When it comes to slasher movie icons there are four names that ring out through the hallowed halls of horror: Michael, Jason, Freddy and Leatherface. The stars of the Halloween, Friday The 13th, A Nightmare On Elm Street and Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchises are as recognisable and popular today as they were when they made their movie debuts decades ago. Google any ‘top 10 slasher movies’ list and they’ll all be in there somewhere.
While other beloved boogeymen and boogeywomen (boogeypeople?) from the golden age of the slasher have fallen by the wayside in the eyes of the mainstream moviegoer, these four titans of terror are regularly remade, rebooted, prequelised and sequelised for a new generation, placing them on the same level as Star Wars when it comes to pop culture staying power for movies of that era.
Especially impressive is the enduring popularity of Leatherface, who made his first appearance 44 years ago in 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As recently as last year he got a (terrible, granted) origin story prequel movie and the fact that you can buy an official, child-size Leatherface costume in 2018 is as mind-boggling as it is awesome.
Only a fool would debate the impact of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the horror genre, with everyone from Ridley Scott to Rob Zombie citing it as an influence, but what is up for debate is its place among the Big Four of slasher movies. While it’s certainly one of my all-time favourite horror films I think it sits a little uneasily as a slasher movie once you scratch beneath the surface of power tools as murder weapons and dead skin masks.
Out of the Big Four, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre had the least impact on my burgeoning horror obsession. I knew who Leatherface was, of course, and I knew of the movie’s notoriety, but after being caught up in the video nasty hysteria of the early ’80s it was banned and there was just no way to see it in the UK … unless you had a friend whose dad had an attic full of dodgy videos. I was in my mid-teens but I didn’t care about the stash of porn that was also up there, all I was interested in seeing was the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, at any cost.
After a bit of begging and pleading I was finally allowed to borrow the holy grail of video nasties and was, if I’m honest, a bit disappointed. Despite that, it was certainly an experience. Watching an infamous movie on a tape of dubious origin added to the film’s already scuzzy feel, and knowing I shouldn’t be watching it at all only enhanced the feeling of wrongdoing, but it wasn’t quite the wall-to-wall bloodbath I was expecting. For a movie with the word massacre in the title, there wasn’t exactly a lot of massacre-ing going on.
At this point in my life I was subsisting on a steady diet of Halloweens, Nightmares and Fridays and I expected The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to be more of the same – after all, Michael, Freddy, Jason and Leatherface were always mentioned in the same breath in horror circles – but it somehow felt different. It was hard to put my finger on at the time but now I’m a bit older and wiser it’s plain to see that it simply isn’t a slasher movie like the others.
Of course, there are strands of slasher DNA in there – the masked killer, the good-looking group of teens being picked-off – but there are many aspects of the film that don’t fit into the very strict slasher movie template that came to define the genre.
For starters, there’s Leatherface himself. Although he’s the most recognisable bad guy from the movie, there’s also the hitchhiker, the cook and Grandpa. He’s not a lone stalker like Michael, Jason and Freddy, this is a family affair. Although there are slasher movies with more than one antagonist, none of them quite fit the bizarre family dynamic on display in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You could even argue that Leatherface is the least aggressive member of the family. The hitchhiker and the cook both go out of their way to cause trouble but it seems obvious that he’s the whipping boy of the brood and just wants to be left alone.
While slasher movie bad guys are often driven by a sense of vengeance for some past wrongdoing – whether it’s getting burned alive by vigilante parents or being allowed to drown by negligent camp councillors – Leatherface and his family lack any such motivation. The young victims have no connection – however tenuous – to the killers, they just find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is no score to be settled on behalf of Leatherface and his kin. The teens themselves also fail to abide by many of the usual slasher movie tropes. There is no promiscuity or drug use and aside from a little bit of trespassing, they do nothing to deserve what happens to them.
That other classic slasher trope, the final girl, also doesn’t quite fit here either. Sally might be the last surviving member of her group but she doesn’t end up turning the tables on her tormentors and getting the better of them in true final girl style. She only manages to escape through the sheer incompetence of the bad guys while barely hanging onto her rapidly fraying sanity.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre undoubtably paved the way for the slasher movie boom of the late ’70s and early ’80s, but if you go through a checklist of what makes a slasher movie a slasher movie, it just doesn’t tick enough boxes to be considered part of the genre in the strictest sense.
It makes a much closer bedfellow to something like The Hills Have Eyes, which nobody would ever argue is a slasher movie. Beat for beat, they’re almost the same film, with a stranded family running afoul of a cannibalistic clan in a sun-scorched setting after their vehicle breaks down. There’s even a cantankerous old man at a gas station trying to steer the unwitting travellers away from danger in both films. By comparison, if you take Halloween as the definitive slasher movie, they have almost nothing in common.
I love The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s a great movie and a great horror movie, but if you measure it against the other members of the Big Four, it simply can’t be called a slasher movie.
Billy Loves Horror 