The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at 50

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (TCM) has been widely recognized as a groundbreaking and politicized contribution to the horror canon and to the slasher subgenre in particular. This month, on its fiftieth anniversary, the film will not just be commemorated but seen as a living, transformative part of U.S. and global culture. As Chuck Jackson notes in his 2008 essay, "Blood for Oil," TCM is "a predictive analysis of the present political moment."

TCM is not only an important film to revisit and reimagine but is itself a critical text that helps us understand our current moment. Building on Mark Steven's argument that anti-capitalist cinema has not disappeared with the waning of the aesthetics of montage inspired by a previous period of industrial production and Soviet influence, we see TCM as an origin point of post-sixties filmic political representation, a means of "screening insurrection." 

In this cluster we explore how TCM reflects the realities of a transformed working class and develops an apocalyptic style giving form to ongoing concerns surrounding the oppressions and uprisings of an impoverished, surplus, feminized, racialized, criminalized "reserve army" of productive and reproductive workers as well as to economic crisis, geographical uneven development, settler colonialism, disability issues, environmental concerns, and animal rights. 

Mark Steven returns to the moment he first saw The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, several years ago on a hot Christmas afternoon in Australia, a reminder that this is a classic example of daylight horror. Invoking Kristeva's formulation of melancholia, Steven declares his purpose is "to use this essay to understand what it means for horror to take place in the sun's warmth." Weaving deftly among Hegel, Aztec ritual, and Lana del Rey, Steven explores what it means to watch TCM as a "summer movie." After all, he writes, "horror's calendar overwhelmingly favours the kind of autumnal gloom and frosted winters that barely exist in Australia." Steven describes the "dialectic of horror" as something that occurs "through the manipulation of affective force."

Chuck Jackson narrates the fiftieth anniversary of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre by returning to the early 2000s and his work with Houston anti-war activists during the tumultuous years of "Texas Chainsaw George / the Presidential Hitchhiker-in-Chief." Poetically integrating anti-war screams with the political economy of the Bush years and scenarios from the film, Jackson meditates on the conditions that produced his seminal article on TCM and its aesthetic of murder and oil. Jackson's entry is equal parts experimental writing, film analysis, and historical reminder of the multiple catastrophes that have visited Houston in the decades since 1974, courtesy of the oil and gas industry.

Michael Truscello positions The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as an allegory for the failure of revolutionary possibilities in the United States in the 1960s, with reference to Hunter S. Thompson's famous passage from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas referring to the "grim meat-hook realities" that awaited naïve hippies. Citing Chuck Jackson's essay on the film's use of early 1970s political economy, Truscello examines the costs of failed revolution in terms of petrocapitalism and its ruinous expansion over the past 50 years. The bleak ending of TCM reverberates in two recent horror films, The Dark and the Wicked (2020) and Unearth (2020), reflections of contemporary dread and toxicity.

Johanna Isaacson questions the consensus that the Sawyer family represent masculine proletarian violence. Exploring Leatherface's feminine masks and feminized labor, she considers how the film "helps us rethink the gendering of class antagonism in a period of capitalist crises, transforming technologies, and shifting class composition." Leatherface's engagement with housework and other forms of unwaged work makes him paradigmatic of what Michael Denning sees as the feminized "wageless life" at the heart of contemporary proletarianization. In this sense, Leatherface himself is a "final girl" who mirrors Sally. The film ends with the surplus worker and the feminized victim of violence as "intertwined, parallel actors in a world that defies reason, and whose hope lies in a horizon of refusal."

Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa looks at the depiction of dead animals in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as a means to "become philosophical." The film's animal corpses are linked to cosmic horror as they conjure unspeakable dread in the face of unfathomable scales of time, space, and incomprehensibility. This, in turn, leads to both an evocation and critique of the "industrial sublime." TCM acknowledges the awe and violence of industrial agriculture while critiquing its framing as progress — "Here, industrial agriculture is fundamentally not a sign of human triumph, but rather functions akin to Lovecraft's chthonic gods—a mysterious force of destruction that traffics in human and animal death and misery." The terrifying violence and grisly murders in TCM, then, fuse into a work of "industrial cosmic horror," a form of awe and terror that cannot resolve in sublimity but rather only inhumanity. The dream of progress, as embodied by factory farming, is revealed as a nightmare.

Elisabete Lopes looks at the 2003 version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, directed by Marcus Nispel, as an example of the evolution of the final girl. The protagonist of this film, Erin, is an homage to the final girl tropes that were beginning to be established in the 1974 TCM, and that Carol Clover codified in Men, Women, and Chainsaws. However, Lopes argues, Erin marks a deepened feminism of this figure, as she becomes more self-conscious, less passive, more agential, less objectified, while marking an increasingly complex understanding of gender roles three decades after the original film. As Barbara Creed and other critics have contended, Clover focuses on the final girl as a "double for the adolescent male." However, Erin's resourcefulness, thematic explorations of the family and domestic violence, and more modern gender fluidity marks her as a site for female identification.

Slashers always return. The 2003 TCM discussed by Lopes is far from the first or last time we will hear the whirl of the chainsaw. Since the 1974 original we have seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986), Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990), The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1995), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006), Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013), Leatherface (2017), and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022). But these are only a tiny fraction of the works influenced by the 1974 Texas Chain Saw Massacre, considered by many the inaugural slasher film.

The original TCM met with widespread moral panic and reductive characterization, but even in the 1970s, Robin Wood, Carol Clover, Christopher Sharett, and countless ecstatic viewers sensed in what Mark Steven calls the melancholia of TCM's "black sun," an abjection that seeps below individual fear and into the bones of stark national and global realities. TCM reveals U.S. history not as a cemetery or cliché "Indian burial ground," but as ever-present, all-encompassing viscous horror, akin to the lake of Indigenous novelist Stephen Graham Jones' recent Indian Lake Trilogy.

Jones' robust engagement with the slasher genre, and his choice to name the first novel of his highly citational trilogy after TCM, is a thrilling example of the long reach and political potential of Hooper's scrappy DIY film. The final girl of My Heart is a Chainsaw, Jade Daniels, wields horror tropes as weapons against a confounding world of white, settler supremacy, class oppression, and gendered threat. As an abused, troubled Indigenous kid, Jade mobilizes her encyclopedic knowledge of the slasher film to make sense of her own suicidal depression as well as the collective and historical violence that menaces below every surface of her small town.

In Jones' novels, the chainsaw is a mobile signifier. It is the weapon that attacks the final girl and those she tries to protect, but it is also a tool she reappropriates to fend off an array of predators—rich, white patriarchs seeking to hide their economic and personal crimes, perpetrators of familial, patriarchal violence, and the recrudescence of settler colonial history itself in the form of ghosts and mythic monsters. Towards the end of the book, Jade, whose childhood was filled with violence and neglect, witnesses a mama bear nurturing her cub, which restarts the battered protagonist's spikey, jagged "chainsaw heart," thus giving the novel its uncannily hopeful title.

This metaphor builds on Carol Clover's note that in the slasher, killers choose the chainsaw over the gun for its intimacy. The slasher will not kill from a distance. He will get so close it will be difficult to tell the aggressor from the victim. Reflecting the repressed and repressive status of Indigenous existence in a world built on one's genocide, My Heart is a Chainsaw intertwines love and vengeance so tightly that the heart itself becomes a weapon beyond good and evil. A call-and-response resonates between Jones' politicized, anti-moralistic evocation and the pervasive, atmospheric threat haunting the original TCM. As the spectacle of simplistic liberal politics drones on, for fifty years TCM has offered a counter-myth through which we, like Jones' protagonist, may explore our own and our world's slashed and slashing chainsaw hearts.

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Johanna Isaacson writes academic and popular pieces on horror and politics. She is a professor ofEnglish at Modesto Junior College and a founding editor of Blind Field Journal. She is the author of Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror (2022) from Common Notions Press and The Ballerina and the Bull (2016) from Repeater Books. Her book What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is forthcoming from Die Die Books. She runs the Facebook group, Anti-capitalist feminists who like horror films.

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).