The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
The Film that Terrified a Rattled Nation
Joseph Lanza Skyhorse Publishing 2019 Hb, 296pp, illus, notes, ind, $24.95, ISBN 9781510737907
The making of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has already been detailed in a definitive book by Stefan Jaworzyn and a handful of documentaries. Does Joseph Lanza’s book add anything new?
Clearly, director Tobe Hooper was interested in fortean subjects; the movie begins with ominous sunspots and vague astrological warnings. I’ve no doubt Hooper would have enjoyed the couple of pages on Charles Fort and the fact that this book leads off with a quote from The Book of the Damned: “All things merge into everything else”.
After that, much of the book is debatable. The author frequently quotes from a memoir by chainsaw-wielding actorpoet Gunnar Hansen, but I notice he doesn’t quote the interview in which Hansen dismissed all theories about deep subtext in the movie as “bunk”.
The author considers Texas Chain Saw Massacre a rebuke to Charles A Reich’s The Greening of America; certainly the film has gruesome fun at the expense of hippies. He also believes Fort predicted the Nixon cabinet, an intriguing suggestion. I was a little taken aback by his claim that the relatively benign armadillo, a humble armourplated symbol of the southwest, is a repulsive and “alien” creature “even when dead”.
Those are just a few of the tangents in Joseph Lanza’s book, which is only half about the movie. The rest of the book is a study of the events of the late Sixties and early Seventies. It’s always fascinating to be reminded that Nixon henchman E Howard Hunt wrote a book on witchcraft conspiracy. But there are already plenty of indepth histories about this turbulent era, and you may wish you were reading one of them instead.
Learning about the various serial killers that were running around at the time gives you the idea that maybe Leatherface and his family weren’t all that out of the ordinary. We hear about the Zodiac Killer and the Manson Family for the umpteenth time, we get the gay side of serial killing with the Candy Man Killer and the Doodler, and we have radicals like the SLA and the Black Liberation Army, plus the racially charged Zebra killings.
We turn to cult groups like the Mel Lyman Family for a reminder that the Mansons were hardly the only communal group that had the authorities worried. For a further slice of religious controversy we get a look at Madalyn Murray O’Hair, a famously outspoken atheist who came to a gruesome end. Which is all very interesting and depressing, but what does it have to do with the movie?
I’m not sure this is the best way to appreciate a work of art, be it a piece of music or a scabrous horror film. It’s a bit like trying to look at Guernica while a yappy tour guide is yelling facts about the Spanish Civil War in your ear. The book almost comes across as a novel, as Lanza ruminates on the many disturbing threads running through the 1970s. The approach would seem almost too cute and clever if the author’s sincerity didn’t shine through.
The idea that the cannibalistic cook was intended as a caricature of Nixon seems pretty ludicrous to me, but at least it is an amusing notion. I was less patient with the chapter on No Country for Old Men; the theme of growing old in a strange land is a lot like the theme of hippies being carved up with chainsaws, it seems. Really?
A diverting book, but it often left me thinking, “Oh, brother!” Brett Taylor
★★★