[A Pleasurable Headache] Headcheese
Heavy spoilers for Texas Chainsaw Massacre abound in this first section. Skip to the links section if you have no wish to partake.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a reputation. The title helps. After everything you’ve been told you expect a gore-fest, a showcase of severed limbs and buckets of blood. Additionally, it was banned here in the UK for a number of years as one of the maligned ‘Video Nasties’ which only added to its legend.
There is little gore beyond the hitchhiker’s deranged attacks in the opening and Leatherface’s mishap at the movie’s climax. TCM‘s reputation is earned, but it all comes down to tone and editing. Tobe Hooper (Director, Producer, Co-Writer), Daniel Pearl (Cinematographer), and Larry Carroll & Sallye Richardson (Editors) all play their part. The way the movie is shot and staged gives it the feel of a home movie that devolves into a nightmare tinged with the touches of Southern Gothic.
When a victim is placed onto a meat hook we don’t see anything in the way of gore or lurid closeups. Hooper blocks the scene so this is obscured. Instead, the scene is horrific due to the subsequent scream and reaction of the actress, Teri McMinn. A lot of TCM‘s reputation comes from the audience filling in the gaps the movie provides.
However, I think there’s more to it than that. I’m not the first person to make this argument, nor will I be the last, but hear me out – TCM is one of the greatest pro-vegan movies ever made. ^1
I’d argue that a large part of the horror and terror the audience feels whilst watching the movie comes in the treatment of its victims. They are treated essentially as nothing more than ‘meat for the grinder’, being dispatched in ways eerily familiar to anyone with even a scant knowledge of what goes on in slaughterhouses to this day.
The film lays this out almost immediately with the slow reveal of what has been done to a number of corpses in the wake of a spate of grave robbing. The corpses are arranged in a grim, trophy-like tableau and left to cook in the relentless Texan sun. Flesh here (whatever the species) is to be rendered as a trophy, a work of art rather than something that lived, that had hopes and fears and an agency of its own.
Mere minutes later we meet our cast as they drive through the arid landscape. They smell the slaughterhouse before they see it. The stench of death and decay causes all of them to actively be repulsed. During this sequence we get a blink and you’ll miss it shot of a cow. To me this quick shot is just as horrifying as the almost subliminal cut to the demon during the dream sequence of The Exorcist. The shot here shows a cow, its head sticking out through the gaps of a gate or fence, staring forlornly at the camera as drool or some kind of viscera hangs from its chin. It is a living thing absolutely devoid of hope.
Hooper then cuts to longer shots of the cattle at the slaughterhouse all brushing up against each other in close quarters, waiting for the inevitable. Again, it’s not subtle that Hooper is cross cutting this against shots of the cast all packed into their mini-van as they drive towards their doom.
There’s even discussion about the methods of slaughter here by the characters, with the old fashioned mallet to the head being replaced by an industrialised bolt gun process. The movie here is beginning to mess with the audience, exposing their cognitive dissonance. It brings to light the lies we tell ourselves as we consume and devour, forgetting what it cost for that food to get to our plate. One of the characters even voices this, asking for the discussion to stop as she eats meat and doesn’t want to be put off from eating it in the future.
Then they pick up the hitchhiker and shit gets even weirder. He revels in showing them Polaroids of slaughtered animals, bellies cut, dangling from steel hooks. The cast and audience’s reaction here mirror each other, revulsion, a little worried, a sense of unease beginning to creep in. But, again, all that is being shown at this point is the reality of what we consume on an every day basis, where it comes from and what it costs. Again, the film isn’t subtle, when moments later the hitchhiker takes a Polaroid of the group as they stare back at him open mouthed.
The movies first kill is often spoken about in terms of its impact and sheer horror. Kirk ventures into the strange house the group have come across, seeking fuel and help. We hear what sounds like the squeals of a pig. After all we’ve been told so far we are already on edge, the animal-like cries conjuring up scenes of mechanical slaughter.
As Kirk approaches an open door he trips a little, only to be met with the sudden appearance of TCM‘s ‘star’, Leatherface. Leatherface wastes no time in dispatching Kirk with a swift mallet to the head. The old ways are still the best out here. As Kirk slumps to the floor his leg starts twitching uncontrollably. Nothing but meat and flesh now, synapses misfiring as the brain tries to deal with its impending death. Kirk’s twitching form is pulled through the doorway and a sliding metal door is slammed shut. The ominous metal door, of course, is a perfect facsimile of the ones used in slaughterhouses. The sound it makes as it slams shut is the perfect full stop to a scene so visceral and horrific.
Moments later, Kirk’s girlfriend Pam (played by the aforementioned Teri McMinn), comes looking. She stumbles into the house’s living room where she comes face to face with furniture constructed from human bones, a floor carpeted in feathers and unused human ‘material’ strewn across the room. Again, the entire scene is punctuated by the sounds of an animal in distress. Despite the detritus spread about the room, the most horrifying aspect is the chicken that sits squawking in terror in a cage far too small for it.
It evokes a sense of claustrophobia and mimics Pam’s own entrapment. But the cramped conditions, the frenzied squawking and abject terror are merely a mirror to battery farms across the globe. Pam screaming herself now, meets Leatherface and is grabbed, kicking and screaming, and taken back to the workshop too. It’s here that Leatherface places her onto a meat hook as she squirms, fully cognisant of what is going on. Her ordeal doesn’t end there as she is then forced to watch as Leatherface turns on the titular chainsaw and begins to carve up Kirk’s body in front of her. A quick shot shows a metal basin beneath Pam’s dangling feet. We know what’s coming. We’ve already seen the hitchhiker’s Polaroids. Again, none of this is particularly gory. The horror comes from the situation, the tone, the blocking of the scene and the actors performances.
But, there is again an unspoken strata of horror here. The suffering of Pam is front and centre here. But the methods and means Leatherface employs here are almost no different to some of the practices carried out in slaughterhouses and similar facilities. Animals are forced to watch or listen as their kin are slaughtered in their immediate vicinity with full knowledge they are likely to be next.
The victims keep on coming at this point, an invisible conveyor belt pushing them towards their slaughter. Jerry is next as he enters the house in search of his friends. He finds the workshop and discovers an alive Pam stuffed into a freezer before being killed by Leatherface himself.
The film’s climax is perhaps its most horrific section with Sally (the film’s final girl), subject to a macabre dinner party by Leatherface, the hitchhiker and the gas station owner. It’s here that the character of Grandpa is literally wheeled out from the attic. We are told he is a legendary killer from his time working at the slaughterhouse. We are then subject to a gruelling sequence as Grandpa attempts to kill Sally using the mallet. Due to his frailty he is unable to do it. It is excruciating to watch, with the hammer coming loose from his hands and clanging into the metal basin below Sally’s head. Other swings miss entirely as Sally struggles against the grip of the hitchhiker. At one point a blow glances off Sally’s scalp and blood begins to flow. The audience, like Sally, like myriad animals before and since, sees death’s hand rise and fall knowing that sooner or later it is going to find its target.
Death is a struggle. It can be slow and untidy. But it will always be a moment of terror for a living thing, cognisant of its own mortality, when all it wants to do is live.
As we know, Sally escapes moments later using a momentary lapse in the hitchhiker’s concentration here to get free and jump out of a window into searing daylight and make her escape. She is pursued by the hitchhiker who dances around her revelling in the chase, and then by Leatherface chainsaw whirring and buzzing. As Sally nears the main road the hitchhiker is killed by an oncoming truck.
As Sally escapes, a shrieking, babbling shell of her former self, Leatherface is left to pirouette wildly with his chainsaw like a spurned lover. The family (less one member) and the killers are still out there. They are free to kill and maim as they please. It’s just meat after all.
During the closing scene the audience’s mind may drift back to that truck that killed the hitchhiker. They might notice how long it is and see the double decked rows of metal on its trailer. They will probably notice that it’s a cattle truck that killed the hitchhiker, the kind they use to transport them, alive and devoid of hope to the slaughterhouse.
It sits empty for now.
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^1: For those doubting some of the argument here, that’s fine, it’s just a take. Albeit a very cold one at this point. That said, give the documentary Dominion a watch and tell me that isn’t its own kind of horror movie. That is if you can make it past the opening sequence.
Links
Cuban exile told sons he trained Oswald, JFK’s accused assassin, at a secret CIA camp
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article255356661.html
There are some questions about the validity of the claims, given the person who made them (now deceased) was prone to copping to being involved in almost every plot imaginable in the Miami-Cuba nexus, but this still lines up with a lot of the long held theories about the involvement of anti-Castro groups in the assassination.
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I’m a Luddite. You should be one too
https://theconversation.com/im-a-luddite-you-should-be-one-too-163172
Jathan Sadowski attempts to re-frame the term ‘Luddite’ back to its original meaning, as well as stating we would all do well to absorb some of the movement’s original lessons:
“Smashing machines was not a kneejerk reaction to new technology, but a tactical response by workers based on their understanding of how owners were using those machines to make labour conditions more exploitative. As historian David Noble puts it, they understood “technology in the present tense”, by analysing its immediate, material impacts and acting accordingly.”
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The state of the horror trope: an expert roundtable
https://www.polygon.com/22738200/best-horror-movies-tropes-debate
A whole host of horror writers, creators and artists discuss the genre’s tropes, efforts to subvert them and their validity in today’s culture.
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How Disinformation Is A New Kind Of Horror Fiction
https://www.logically.ai/articles/how-disinformation-is-a-new-kind-of-horror-fiction
Joe Ondrak at Logically posits the theory that the decline of CreepyPasta is directly aligned with the rise of movements such as QAnon and Pizzagate, with the latter taking on characteristics of the former.
“Hacker X”—the American who built a pro-Trump fake news empire—unmasks himself
This report from Ars Technica drops the revelation that ‘ethical hacker’ Robert Willis was Hacker X. Hacker X was responsible for creating a whole slew of websites that trumpeted the same pro-Trump click-bait and chum. These same websites then went to great lengths to disguise their connections to each other so they could then cite each other, build a facade of truth and so on. Willis argues that this network, and others like it, did far more damage in the Trump/Clinton election than Russia supposedly did.
There’s a number of interesting titbits in their from a technical perspective, as well as the tactic that certain stories would be posted at particular times of the day to garner the best reaction and engagement. Apparently humans like to see positive stories first thing in the morning before engaging with fringe stories as the evening draws on.
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You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life (You Are Joe Cole)
https://www.samdiss.com/work/you-could-do-something-amazing-with-your-life-you-are-joe-cole
This is a bit ‘inside baseball’, but this a beautifully written piece by Sam Diss on former football wunderkind Joe Cole.
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Pain Doesn’t Lie: Hard Candy (David Slade, 2005)
https://jude-doyle.ghost.io/pain-doesnt-lie-hard-candy-david-slade-2006/
I enjoy Jude Doyle’s newsletter immensely. This recent piece on gender, identity and the movie Hard Candy is a recent favourite.
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Manufacturing Ignorance: Keeping The Public Away From Power
https://www.medialens.org/2021/manufacturing-ignorance-keeping-the-public-away-from-power/
As ever, Media Lens‘ recent piece is fantastic. This one covers recent news headlines involving Colin Powell, Julian Assange and the (continued) supply of arms to Saudi Arabia from the British company BAE.
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I’m off to wrestle with Buttondown’s inability to render Markdown properly all of a sudden. See you in two!