The Grim Meat-Hook Realities of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

No film captures the failure of the revolutionary impulses of the 1960s in the United States quite like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Christopher Sharret calls director Tobe Hooper "a poet of the American twilight, of the dead American Dream warned about by any number of artists, but emphatically by Hooper and his soul mates George A. Romero, Wes Craven, and not a few others."1 Easy Rider (1969) proclaimed the end of the 60s with shotgun blasts from a white hillbilly; the failure to abolish capitalism in the United States released a chainsaw-wielding homicidal maniac and his family of cannibals.

A vanload of hippies searches for gasoline in rural Texas, having made a trip to a cemetery in the fictional location of Newt, Texas to confirm whether the grave of Sally and Franklin Hardesty's grandfather has been disturbed. Their friend Pam reads from a book about astrology, "There are moments when we cannot believe that what is happening is true." The foreboding implicit in this scene is amplified not only by the dramatic irony that these hippies are about to be slaughtered by a family of cannibals in backwoods Texas, but also by the broader context in which the film exists: the naïveté of white hippies who believe that mass murder couldn't possibly happen to them in a nation founded on genocide and chattel slavery, a nation that routinely projects profound violence on behalf of capitalist imperialism. This is a cinematic illustration of Hunter Thompson's "survival trip" following the collapse of 60s idealism in "grim meat-hook realities" that awaited the hippies: Leatherface literally kills Pam by impaling her on a meat hook. The character whose name means "sweetness" is suspended like a cut of beef, and the only survivor of this massacre, Sally, escapes in the bed of a 1971 Chevy C10 pickup truck while screaming hysterically and covered in blood.

While Tobe Hooper obviously did not know what would become of the failures of the 60s, he understood, as Hunter Thompson clearly understood, that the early 70s exhibited a definite pivot away from the idealism of the counterculture. Significant events in a matter of a few years, such as the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and the OPEC oil drama of 1973, would signal a capitalist system in turmoil, and that seemed determined to reset society and reassert itself with a dose of authoritarianism.2 Many of the champions of 60s counterculture would end up dead, in jail, in mainstream jobs, or lost to obscurity. In 1973, Timothy Leary, whose "trip" Hunter Thompson diagnosed with a "fatal flaw," was sent to Folsom prison where he spent some time in a cell next to Charles Manson, whose murderous "family" is often considered a parallel with the Sawyer family of cannibals. Leary agreed to become an informant for the FBI, in exchange for a reduced sentence. He left prison in 1976. In 1988, Leary held a fundraiser for libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul.

One of the central themes in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which forms a bloody anchor to the twentieth century, is the foundational and violent oil infrastructure of the global capitalist economy. Chuck Jackson's excellent 2008 essay, "Blood for Oil: Crude Metonymies and Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)," was the first academic analysis to map the many ways that the film is shot through with concerns about oil in the wake of the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, what Jackson describes as "a metonymy of force, power, and oil."3 From the radio broadcast describing "the continuing squabble of South American governments over oil-rich regions" to the hippy kids' van running low on gasoline to Drayton Sawyer (The Cook) complaining that the "cost of electricity is enough to drive a man out of business," The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has oil on the brain. Jackson calls this allegory "a predictive analysis of the present political moment,"4 with reference to the Bush/Cheney regime of the early 2000s. The film "makes visible how local bodies, economies, and terrors participate in and, indeed, are made possible by global capital's early 1970s political economy," and I would argue we can see 50 years later the bodily and environmental residue of the capitalist buzzsaw run amok for decades.5 Just as Jackson connected the violence of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to the political economy of the early 70s, in which "military conflict over oil and land in South American rainforests rages on while gigantic, oil-fueled machinery bulldozes human bodies in Texas," contemporary viewers might consider the failure to contain such forces — the global rents of capitalist appetites that manifest as mass extinction, mass murder, and authoritarianism — in the present.6

We might add to the allegorical presence of oil in the narrative of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre the literal presence of oil in the film stock used to shoot the movie. Pansy Duncan, in a provocative reading of Kubrick's The Shining as a form of "petro-horror," notes that "many of the low-budget hits of 1970s horror were shot on" film stocks "increasingly constituted not of acetate or cellulose nitrate, but of polyester, a petroleum derivative." Included in this group of films is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.7 Duncan's reading of The Shining "retroactively reframes the 1970s 'New Regime' horror as a genre awash in oil."8

Chuck Jackson notes that from 1930 to 1970, "Texas was a pivotal petroleum producing state, producing 35-45% of the national total of oil each year."9 For many years, the early 70s were the peak of US oil production, the birth of the modern US environmental movement, and around the time when oil companies began lying to the public about climate change. We now know, for example, that ExxonMobil learned from its own scientists in the 70s that its primary business would increase global temperatures dangerously, and instead of changing its business model the company expanded extraction over the coming decades and promoted forms of climate denial.10 As early as 1954, the fossil fuel industry funded research by the Air Pollution Foundation that demonstrated the detrimental impacts of smog and greenhouse gasses.11 On December 31, 1974, the year The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was released, daily global oil consumption was 54.79 million barrels; by December 31, 2023, daily global oil consumption measured 102.21 million barrels. In 1974, CO₂ levels measured 330.19 ppm; by 2024, this number was 427. The Royal Society notes that "for the past 800,000 years up until the 20th century, the atmospheric CO₂ concentration stayed within the range 170 to 300 parts per million (ppm), making the recent rapid rise to more than 400 ppm over 200 years particularly remarkable."12

Texas Heat

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was filmed in famously hot conditions. The use of animal carcasses as set decorations, combined with the extreme heat inside the Sawyer house, created nauseating conditions for the actors. The scorching conditions captured on film are at once a template for daylight horror cinema, petrocapitalist allegory, and prophesy. Texas, arguably the birthplace of the global age of oil, recorded its hottest year based on average temperature, in 2023.13 The impact of global warming on Texas will be brutal:

A report by Texas A&M University's Office of the Texas State Climatologist projects average Texas temperatures in 2036 will be 3 degrees warmer than the average temperature from 1950 to 1999 and 1.8 degrees warmer than the 1991-2020 average.

The number of 100-degree days is expected to almost double by 2036 compared with 2001-20, especially in urban areas.14

Texas is both the leading climate polluter in the US, and a region that will suffer substantially from the effects of climate change.

Extreme weather is on the rise in Texas, with record heat, drought, wildfires, flooding and hurricanes causing significant loss of human life and damage to property and infrastructure, climate impacts which will grow severely worse unless the state gets off of fossil fuels and eliminates greenhouse gas pollution by 2050.15

In 2016, geologists announced an oilfield discovery in Texas that at an estimated 20 billion barrels of recoverable oil would make it the largest discovery in US history; however, at current global oil consumption rates, this entire field represents less than one year of supply. By 2019, Texas was pumping more oil than Iraq and Iran. The United States has become the largest producer of oil and gas in history:

Domestic oil and gas production, turbocharged by the advance of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has rocketed. No country in history has extracted as much oil as the US has in each of the past six years, with a fifth of all oil drilled in 2023 being American flavored. US gas production also tops the global charts, having surged 50% in the past decade. Every hour of every day, on average, around 1m barrels of oil and 2m tons of gas are sucked up from oil and gas fields from Texas to Appalachia to Alaska.16

Oil and gas production includes many social and environmental forms of degradation and oppression, such as what some scholars call "fossil fuel racism," which is "characterized by the disproportionate and racialized effects of climate change, fossil fuel extraction, transportation, processing, and consumption on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor populations."17

The Expansion of US Oil Empire

This status of fossil fuel superpower is temporary, of course, but tracks the violent trajectory of US capitalism in the wake of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. The Carter Doctrine of January 1980 declared that the US would use military force in the Persian Gulf, if American hegemony in the region were challenged; Reagan extended the doctrine to include the protection of Saudi Arabia. Multiple military interventions in the Middle East, including the Iran-Iraq War, the 1991 deployment of over 950,000 US soldiers in Operation Desert Storm, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, solidified the US ruling class' resolve to dominate the most prolific oil-producing region in the world and to make the US military-industrial complex somewhat less reliant on antagonistic nations for fossil fuels. The Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University estimated US post-9/11 war spending at $8 trillion, as of 2022;18 the estimated human cost "of people killed directly in the violence of the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere" from 2001 to 2023 is 905,000 to 940,000.19

US government subsidies for fossil fuels reached a high of $760 billion in 2022, second only to China, part of a global total that has soared to $7 trillion annually in an era of catastrophic climate change.20 As of 2019, fossil fuel subsidies in the US were 10x the amount the government spent on education. Far from scaling back fossil fuel production during the sixth mass extinction event, global capitalism is accelerating its commitment to ecocide. A 2019 report from the environmentalist group Global Witness estimates commitments by global oil and gas corporations to new fossil fuel exploration at $4.9 trillion over the next decade.21 Global Energy Monitor estimates slightly more than half of the 302 oil and gas pipelines in development worldwide are in North America; if these pipelines are constructed, they will increase global oil and gas pipelines by almost one-third and ensure decades of increased oil and gas extraction and consumption.22 The inability of the revolutionary left to abolish or contain capitalism, perhaps apocalyptically alluded to by the bleak ending of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, enabled a petrocapitalist order to drive the planet into mass extinction, and the chainsaw-wielding madman remains at large.

Haunting The Petrostate

On the 50^th anniversary of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, we might ask, as we once again witness Leatherface flailing a chainsaw on a highway in the bloody orange Texas sunrise, "What is the true cost of allowing monsters to walk among us?" What is the cost of losing a revolution to ecocidal capitalist imperialism? Chuck Jackson's observation that "the material presence of a national energy crisis haunts The Texas Chain Saw Massacre"23 was made while a cartel of former oil executives — Bush, Cheney, Rice — occupied the upper echelons of the White House. The neocon wars of the early 2000s were primarily about dominating Middle East oil for global capitalism. But the face of the petrostate ultimately does not matter: under Democratic presidents such as Obama and Biden, the US has continued engaging in record levels of oil and gas production. As Jackson writes, "The awful noise of the gas-guzzling machines closes the film as a psychotic symptom of petroleum's collusion with power and control, leaving the viewer with a morbid reminder that our reliance on oil for fuel is bound up in a Gothic economy ruled by ravenous corporations and paid for, in blood, by many."24 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre makes visible the murderous rage and bloodletting of a system that often effectively conceals its necropolitical valences.

Epilogue

Bryan Bertino's 2020 supernatural horror film The Dark and the Wicked takes place in Thurber, Texas. In real life, Thurber is an actual ghost town. A company town that thrived on coal mining and the production of bricks, Thurber's decline began in the 1920s when oil became the industrial standard. The history of the real Thurber is never introduced in The Dark and the Wicked, but the film itself is more of an experiment in prolonged dread in which history is implied rather than illustrated. In the film, the children of a dying patriarch attend to his isolated farmhouse (the director's family home). Their mother appears to commit suicide. An evil entity, called The Wicked in the film's credits, seems to have possessed the land and its people. The Dark and the Wicked derives horror from grief, alienation, and dread. David Theo Goldberg argues that dread "operates in the space of indiscernibility," and the horror of The Wicked works in this space: everything in this fictional Thurber is dying or killing itself, and no known cause can be identified.25 Dread, says Goldberg, "envelops. It inhabits the world it comes to constitute, to define."26 The dread of Thurber, Texas, in real life and in The Dark and the Wicked, is the end result of a capitalist system that brutalizes, alienates, dissects; dread is a word that stands in "for the gathering evaporation of the commons, the dissolution of the social, the severing of and turning away from the sometime social ties that bind."27 This is the world of pervasive dread in which we now live, whose social and environmental devastations are unequally distributed.

The American historian Howard Mumford Jones observed of the epoch in which oil extraction on an industrial scale emerged, "The discovery that energy could be channeled into vast and profitable projects of destruction created in the era a kind of fierce, adolescent joy in smashing things."28 While the chainsaw might function metonymically for industrial capitalist evisceration, the true scale and horror of oil capitalist destruction cannot be contained in a single object.

The abysses of the twentieth century — world wars and extermination up to the Shoah — are elementarily linked with the use of petromodern means. Here lies the maximum point of petromodern horror. For the murder of the disabled in the National Socialist euthanasian "Aktion T4," trucks were converted into mobile gas chambers. Exhaust gases from firmly installed engines were also used to kill nearly two million people at the Sobibór, Belzec, and Treblinka death camps. Similar to the toxic gas Zyklon B, carbon monoxide overrides the chemical mechanism of respiration.29

Indeed, with the twentieth century as a prologue, we can confidently declare that something wicked this way comes. The Dark and The Wicked does not have to position oil visibly as the source of horror: petromodern horror wades in the ambient dissolution of life after oil.

Epilogue #2

Unearth (2020) uses genre cinema to depict the impacts of fracking. Instead of Texas, the location is Pennsylvania; like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the setting is rural, and the people impacted by the horror of oil infrastructure are almost all white. Unearth spends at least half of the film developing a working-class melodrama about struggling farmers. Characters are in debt, fighting addiction, trying to save a failing business, raising a baby as a single mother, and dealing with the capitalist assault on small farms. The opening scene at a local pond establishes an idyllic setting and our central character's connection to the water. This same character will be the conventional Final Girl in Unearth.

Overhead establishing shots of the farm connect the habitat with the body of water nearby, and it's not long before the town council has approved licenses to drill for natural gas in the area. Seeking a way out of his failing auto shop, and against the advice of his neighbouring farmers, George Lomack accepts an offer from a representative of Patriot Exploration to drill on his land. The economics of the deal appear to be favourable, until later in the film when George learns of the hidden expenses in the contract he signed. The drilling company's exploitation of the Lomacks is twofold, of course, as events in the second act of the film reveal the drilling has destabilized something below the surface and both families begin to experience physical and psychological ailments. Repeated shots of people drinking water from the tap make it obvious that the local aquifer is the source of the problem. By the third act, Unearth has presented many symptoms of actual cases of illness that resulted from fracking. In addition to documentaries on the subject, such as such as Josh Fox's 2010 film Gasland, and Hollywood treatments of fracking, such as Gus Van Sant's 2012 film Promised Land, most of Unearth resembles a standard critique of hydraulic fracturing.

When Unearth surpasses the realistic depiction of fracking and engages horror genre conventions, the film passes from environmentalist fable into petro-horror. Instead of being unsettled by the science of fracking, the viewer might be repulsed by the prospect of fossil fuel infrastructure. The film connects fracking to drinking water and activities connected to the water supply. The victims range in age from a newborn baby to senior citizens. Even the characters who warned against selling the farmland to a fracking operation end up dead from the tainted water. As it replicates the slasher convention of the Final Girl, Unearth also leaves the audience with the prospect that even the survivor of this clash with capitalism might be infected, which perhaps points to our own post-capitalist world as one that will be too degraded for utopian rebirth. We may have allowed the chainsaw-wielding maniac to roam free for far too many years.

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Michael Truscello is an associate professor in English and General Education at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta. He is the author of Infrastructural Brutalism: Art and the Necropolitics of Infrastructure (MIT Press, 2020) and co-editor with Ajamu Nangwaya of Why Don't The Poor Rise Up? Organizing the Twenty-First Century Resistance (AK Press, 2017). His recent publications on horror cinema include: (with Renae Watchman) "Blood Quantum and Fourth Cinema: Post-and Paracolonial Zombies," Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 40.4 (2023): 462-483; and "The 'Yahima' Controversy and Antiracism in HBO's Lovecraft Country," in Horror and Indigeneity: Literature, Film, and Television. Murray Leeder and Gary Hodes, eds. (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, forthcoming).

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