Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 2022, and the Failures of the Slasher Sequel

Let's get something out of the way,  This is not a good movie. There are some things about the film which are particularly good and do rise about a lot of what the lesser end of the standard horror film fall prey to. The cinematography is gorgeous. The whole thing looks great, and there are some truly gorgeous frames. The set design and set dressing are also very good, which is part of what makes the film look so good, but goes beyond the cinematography. All of this would be part of the collaboration between the director and those departments. The director would get the final say in what they want, and all of this is well done. 

It's worth saying David Blue Garcia only had seven days to prepare to start filming. He was basically a hired gun and wasn't involved in the film from its inception. He showed up and shot the script, without being involved in either the script writing process or in the decision to shoot this particular script. This is all to say, it's still going to be worth giving David Blue Garcia's next film a chance. He's got some flair. 

This brings us to what doesn't work. The writing is not good, for a number of reasons. First, there isn't enough investment in the characters to care about any of then. Nearly everyone begins as unlikeable. There isn't enough time or evidence of much else to get them from being unlikeable to caring about them enough for any of the horror they experience to come with any kind of impact. It's just gore and brutality, which is boring. It's the other end of the spectrum from television commercials using lots of bright colors, fast cuts and the loudest possible volume to get the attention of anyone who might be near the screen. It's the opposite end, but it's still the same spectrum. Commercials and film often rely on adding in some whiff of sex too, if not outright nudity, and all of it is boring if we don't care about the people on screen. At some point though, there's some degree of inoculation. There's not even any more empty titillation in the sex or the gore. It's just empty, and that emptiness works against  what should be the visceral sense of horror. In this new Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it's just gore, they don't even bother with the sex. Good? Maybe. Cheap as it may have been, "I'd like to see these characters get busy again," would have been more than what we're given to have any interest in them. 

We get pulled in to story by characters, and if we never get pulled in, it's all just flashes of light on screen because that part of our minds which suspends disbelief enough to produce allow for the visceral reaction never engages. Our disbelief is never suspended. It doesn't feel real if there's no sense of truth to what we're seeing on screen or a sense of honesty to the way we're seeing characters act or being portrayed. This is a standard and cliché criticism of horror films and the slasher sub genre more routinely. Even as critics and movie fans who don't like horror are given to tossing this cliché out when it's unfair, it's cliché because it is often the truth, as it is here. 

What's also true of this particular film is it continues an unfortunate trend of horror films treating subplots or character elements related to past trauma due to violence in a way which is so superficial as to be insulting. Here, these are just a jumbled mess of impulses, without any structure or narrative cohesion. Even as someone who deals with past trauma related to violence, and lives with PTSD, I'm not asking for realism in these portrayals. Genre isn't about realism. Documentary is about realism. Drama is about realism. I am at least asking that the filmmakers care enough about this subject matter to give it some weight and depth, to treat it like it genuinely matters. Care enough about it to treat it like it matters, that's all. This goes back to treating the events of the film with some sense of truth and the characters with some sense of honesty. The writers Sally Hardesty back, the Final Girl of the original film, and it's just a mess, all around. It's a waste to have brought the series original Final Girl back just to use the character the way she is here. There are ways this general idea could have had some weight and meaning, but they're not here. There's something involving the survivor of a school shooting which is somehow worse, it's given more time which ends up making it clear how much it doesn't matter because of how badly handled it is. To call it a subplot would be giving it credit for a level of substance far, far beyond what's on screen. At worst, it comes across as juvenile, and at best, like it was tacked on by a producer demanding a trauma narrative be tossed in to make it "topical." 

Now, this movie comes in at a sleek 74 minutes of screen time, so it's possible there was so much left on the cutting room floor, there was just no chance for this film to be more than it is. It is absolutely possible the producers of this film butchered it in a way not dissimilar to the way Leatherface does some of the characters in it. 

There's something else which plagues the many sequels to the most celebrated slasher franchises too, which doesn't get as much attention, and was part of what made the 1974 original something head and shoulders above its contemporaries, and the lion's share of horror films that have followed. It's regularly cited as the greatest horror film of all time, for good reason. There a number of good arguments to be made that Tobe Hoopers 1974 film isn't a slasher film or at least isn't just a slasher film. It shares with the other heavy hitters in the slasher canon and horror more broadly: tragedy. Tragedy was the forbearer to what we cane to understand as the horror story and then as the horror film, and is what still connects it to its dramatic roots. 

It's not just the tragedy related to the protagonists or the deaths of the other characters either. It's the degree to which there's an element of tragedy to the antagonists, the killers, which is also central to the films. Leatherface is one of the most tragic of the characters usually considered titans of the modern horror canon, as well. 

Halloween, generally considered the prototype where all the slasher elements previous films contained come together, begins with what is essentially two tragedies in its opening scene. The now famous (or infamous) continuous shot following someone as they stalk a teenage girl into the second floor of her house, after watching her through the front window, and then murder her, is the first tragedy. The second tragedy comes when it's revealed the eyes we've been seeing through, the person who killed this young woman is a child, a young boy who can't be more than eight or nine. This is where we're introduced to Michael Meyers. In the next scene, it becomes clear Michael Meyers is now twenty-three. He's spent the last fifteen years in an institution, and has never spoken a word. We learn we witnessed the death of Michael's sister, Judith Meyers, and the birth of The Shape, which is how John Carpenter's script refers to Michael through the rest of the film. Two people lost the lives they had left in front of them. Judith was murdered, and whatever life may have been ahead for the eight year old boy named Michael is now gone. The Shape takes that life too, be it due to mental illness or through some supernatural evil, the boy who was Michael is gone. 

In the case of Jason Voorhees, of the Friday the 13th series, he begins as a child with what we're lead to assume are developmental disabilities. Jason, who infamously makes his debut at the end of the first film, is assumed to have seen his mother killed as the last surviving camp counselor off her head in self defense. His mother has been killing camp counselors because she's essentially insane with grief, believing her son drowned in the lake at the camp while the counselors were drinking and having sex etc. At least at the beginning of his tenure as one of Big Four of the slasher genre, Jason Voorhees was also a tragic figure. We only see Jason at the end of the first film, when a deformed boy jumps from the lake, pulling the surviving counselor out of a canoe, in one of the great jump scares in horror history. When we see Jason next, in the sequel, he's a full grown man, living in a dilapidated, barely constructed shack in the woods, with his mother's head on an altar. The protagonist, the final girl of the film, Ginny, survives her encounter with Jason in this shack by impersonating his mother. As horrifying as the events of the two films have been, it's also a deeply tragic scene. Friday the 13th Part 2 is the first "Jason movie" of the series, and by the third, we've lost all sense of that tragic character. He's a hulking killing nearly inhuman killing machine, and his deformity is treated as a thing of horror more than it is related to the tragic nature of his character. 

Even Freddy Krueger, the most outrightly malevolent of the slasher icons, has an element of tragedy to his story. He was a child killer, so the tragedy isn't necessarily in the character of Freddy Krueger himself, but in the manner of his death, before becoming the "dream demon" of the first A Nightmare on Elm Street. When it becomes clear Krueger is going to escape conviction because of some technicality, the parents of Springwood chase him down and burn him alive. The tragedy is in both the failure of the legal system to provide justice, and in the surrender of the parents to barbarity and vengeance. It's never directly stated in the text of the film, but it's part of the subtext to suggest the injustice of it, the tragedy, has some part in how Krueger is able to gain access to the dreams of the children of Springwood. The fire which burned him made him into something more than just a man. 

That brings us to Leatherface, the titular Big Bad of the TCM series. The horrifying thing about Leatherface in the original film is that he is a developmentally disabled child in a 300 pound body, and in the subtext of the film, he's doing what he's doing both to please his family and because he's afraid of what they're going to do to him if he doesn't do what he's doing. Unlike Michael Meyers or Jason Voorhees, who are speechless and only in the early films grunt when either exerting themselves in the midst of killing someone or when they're injured, Leatherface very clearly can't speak. Through the original film he makes a series of grunts, squeals and mewling sounds, one of which is a scene showing him in clear distress about what's happening, trying to understand where all of these interlopers traipsing into his home are coming from. Leatherface is clearly frightened and upset, not some mindless rage machine. We see him cowering in a way which suggests he has no understanding of just how much larger he is than the older brother dealing him abuse and doing so in a way which suggests how routine it is.  In the midst of beating him with a broom handle his brother asks whether Leatherface "let any of them get away." There are the costume changes too. He's at one point wearing a rubber apron, like those of a slaughterhouse referred to in the earlier part of the film. It's in combination with a mask which is more clearly masculine. Later we see him in an apron which would be stereotypical of a housewife, his mask has changed to one with heavy makeup and what looks like a hairstyle of a fifties matron. He's then in a jacket, tie and dress pants, with a mask so overly made up, it looks like clown make up when the family is gathered for the infamous "dinner" scene. Leatherface has no identity. He has tasks and assumes the identity he understands right for the task assigned him by his brothers. As he chases Sally in the final minutes of the film, and she climbs into the cab of a big rig which has stopped after running over Leatherface's younger brother, Leatherface never even bothers to try opening the door. He just runs his chainsaw all over it, obviously unable to cut through. Given what we've seen to that point, it's not unreasonable to think he's never left his family's property and never been in a car, hence never even used a car door. 

Horror journalist and enthusiast Emily von Steele noted on Twitter (@horrorellablog) that Leatherface just isn't frightening without his family, and it's an astute observation. Everything we see in the original film suggests Leatherface couldn't function without the direction of his family, and he does what he does because of his family. In the midst of all of this is the mundanity of sibling rivalry and family roles. For the Sawyer family in the original film, all of this is mundane, which is part of what makes it so terrifying. In fact, it's the "dinner scene" where that mundanity is so plain which is the most terrifying and where Sally is most clearly losing her grip on reality as the brutality and mundanity are so clearly coexisting. The whole scene is dedicated to that coexistence. Ultimately, it's the mundanity of the interfamilial disfunction and competition which allows Sally to escape the dining room, leading to her ultimate escape on the road in front of the house. Leatherface is a blunt object, not a scalpel or a well honed kitchen knife. In his origin, he's not capable of being a "stalker." He's capable of surprise, laying in wait, the way a toddler is, but he's not capable of the kind of higher functioning thought processes it takes to anticipate other people the way a "stalker" in horror films is. 

The other sequels to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre leave all of this behind. This one, like the subplots about past traumas, treats what it does pick up from the original film with such superficiality, it just ends up being an obvious excuse to get Leatherface committing a series of increasingly brutal murders. And again the rote slasher, as a lifelong horror fan, it's just boring at this point. 

The sad thing about the state of the Texas Chainsaw franchise is that the original had a slew of interesting threads which could have been picked up and turned into genuinely interesting sequels. There's at least one interesting sequel in there. The original wasn't strictly a slasher film, which is part of why it's still so unsettling today. There's even a good story in a direct sequel to the original, featuring Sally, the final girl of the film, seeking revenge. Given the number of themes the original touched on, there are some very different, interesting and nuanced ways a story like that could go. Leatherface is one of the more interesting characters in the canon of horror, specifically because he's not just some lumbering evil. There's a whole lot more going on there, and a lot of it is related to his family and the family dynamic.

There's even a slasher film in something like a role reversal. If Sally had spent ten or twenty years looking for what was left of the Sawyer clan, and then found them, there's a home invasion slasher in that film. There's a way to tell that story where we witness members of a family in a rural setting being dispatched, drawing our sympathies to them, only to find out some half way or three quarters of the way through, maybe at the reveal of Leatherface, that what we're watching is Sally coming to take her revenge. It's almost an inverted Psycho switch. Instead of losing the person we believe is going to be the protagonist and Final Girl, we find out the protagonist and Final Girl has been the one doing the killing since the beginning. We've been watching the monsters being dispatched. Handled correctly, the moment of that reveal would be one horror fans wouldn't forget for a long, long time. One of the themes often pointed out in the original is about the Sawyer family being a kind of unforeseen consequence of progress. Part of how they've become what they are is that they've been abandoned by modernization. The system required their brutality before, and fostered it. Then, technology makes them obsolete, and modernity abandons them, after having fostered that brutality for generations. What's the unforeseen consequence of the consequence the Sawyers are? Is Sally any more or less justified to seek out bloody revenge than the Sawyers are in trying to subsist through cannibalism? Given the state Sally is in at the end of the original, it's not much of a stretch. It's also something which could just be a good, interesting story, in the right hands. 

There's a damn good, Strangers-esque, home invasion slasher film in there, but instead of looking at what the pieces are that would make the best film, every sequel has been based on the idea that each film had to be a gory, sadistic slasher above everything else, instead of looking at the themes and pieces from the original and asking, "What's the best film we can come up with from the elements we have here, and what story we can still tell?"

There's a story in Sally Hardesty hunting down the surviving members of the Sawyer family which could be compelling and interesting. It could take into account the fully tragic nature of Leatherface as a character, as well as the tragedy Sally survived. It's not a rote slasher film though, and that's the problem. It's a problem both for marketing departments and for no shortage of horror fans, which is kind of sad, in and of itself. It should matter less that a film fits a specific genre than whether or not the film is a credit to the characters in it, especially when they're characters who've meant enough for legions of dedicated fans to continue to throw their money down for every new format or edition of a film which is 48 years old. 

Despite what this piece might suggest, the only thing I have against slashers or slasher sequels, is the regularity with which they're made without much consideration given to whether or not they're also good movies. The latest Scream entry was not without its shortcomings, but overall made well and a lot of fun. If nothing else, the existence of Scream and Candyman suggest it is possible to take a beloved horror series, and still create a well made film, pulling in some new ideas, and use threads from the original. Texas Chainsaw Massacre nods in the direction of thinking about doing this, but fails in its storytelling.