There is only one character dancing with joy in the sunrise at the end of this movie.
She does not overcome the monster as her Final Sisters would increasingly manage to do in the 1980s and 1990s, but loses her essential self to him. Her eventual escape is not a represented as a looked-for triumph, far from it.
Instead they distance themselves from her demented semi-nakedness, and begin to view her with the killer’s impassivity. In terms of spectatorship, the audience cannot empathise for long with this extreme and unrelenting state. She appears to be experiencing punishment for some ambiguous travesty (a sibling spat with crippled Franklin? implied sex with Jerry upstairs in the old Franklin house?), as she is first chased through the woods by Leatherface (her long hair gets tangled in thorn bushes and nearly leads to her capture, perhaps her sin is vanity?), then stuffed in a sack by the Cook, shackled to a skeleton-chair by the Hitch-hiker, and finally served up as Grandpa’s hors d’oeuvres.įor much of this she screams, relentlessly, is covered in blood, and appears to act without much forethought, leaping through an upstairs (and closed) window. Her torture at the hands of each one of the Sawyer family is the movie’s only real nod to excess. Sally Hardesty is the sole survivor of his blade, an early example of the genre trope, the Final Girl. One man and his power tool: Gunnar Hansen as Leatherface His menace is evocative through its simplicity he lacks the complex motivation of Norman Bates or Michael Myers, he simply is what he is, as his final joyous dance with the chainsaw attests.
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Bubba never speaks, never reveals his motives, just flails his hammer or cranks up his chainsaw, his face hidden behind one of three masks stitched from the skin of previous victims. The monster here is towering figure of Leatherface, otherwise known as Bubba Sawyer, played (in this instalment) by 6’4″ Icelander Gunnar Hansen. The audience’s over-wrought imaginations have to do the work, here and with the deaths of Jerry and Franklin, which both occur offscreen. Pam’s demise is more drawn out, but bloodless – Hooper was aiming for a PG rating and was careful not to show the meathook entering her skin. When Kirk runs foul of Leatherface his despatch is famously speedy, two quick blows with a sledgehammer. Almost halfway through the taut 84 minutes run time, all the blood we have really seen has been oozing from the palm of the Hitchhiker.
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They’ll defend their lifestyle to the death, even if it involves decorating neighbouring homes with chicken bones, and despatching nosey strangers, hence the number of abandoned cars discovered by Pam and Kirk as they explore the farmyard.įor a movie that was banned outright for 20 years in the UK, there is remarkably little gore. This sequestered clan are truly grotesque – the gibbering Hitchhiker, the half-decayed Grandfather, the slobbering Cook and of course, Leatherface – and they represent that stubborn, isolationist streak in American backwoodsmen who simply like to live the way they live, and don’t want to be answerable to anyone.
They are trespassers, and, since the slaughterhouse down the road upgraded to more humane methods of killing, there are four rightfully resident Sawyers itching to smash their sledgehammers on the skulls of fresh meat. “Who will survive and what will become of them?” When the gas station is out of gas, the hapless hippies fill up on barbecue instead and decide to hang out at the old house until the fuel truck arrives to make a delivery. Those things is dangerous, you’re liable to get hurt.”) but all are ignored. Other warnings come from the more traditional horror genre source of a mad old drunk in the cemetery (“Things happen hereabout they’ll tell about”) and the gas station attendant (“You boys don’t wanna go messing round no old house. Pinch yourself and you may find out that it is”.
Franklin’s horoscope predicts “a difficult and disturbing day” whilst Sally’s reveals that “There are moments when we cannot believe what is happening is really true. On the way home they start to ignore some dire warnings in the astrology magazines that Pam is set on believing. A Scooby Doo-esque van of longhairs (Jerry, Kirk, wheelchair bound Franklin, his sister Sally and bare-backed, micro-shorted Pam) goes to investigate the aforementioned graverobbings to see if Grandfather has been affected. The rest of the movie involves a slow, measured descent into the madness of the Sawyer family, and culminates in a final ten minutes of torture and terror, largely round the dinner table.
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