“Becoming Philosophical” in the Slaughterhouse: Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Industrial Cosmic Horror

The script for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) — originally simply titled Leatherface — begins with the celestial image of a sun flair. Eloquently described, Hooper and coauthor Kim Henkel write, "The sun is larger than the frame and white hot. A long, golden arc sweeps across the upper right hand corner: it is the explosive, gaseous profile of the sun. There is a burst of light and a liquid rope of moltent [sic] gases arcs into space and then slowly, heavily, back to the sun."1 In the following shot, the circle of the sun itself was meant to be cross-dissolved into the "purple glazed eye of a dead dog." This transition would have directly evoked the famous dissolve from the shower drain to Marion's eye in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). But where Hitchcock's montage creates a simple simile — the blood goes down the drain just as Marion's life drains from her body — Hooper and Henkel's is much more opaque. Like Sinclair's character in the above epigraph, one becomes "philosophical" when contemplating animal death. The universe itself is contained within the eye of a dead dog.

So, while The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is undoubtedly about a specific regional location, it was always meant to evoke a cosmic scale.2 This scene did end up in the film's final cut but features a dead armadillo's body instead of a close up of a dog's eye, thereby erasing the comparison to Psycho. However, the armadillo adds its own bizarre valence, presenting an animal whose alien anatomy continues to evoke otherworldliness. Robert A. Burns, the film's art director, claimed to have found the dead armadillo on the side of the road and created a taxidermy from its corpse, which was eventually featured in the film.3 This was only one of many dead animals that Burns would scavenge in his work on the production design. As he ruefully recounted, "there was a lot of collecting of dead animal parts."4

Jason Middleton has argued that these dead animals bring an indexically documentary quality to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, one which invites viewers to reflect on the world outside the film's story.5 Following Middleton, I argue that these images ask audiences to, in the words of Sinclair, "become philosophical" when facing the actual scope and scale of industrial slaughterhouses. This essay thus considers the connections between the film's images of dead animals and its use of a type of cosmic horror. Mobilizing the concept of the "industrial sublime," I argue that the film is a horrific reflection of real changes in industrial agriculture during the mid-twentieth century. As the family farm was increasingly replaced by the factory farm and as meatpacking went from a national to an international industry, the operations of the slaughterhouse and industrial agriculture more generally were transformed from awe-inspiring images of efficiency and progress to a much darker, more ominous image of twisted human and nonhuman bodies, where waste, disease, and death pile up at an almost unimaginable scale. All of these changes, which occurred over several decades, took on an especially apocalyptic tone after the 1960s, when exposés by the likes of Rachel Carson and Ruth Harrison revealed the immense environmental damage caused by industrial agriculture and factory farming.6 In this context, changing labor conditions, intensifying industrialization, and planetary catastrophe all existed side-by-side.

In order to make this argument, two concepts must first be laid out, each of which interlock in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The first is "cosmic horror," the second, the "industrial sublime." Both are connected to Burkean and Kantian notions of the sublime. Cosmic horror — a subgenre most closely associated with the author (and outspoken racist) H.P. Lovecraft — is generally defined by its evocation of unspeakable dread in the face of horrors that are frightening due to their scale or scope. Objects or beings that are either terrifyingly old, vast, or strange often populate these stories. As Vivian Ralickas argues, this dimension of cosmic horror relies on, and yet ultimately subverts, the philosophical notion of the sublime.7 For Edmund Burke, the experience of the sublime involves shattering our sense of self, only to build it back better. Through the recognition of the cosmic scale of reality, Immanuel Kant and others argue that we recognize our own limits but also return to ourselves as moral actors who are fundamentally unlike nature in our capacity to make decisions and guide our actions accordingly. But Ralickas argues that Lovecraftian cosmic horror ultimately deploys no such recuperative move, writing that "the effect of cosmic horror" is to highlight "the shortcomings of the humanistic mode of subjectivity upon which the sublime is predicated."8 Cosmic horror thus uses the tropes of the sublime to shatter a reader's or viewer's sense of self, but doesn't repair or rebuild that self by reasserting human meaning.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre may at first seem disconnected from many of these concerns. Hooper was initially inspired by the serial killer Ed Gein, and while the murderous members of the Sawyer family are terrifying, they don't immediately evoke the sublime in the way of, say, Lovecraft's eldritch Gods. Nonetheless, the opening sequence's sun flares described in the beginning of this essay place the events of the film in a cosmic register. This register reframes the extreme violence of the Sawyer family into a kind of sublime image that refuses rational recouperation. As Tony Williams argues, this sequence gives the film "an aura of cosmic significance" which exacerbates what Williams describes as the film's sometimes apocalyptic lack of rational causality.9 For as long as the Sawyers' violence is connected to inexplicable sources outside themselves, the family can function as onscreen avatars for a sublime experience of cosmic horror.

Alternately, there are also some very graspable reasons proffered by the film for the Sawyers' violence, which Williams is quick to acknowledge, and which are not rooted in the otherworldly but rather are prototypically human. Early in the film we learn that Sally and Franklin Hardesty's grandfather used to sell cattle to the local slaughterhouse, which also once employed members of the Sawyer family. The character referred to as Hitchhiker implies that the Sawyers were laid off when bolt guns were adopted as a more efficient method of slaughter, one that required fewer employees than using a sledgehammer. Williams concludes that such hints toward past capitalist and industrialist exploitation ultimately place the Sawyer family within mundane machinations of social causality.10 In this rendering, the Sawyers represent a return of the repressed for society's exploited, outcast, and abandoned — pulling in an opposite direction from the sublime horror evoked by the film's opening. This seeming shift in register, from the local to the universal, from the material to the existential, from the sociopolitical to the cosmic, is a contradiction at the center of the film.

But there is a concept that can bring together both sets of concerns. Scholars studying industrial agriculture, such as Alex Blanchette and Brian Black, have identified a framework for understanding issues of scale and violence in the slaughterhouse, which they term "the industrial sublime."11 Broadly described, the industrial sublime refers to a discourse of the sublime in which innovation, mechanization, and the notion of human progress replace the scenes of natural grandeur and power in prior definitions of the sublime. Often used to analyze representations of industry at the turn of the century, the industrial sublime helps explain how, for instance, slaughterhouses in Packingtown were seen as popular tourist attractions in the early 20^th century. Visitors to these sites — where thousands upon thousands of animals were being routinely slaughtered by low-wage workers with few-to-no health and safety protocols — came to marvel at the power and majesty of human industry. Here, the factory, assembly line, or a slaughterhouse functions like a mountain range or tornado previously did, demonstrating the unimaginable size and might of humanity itself. In this framework, even images of extreme violence or foul neglect could attest to humanity's power. As Black writes, industrial operations "[n]o matter how squalid and unpicturesque" could be framed as "a model of the positive capabilities of human technology."12 The "hog-squeal of the universe," to use Sinclair's term, points back to the extreme size and potency of the human power that is able to elicit it.

If we think of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as a cosmic horror film based on the industrial sublime, rather than the Kantian or Burkean sublime, its various modes of horror start to make more sense. Just as, according to Ralickas, cosmic horror transforms the sublime by refusing a return to humanism, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre evokes the violence and awe of the industrial sublime without allowing these to stand in for a vision of human progress. Take for instance the scene where the van passes a slaughterhouse. The script describes this moment in the typical language of the industrial sublime: "They come abreast of huge pens. Cattle cover the hill like a brown plague. They are so tightly packed and the yards so vast that nothing but the red brown smear of their color can be seen."13 The actual footage is less spectacular, if no less ominous. Instead of a wide shot taking in the vast expanse of a cattle herd, viewers are placed inside the pens themselves, where the cattle are densely packed and loudly bellowing. One particularly disturbing closeup depicts a cow's head as it labors to breathe in the Texas heat, long strings of drool spilling from its open mouth. But this moment is not contained solely to register of the industrial sublime. Its musical accompaniment is the same eerie, disorienting ambient wail that plays over the footage of the sun at the beginning of the film — a sonic throwback that asks viewers to see the cows in line with other elements of cosmic horror. We are invited, like Sinclair's narrator in The Jungle, to "become philosophical" — to imagine what the cows represent not only about industrial agriculture and factory farming in America, but also about the inhumane scale of such activities and their indifference to individual forms of life, human and nonhuman. 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.

Read this way, the later scenes of terrifying violence wrought by the Sawyers are both expressions of the industrial sublime's violence and its subversion. There is no possibility of recuperating such grisly moments into a rhetoric of human progress. Leatherface's use of a sledgehammer and meat hooks to kill and torture the teens, the Sawyer family's past relationship to the meatpacking industry, and, perhaps most pointedly, the gruesome sculptures made of animal carcasses that decorate the house all point to the Sawyers as inverted reflections of factory farming. In an interview for the 2000 documentary Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Shocking Truth, Robert A. Burns describes his access to these animal corpses as a direct result of changes in the meatpacking industry.14 Burns describes how farmers were initially paid by companies working in animal rendering — a procedure where otherwise unused animal body parts are processed into saleable products — to haul away animals that died from disease or neglect. Over time, these payments stopped and, as Burns describes, by the 1970s farmers were required to pay renderers to remove bodies. Farms thus stopped having these animals rendered, but instead placed their bodies (buried or not) at the edges of their property. Burns recounts driving from farm to farm, scavenging the rotting corpses, which were then used to create the props in the Sawyers' house. In this way, the actual setting for the Sawyers' home was composed of industrial agriculture waste byproducts that, like the Sawyers themselves, are hideously twisted in their excess.

Beyond lending their image to the screen, these animal bodies inflected The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in other pivotal ways. As the cast and crew recount, the film's infamous dinner table scene was made over one marathon day of shooting, during which blackout curtains were used to make it appear as if they were shooting in the night.15 These blackout curtains combined with the scene's light sources to effectively transform the room into an oven, in which the actors, crew, and, crucially, the props all baked in the Texas summer heat. The meat props began to rot, and a lamp made from a skeleton caught on fire, filling the room with the smell of burning bones. At one point, in an attempt to get rid of some of the stinking corpses, the crew piled them up outside and tried to burn them. The smoke and smell quickly entered the set, compounding the scene's horrific atmosphere. Multiple actors and members of the crew had to run out of the house to vomit while shooting. It's hard to imagine that the unhinged quality of the dinner scene would exist onscreen in the same way without these profilmic conditions. Here, the material properties of the animal bodies, the mounting waste matter of the local meat industry, and the requirements for filming all worked together to create an indelible image of the operations of a slaughterhouse gone deeply awry.

In these sequences, the individual experience of the sublime, which lies at the heart of cosmic horror, leads into the social experience of the industrial sublime. As a twisted reflection of the nuclear family, the Sawyers have internalized the horrors of the industrial slaughterhouse and taken it home with them. They live within that horror now, breathing in its noxious fumes as the corpses that provide the décor for their Edwardian farmhouse off-gas in the heat. Here, we seem to see an attempt to reconstruct the American social order that goes off the rails after being exposed to the cosmic horror of the factory farm. A patriarchal family persists, even as it is mutated nearly beyond recognition by the breakdown of the border between violence at the worksite and violence in the home. The industrial sublime thus acts as a zoonotic pathogen, spreading beyond the factory to infect other social spheres.

Ultimately, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre might best be called a work of industrial cosmic horror, one in which, as I've argued, the normal experiences of the sublime are replaced or augmented by the awe and terror of human industry. In this context, the animal bodies and references to slaughterhouse practices that litter the film evoke not only the parochial issues of rural economies in the 1970s, but also are meant to push the very boundaries of individual subjectivity. The majestic image of human progress that fueled so many developments in factory farming — from the slaughterhouse (dis)assembly line to the implementation of bolt guns as a means of killing — is warped by the film to reveal the primary violence underneath. Human and nonhuman animals are consumed by this dream of progress, mashed up, twisted, and left for dead.

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Dr. Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa is an associate professor in film and media studies at Seattle University. His research focuses on the history of scientific filmmaking, non-theatrical film, and animal studies. Among other venues, his writing has been published in JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Film History and Journal of Environmental Media. His open-access book The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life was published by UC Press in 2023.

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