When The Texas Chain Saw Massacre hit theater screens in October 1974, American viewers had endured a tumultuous number of years. Just a few short weeks before, Nixon had resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal. The U.S. and other nations that supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War faced retaliation from oil-producing Arab states in the form of a six-month embargo on oil exports, which threw the American economy into a spiral. That crisis sparked a recession, ending a decadeslong period of economic prosperity. U.S. troops returning from the ongoing war in Vietnam were facing hostility from their neighbors and indifference from their government. And the early stages of American deindustrialization were already underway: Jobs were starting to vanish.
Ted Bundy was killing young women in the Pacific Northwest at the rate of roughly one per month, and John Wayne Gacy was killing young men and boys in Chicago. Christine Chubbuck had recently died by suicide after shooting herself on live TV. Patty Hearst had been kidnapped by, and seemingly joined, the Symbionese Liberation Army. Violence was in the air. So was rampant pessimism and anger. A Gallup poll from October 1974 reported that 7 in 10 Americans “held little hope for any immediate improvements.”
In the midst of all this, a movie about innocent people being killed indiscriminately with lumber machinery functioned as a kind of primal scream. The plot of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is about as straightforward as it gets: On a road trip through Texas, Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) and her hippie friends, stranded for lack of gas, are set upon by a family of killer cannibals, the Sawyers, who torment and kill them in a variety of grisly ways. Directed by Tobe Hooper, the gory exploitation flick became an instant classic of the horror genre.
But the reason The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which has generated a whopping eight sequels and spin-off films, has lingered in our cultural consciousness for 50 years now has little to do with the mechanics of what happens on-screen. It sticks with us because of how vividly it captured the hysterical unreality of living in a turbulent age, and how it picked at the scabs crusting over the face of the American dream.
Hooper’s expressed intent was to create a movie more about feeling than story, one that would get under viewers’ skin and follow them home. The film’s greatest accomplishment is that pervasive feeling of wrongness, of danger, a vertiginous sense that there’s no safe haven left. Watching the movie is, even now, an unpleasantly immersive experience. The jangling, discordant soundtrack; the ghastly imagery; the Ed Gein–inspired set design (the Sawyers’ charming white farmhouse is decorated with human and animal remains); the speechless, hulking menace of Leatherface; and Burns’ extremely committed performance of sheer terror all contribute to sensory overload. By the time the credits roll, you feel as though you’ve survived a massacre too.
The little farm, the honest job, the family dinner: The film takes these comforting symbols and paints them with blood. If the promise of America is a pretty white farmhouse, Hooper’s camera directed viewers to the dry rot in the walls and the bodies in the cellar. Fifty years later, as we sit at another inflection point in our nation’s history, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre can still offer us a way to understand the dynamics of this moment—and possibly the next.
In Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire, historian W. Scott Poole uses two potent symbols from 1970s cinema to explore how America conceives of threats to its idealized, aspirational image: the shark and the chain saw.
The first—the shark—comes from Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster Jaws, in which a sheriff, a scientist, and a tradesman roll up their sleeves and put themselves in harm’s way to defeat a ferocious great white. It’s the ultimate tale of a deadly threat that comes from outside a community. “Everyone is inexorably middle class and happy until the shark shows up to ruin it,” Poole writes. “But then our heroes kill it and America can go on dreaming the dream of itself.”
It’s a reassuring fiction. The shark, as a threat, is foreign, is ultimately conquerable, and can be left in the past without requiring any self-reflection from the residents of Amity Island. It’s a lot simpler than Poole’s alternative: In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, he writes, the monsters are “hatched from the dragon’s teeth America sowed in its own soil.” In the chain-saw paradigm, the scariest monster is the one born in your own backyard.
The Sawyers became monsters due to abandonment and neglect; members of the family were employed at the local slaughterhouse until the bolt gun replaced the sledgehammer as the cattle-killing method of choice. Their jobs evaporated, and they turned their attention to human quarry. They represent the people left behind by deindustrialization and the disappearance or automation of the dirty, distasteful jobs that were the backbone of the U.S. economy. Without those jobs, whole communities withered, leaving swaths of rural Americans without economic opportunity or social support.
The shark represents an external force capable of stochastic violence—its victims are innocent, having committed no crime worse than swimming on a hot summer day. But with the chain saw, the call is coming from inside the house: When people are left without employment, community, or opportunity, a void opens up. Something dark and malevolent takes shape within.
Because this is a horror movie, the Sawyers respond to neglect with a hyperbolic strain of violently deranged decompensation, treating the humans stranded on their land as livestock. The tremendously upsetting dinner table sequence, when the Sawyers effectively play with their food, taunting and tormenting Sally before their plan to kill her goes awry, is a demented fun-house version of the stereotypical Leave It to Beaver–style family dinner (one in which Cleaver has an entirely different connotation). And the kills themselves are brutal—by hammer, by chain saw, by meat hook. The 1970s were the age of the American serial killer, and the Sawyers, though taken to a fictional extreme, were the decade’s avatar.
Hooper, who co-wrote the script in addition to directing, had personal experience with an all-too-American form of violence: He had been on campus during the University of Texas at Austin tower shooting in 1966, when Charles Whitman killed 15 people and injured 31 more. It was, at the time, the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
To live in America right now is to feel squeezed from all sides. High grocery and gas prices, outrageous rent and a lack of affordable housing, and the gradual erosion of social services make the day to day a lot harder. The economy may be good, but no one really feels that way. Political polarization and economic inequality seem to be deepening by the day. As of Monday, there have been 436 mass shootings this year. Attempts to reckon with the root causes of these issues are met with vitriol and censorship, and the kinds of solutions that might actually help broad swaths of people—such as student loan forgiveness or single-payer health care—are blocked with such vehemence that it can feel like a personal insult.
It’s simple to blame the shark. Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have made blaming “outsiders” a central part of their campaign for the presidency, down to broadcasting baseless, racist lies about Haitian immigrants in Ohio and proposing mass deportations as a solution to the housing crisis. Shunting blame onto immigrants, queer and trans people, leftists, student protesters, Jews, Muslims? That’s easy. Humanity loves a scapegoat, especially one that doesn’t implicate the rest of us. What’s much harder—and what many Americans are reluctant or unwilling to do—is to recognize that the chain saw is a much greater threat.
The structural problems Americans face are deep, and the solutions are complex and politicized. Discussions of real, material fixes often devolve into bad-faith debates over whether the problems are even real to begin with. Interest groups have more influence than actual people do. Truth and facts vary wildly depending on where you get your news, which is made all the more complicated by the fire hose of information on social media—some of it fake, much of it sensationalized. At times, reality itself seems fractured. How do we heal from these divisions? How do we come back from a place where members of Congress blame the opposition party for literal natural disasters? Where first responders and civil servants and even meteorologists are threatened for doing their jobs?
One thing Tobe Hooper refused to do in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was to give us the relief of a resolution. Sally, the last hippie standing, loses her boyfriend, her brother, and her friends and escapes death herself only by the grace of the timely intervention of a passing driver. The Sawyers (with one exception) aren’t vanquished. As Sally flees in the bed of a pickup truck, hysterical and soaked in blood, Leatherface dances with his chain saw, an expression of frustration at losing his quarry, but also the reaction of someone who won’t be punished or held to account. The danger is still there, waiting for the next vanload of unsuspecting travelers. Sally may have won the battle, but the threat hasn’t diminished; we haven’t even begun to grapple with its causes.
America’s story is still ongoing. Things will get better, and worse, and better, sometimes by turns and sometimes all at once. The most hopeful part of Hooper’s American masterpiece? Sally doesn’t get through her ordeal unscathed. But she does get through it.
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