The Texas Chainsaw Massacre | A Reflection of Nixon's America

“Oh, I wish they hadn't let the place fall apart.”

“Now it looks like the birthplace of Bela Lugosi.”

The most significant historical event to occur in the year 1974 was the climax of the Watergate scandal, leading to the first and only resignation of a US president when, in August of that year, President Nixon submitted his letter of resignation from the role. The second most significant event to occur in 1974 was the release of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Co-writer Kim Henkel commented that the film reflected the “moral schizophrenia of the Watergate era,” a period marked by deep societal distrust and disillusionment with authority. This theme is evident in the film's first line of dialogue following the opening crawl: “It is believed that the indictment is only one of a series to be handed down as the result of a special grand jury investigation,” which is accompanied by a scarring image of a degrading corpse mounted atop a gravestone. This immediately sparks a thematic link between this rural-apocalyptic Texas and the broader US political climate at the time, of darker truths being uncovered and judgement being passed on American authority.

While 1950s sci-fi and horror films centred on the fear of the bomb (The Day The Earth Stood Still, Godzilla), and 1960s horror portrayed an ever-growing paranoia toward the ‘other’ (Night Of The Living Dead, Rosemary’s Baby), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre marked a shift in the genre, directing these fears at authority itself—the true ‘other,’ and the ones controlling the bomb. It’s a no-brainer why Hooper’s film is set in a Texan wasteland, perhaps THE state for Americana iconography, that is: gun-lovers, cowboys, ranches, lots of land, oil (or in the early '70s, a lack thereof), Texas-style BBQ—and in the last fifty years has only jumped Democrat for one term immediately following Nixon’s presidency in 1976. The solar flares, the intense sun, miraged highways, vandalised graves, and slaughterhouse smells all work to create a truly vapid and cruel atmosphere in the film, but also mirror a forgotten American Dream. Leatherface’s family are out-of-work slaughterhouse workers who have been made obsolete due to new technology being implemented for a swifter and cleaner kill. Hooper’s intention notwithstanding, one of the film’s most iconic shots of Pam walking to the dilapidated house is immaculately composed in such a way that the closer she gets to the house, the more it looms over her and the audience. The American Dream might ‘promise’ a home; it doesn’t promise one in good condition. It certainly won’t tell you what’s inside.

The Leatherface family are remnants of a bygone era of industrial America, which failed them—they have seemingly lost their identities, which they presented to the contemporary world. I always take note that Leatherface’s first iconic kill is exactly how Franklin described the killing of cows at the slaughterhouse prior to the bolt-gun. This kill doesn’t amuse him; it’s just natural. The family now exists within their own isolated society, the crux of which seems to hinge on cannibalism and brutality. Although desperate, they’re clearly psychotic. Their own familial hierarchy seems in constant turmoil as a result of their isolation. Their cannibalism is presented as ritualistic rather than a method of instinctive survival, but what Hooper really presents this as is the end-point of American consumer-capitalism, where the world plunges into an apocalyptic, primitive chaos.

The film’s third act is where this ritualistic chaos occurs, during which the family extensively torment Sally, the film's final girl. (Interestingly, for a film that has the words ‘chainsaw massacre’ in the title, the gore is fairly tame, and in a grander sense, Sally’s trauma, although psychologically extensive, is physically quite minimal.) She survives not because of strength or will but because the family have little to no control over their own murder ritual. There’s a certain nihilism in Sally’s escape: the house had a white-picket fence, but she’s now seen the extent of the American Dream’s fenced-off

underbelly, and her deranged, bloody laugh at the end as she escapes the family (but not America!) says it all. Sally’s ending rings true to a certain line read in the film's opening crawl: “But, had they lived very, very long lives, they could not have expected nor would they have wished to see as much of the mad and macabre as they were to see that day.”

Now turning fifty years old, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the quintessential American movies. Tobe Hooper’s classic is one of the few films unmistakably responsible for the horror genre forming a mirroring relationship to the United States' political currents. Without it, one wonders where the horror genre—or the entire medium of film, for that matter—would be today.

Written By Matt Cooke | IG: @dontlookbackmatt