Black Christmas," echoing the title of another slasher film from 1974. Within this context, the heat conveyed by that opening scene belonged to me much as it belonged to the film.

It was my grandmother, Doreen, who had gifted me the film on VHS. When I eventually wrote a book about horror films, it was dedicated to her, and for good reason. She had been singularly responsible for enabling my overly extensive childhood encounters with a huge array of video slashers, from the canonical mainstay Norman Bates, through the big three (Michael, Jason, and Freddy), to the uncannily animatronic Chucky. I had known about TCM only because of an old, illustrated encyclopaedia of horror she let met read, which included a black-and-white screenshot from the final scene, where Leatherface staggers along behind Sally and the truckdriver. It's a film I had long wanted to see, but neither of our video rental stores had a copy — only that weird sequel with Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger.

On reflection, I'm not sure, at least a decade before online shopping, how an elderly woman who didn't drive found a copy of the tape. But she did, and that was my Christmas present. After a big, raucous, and maximally carnivorous family lunch, itself the friendly double to the film's dinner table scene, I spent most the afternoon with one of those cousin-adjacent people you only ever see two or three times a year — Alycia, a scrappy punk who weeks later would take me to my first gig. And while our parents and a bunch of others were all drinking in the backyard, we watched the movie. The one intrusion arrived punctually for the meat hook scene, when my namesake uncle passed through to remind us, in a tone of confused disappointment at the unholy carnage, that it was Christmas Day.

Trying to remember that afternoon a quarter century later and from the other side of the planet is to experience the full force of an almost painful nostalgia. While Christmas gatherings felt profoundly broken after my dad died and then ceased being a gathering altogether when my immediate family and I moved to England, today just about everyone else from that afternoon is gone, too: my uncle, Mark, drank himself to death a few years ago; his mother and my grandmother Doreen died of health complications not long after.

For Julia Kristeva, melancholia finds its most powerful expression in the poetic figure of the black sun. "Beyond its alchemical scope," she describes the phrase, this "metaphor fully sums up the blinding force of the despondent mood — an excruciating, lucid affect asserts the inevitability of death, which is the death of the loved one and of the self that identifies with the former."2 If Kristeva's formulation hyperbolizes the prevailing mood of my own memories, pressed into consciousness by an old horror movie, the metaphor resonates uncannily with the images contained therein. Remember what happens between that opening shot of the graveyard and our entry into narrative diegesis — the two are bridged by the ongoing radio broadcast, which segues from detailing the grave robberies to a list of apocalyptic events scattered across the American landscape. The movie's title is superimposed onto abstract, red-tinted footage of solar flares and sunspots, which dissolve into the seemingly still image of a malevolent yellow sphere cast before an impossibly dark background: the black sun.

Constellating around this figure and recasting such extradiegetic images as deeply personal, it is at this point in the present essay that we can begin to say something about seasonal aesthetics. In other words, I want to use this essay to understand what it means for horror to take place in the sun's warmth.

Long before Ari Aster could pathologize the ultrabright and overlong days of European Midsommar, the modern mind had already apprehended summer disjunctively, as both blasphemy and benediction. "The sun," wrote Hegel, "stands low in winter, rises high in spring, until in summer it reaches its zenith and now bestows its greatest blessings or wreaks its destructiveness, but then it sinks down again."3 While there is something profoundly atavistic to this transient ruination, the same duality appears all throughout American narrative modernity. We encounter it in the forlorn stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, where party season always portends the fall; it haunts the opening sentence of Sylvia Plath's one novel, whose contorted syntax can barely hold trauma at bay; it arrives at something like its melodramatic apotheosis in the grandiose lyricism of Lana del Rey, the mournful sublimation of a longstanding nativist tradition, replete with echoes from Gershwin, Springsteen, and the Beach Boys. It is from within this tradition, a cultural program for summertime sadness, that I propose we rewatch TCM.

That this film is also a summer movie is integral to its realization of horror. This genre, like pornography and melodrama, wants to do things with our bodies, using its forms to elicit a catastrophically intense physical response. "Indeed," writes Eugenie Brinkema, "we might more broadly consider whether horror is the genre in which the body is formalized, given textual shape only to be subjected to the bare destruction of its form."4 Perhaps that, the illumination of a body in the moment of its obliteration, will be the formal function of summer and of its sun in horror — perhaps this season is its own kind of life-destroying diagram, an inescapable and inhuman forcefield of heat and light through which the human body is made to pass, more often unsuccessfully than unscathed.

And yet, cinematic horror, at least as I knew it before TCM, is atmospherically asynchronous to summer in the antipodes. When I first saw it, I was still wholly unaware of Australia's own aesthetics of sunbaked horror, often set within the rural semi-peripheries — exemplified by legendary Ozploitation flicks Wake in Fright and Long Weekend, enjoying artistic respectability with Picnic at Hanging Rock, and finding more recent success in the torturous Wolf Creek franchise. But these colonial outliers only prove a rule. With the exceptions of Crystal Lake and Camp Blackfoot, and maybe Amity Island, all of which nevertheless convey an exclusively American experience, horror's calendar overwhelmingly favours the kind of autumnal gloom and frosted winters that barely exist in Australia.

TCM is different in both its setting and what it does with that setting. Here summertime isn't just incidental, a well-lit background to horrific action; it is, in this movie, a narratively and aesthetically determining force: summer is the condition of possibility for everything we see and hear, as well as how those things befall their victims. This dynamic, when the incidental becomes integral, or when the background intrudes violently upon action, is what might be described as the dialectic of horror, and it is through the mobilisation of this dialectic that horror makes good on its radical potential, not as social allegory (which we will still discuss) but through the manipulation of affective force.   

Reflecting on what it was like to shoot in rural Texas in July, director Tobe Hooper insists that oppressive heat is essential to the film's atmosphere. "That was the heaviest set I've ever been on," he says. "It was miserable, really. That added to a part of the chemistry that caused certain behaviour. The heat, the smoke and bones are cooking under the hot lights. All of that, it's kind of like a war dance."5 If summer proscribes a kind of method acting, with characters appearing so much more ragged and unhinged than they would otherwise, there are many more concrete indices to summer that make themselves legible all throughout the movie. Summer is manifest in the sweat dripping from each actor, in their progressively more sodden, stained clothing, and in their palpable exhaustion. We hear summer in the omnipresent drone of insects — the sound of life born in pestilence. We see it in the mirage effect of wavy, refractive lines that emanate up from the road. And we can sense it in the lighting, which shifts between blinding white glare and orange twilight as the sun makes its diurnal transit across a visibly desiccated earth.

So much more horrific than these relatively innocuous signs of heat, summer takes another form — paradoxically, given the exclusively audio-visual medium — as what Freud would have called the "olfactory stimuli," in a miasma of death that engulfs a set dressed in skins and bones and carcasses all in varying stages of putrescence. It is this, an aesthetic emphasis on summer and sun and heat and stench, that provides us with the affective framework in which something like class analysis articulates with a broader thematic of mourning and melancholia.

The actors have all spoken about the stench. "Aside from being gruesome," reflects Gunnar Hansen, the actor who portrays Leatherface, "the set also stank. In that heat, the bones and hides and animal parts were letting off a rich mix of fumes. Add the sweating humans and the lack of ventilation, and it quickly got ripe inside. It certainly enriched the atmosphere of the shoot."6 Marilyn Burns, who plays Sally, has similar memories of the production, though hers suggest an experience that verges on trauma. "I remember just being tied up," she says, "being screamed at, having the smell of headcheese and your Leatherface outfit and the room itself, the chicken, all the other decaying meat, the decaying set, the decaying crew."7 Between takes, the cast and crew would flee the set, even if only for the shortest reprieve, to seek fresh air or to vomit.

If these stories testify to what sound recordist Ted Nicolaou has described as a "a slaughterhouse atmosphere," they also harmonize with the movie's social content and historical context.8 While the cannibal family are, in Robin Wood's account, "representatives of an exploited and degraded proletariat," they belong to that grouping at a time of class decomposition and heightened immiseration.9 In the early 1970s, postwar economic expansion was met by stagflation, when accumulation was driven downward by the decline of industrial manufacture's rate of profit. And though this signal crisis in capitalist accumulation was displaced by a shift from manufacture into finance, from a productive to a speculative economy, that very shift nevertheless led to the further extirpation of industrial labour, primarily through foreclosures, offshoring, and mass redundancy. All of which sharpens on a thematic on cannibalism. "All told," writes Nancy Fraser, "the cannibal metaphor offers several promising avenues for an analysis of capitalist society. It invites us to see that society as an institutionalized feeding frenzy — in which the main course is us."10 From within this context, the movie is, in its festering heart of hearts, the story of unemployed abattoir workers applying the skills of their trade to the butchery of humans.

Before the horrors are unleashed, the van in which our five victims initially travel passes what one of them, the wheelchair-bound Franklin, points out is the old slaughterhouse — a factory of death that makes itself known by stench before entering the field of vision. And when it does appear that appearance is a montage that cuts between the van's inhabitants and fly-encrusted cattle, awaiting their death, in a moment of grim foreshadowing. Their deranged, blood-caked hitchhiker knows the place well. "My brother worked there," he claims with reference Leatherface, and speaking strictly in the past tense. "My grandfather too. My family's always been in meat." He defends the sledgehammer against the airgun as a matter of employment. "The new way," he says, "put people out of jobs." With the cannibal family all out of work, displaced by technological automation, the film presents its horrors as indexical to the circumstances faced by the industrial workforce.

Within a collective political imagination, the subjectivity of this family is not just that of the proletariat, then, but of those who Marx despaired of as "the 'dangerous class,' the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society."11 They are the sub-proletarian lumpen that capital has neither interest nor capacity in exploiting, who are not just economically unwanted but socially abject, gone feral in the absence of any other purpose. They are those who, in Rosa Luxemburg's characterisation of the Russian lumpenproletariat, "like a school of sharks, swarm in the wake of the battleship of the revolution," only here we should replace the Eisensteinian battleship with a van that's run low on gas.12 While the members of this dangerous class often find expression in rural horror — perhaps most canonically with The Hills Have Eyes — surely it will not be controversial to insist that this subjectivity is exemplified, with macabre force, in the figure of Leatherface. This exemplification is felt all the more acutely because it is summer.

"The smell got up into my mask," recalls Hansen. "I could never get away from it unless I went outside and took the mask off . . . But when I did get free of the mask and got outside for some air, I could not escape the smell, because I was the smell. I was the smelliest, ripest part of the set."13 Hansen was shunned by cast and crew alike, was forced to ingest nausea pills in order to eat, and that too emanates into and from his performance. When we eventually encounter Leatherface in a moment of relative calm — immediately after shattering Jerry's skull with a mallet — the film affords us a long close-up of the obscured face, or what Deleuze would call an "affection image," the kind of thing typically used to convey human emotion. In this instance, we only have access to the eyes and the mouth, exposed from beneath a dead skin mask, and we zoom in on the latter, as though our focus is drawn in by irregular, inhuman movement: cracked lips pull open and closed, as though pulsating, to expose a tongue that darts from side to side over jaggedly sharpened, brown-caked teeth — a revolting tactility.

Because he is abject, Leatherface exemplifies the class of his character, a figure repulsed from performing even the most disgusting forms of work. In this, Leatherface adumbrates one of the more harrowing accounts of wage labour in all of literature, about another abattoir worker, the Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus, from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, who finds himself stranded with his family in the Chicago stockyards. While that novel replicates the seasonal structure of the agricultural georgics, with different labours performed at different times of year, here is its depiction of summer:

Unlike the men here — workers so thoroughly polluted in mind and body by the experience of their exploitation — Leatherface no longer has such a place of employment. He is the surplus of exploitation, an unwanted and poisonous residue.

The slaughterhouse made Leatherface what he is, searing itself into his being the way that capital reproduces itself in and through all of us. Recall how Marx revealed the horror of what had always been taking place offstage, behind the scenes of simple circulation and the exchange of commodities, and so ignored by classical economists. In Marx's formulation, capital introduces a mutation into the dramatis personae of social life: "He who was previously the money-owner now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his worker. The one smirks self-importantly and is intent on business; the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but — a tanning."15 Leatherface, whose appearance literalizes this grim metaphor, is the horrifying embodiment of that social relation in which he no longer has any place.

Just as the lumpenproletariat exemplifies the general law of capitalist accumulation precisely as a contradiction, with its tendency to proletarianize more humans that will ever be formally exploited, Leatherface is thus a member of what Marx called "a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour."16 He is what happens when the hidden abode of production is no longer hidden but unleashed everywhere and on everyone. He smells the way he does because it is summer and because he is a walking tannery — a living slaughterhouse.

I have confided that, since my first encounter, the movie's vision of summer has acquired the force of melancholia — that it is ghosted by a time and a place and people that no longer exist but for in memory. Nevertheless, my dominant response to the film now, and to a lot of horror, is mediated by the experience of proletarian rage, a visceral disgust with a world that exists only to extract all we have, from so many of us and for just a few, all the while inscribing its violence into every aspect of our individual and collective being. While I almost never identify or even sympathise with the antagonists in horror films, whose frequently gendered violence is only relative to existing structures of interpersonal domination, maybe it is in the interplay of the personal and the allegorical that we can formalize this confluence of seasonal aesthetic and social content into something that will be unique to horror.

What I'm trying to get at here is the kind of thing Jade Daniels, the fiercest and best final girl in the history of horror, senses out in the genre she so adores: its capacity to galvanise the detritus of a life lived in the margins. "When you're watching A Bay of Blood you'll notice the eerie similarity in the opening credits to Indian Lake," she says in comparing the Italian giallo film to her town in rural Idaho. "The first time I was watching it in secret my heart dropped let me tell you. I thought it WAS Indian Lake."17 If my engagement with TCM is eccentric because overly personal, recruiting the contingencies and coincidences of my own life to serve alongside the actuality of our shared textual object, that will only be in keeping with what the movie has been doing all along and for all of us, whether we like it or not. But what exactly is that?

In an essay on the visual form of horror, Evan Calder Williams writes about the interplay between foreground and background, and about those truly monstrous incursions when the latter threatens to rupture the former, obliterating the flat repetition we might otherwise expect from this genre: "when we shift away from trying to identify the subject positions, radical or otherwise, of that horrible content," he argues, "we find the basis for a new kind of political reading, one sensitive above all to how films refract an economic and social order that constantly produces swelling mass of the unwanted pressing up against the edges and into the foreground."18 Precisely that, the insurrectionary force of a background that refuses to just do its job and which instead wants to be more, is what we have been encountering here in the form of a summer that burns just too hot and around which the form and content of our movie warp and distend. It is also what we encounter, simultaneously, in the subject positions portrayed as horrific: the murderous and monstrous upswell of an unwanted mass, a violence that is both embodied and systemic, both personal and social.

This is what I love most about horror, and about this horror movie in particular: that every frame of every moment of every scene is made to feel unstable and unsafe; that no matter how readily horror self-arranges along this or that schematic, into whatever narrative convention, at the level of form it remains irreducibly and unpredictably dangerous, always threatening to annihilate the material confines of its text or medium. It's something those of us born aside from the blessings of capital and connection will have long suspected: that, no matter who or what is cast as abject, sometimes they come back. It's also how a movie about a drive through Texas becoming nightmare can bleed into an Australian teenager's Christmas and continue to shape thoughts and feelings over two decades and too many lives later. And that's what we all see in the final minutes, as Leatherface spins and twirls and windmills as though dancing with his chainsaw, spiralling in silhouette, with the sunrise refracting and flaring across the camera's eye, as the actor's body moves between us and it like a celestial object: another a black sun — or, better still, a solar eclipse, just like the one that took place across both hemispheres on Christmas Day in the year 2000.

---

Mark Steven is the author of Class War: A Literary History, Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism, and Splatter Capital. He teaches literature at the University of Exeter.

---