The Occult Imagery of ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is, alongside The Exorcist, the most infamous, notorious horror movie ever made. That’s ironic, considering the two movies were released less than a year apart. More than anything else, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is known for being a positively unrelenting experience. It is unflinching in its raw, brutal depiction of a horrific event, as five people in a van wind up at the wrong farmhouse, and are subsequently slaughtered, tortured, and tormented. So many people have noted over the past fifty years that it is so authentic in its realism that it earnestly feels like a documentary. All of these things are true. It does have an unshakable rawness to it, to the point that your nerves are shot once the film is over because you genuinely feel as if you, the viewer, were right there going through it alongside our lone survivor Sally and her fallen friends. The fact that it looks and feels so real is astonishing, too, considering the fact that it is so artfully shot. It doesn’t look like a documentary, because there is so much inventive camerawork on the part of cinematographer Daniel Pearl, and yet, it somehow does look — or at least feel — like that as well. But the world of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a world of strange symbols, unknown rituals and otherworldly dread. The oppressive realism is therefore fascinating in that it is the thing the film is most known for when, in fact, it is deeply supernaturally coded.
I’ve written about the gothic structure and influence within The Texas Chain Saw Massacre before, but I really want to look at the imagery of it, because Tobe Hooper did so many fascinating things creating such an otherworldly sense of dread in a movie that is also so highly regarded for being brutally realistic. This starts right from the opening images of the feature. The credits play over stark, red telescope images of the sun, to the point that it almost looks like blood. Many, many people have admitted over time that they do not even know what they’re looking at in those opening credits, but the uneasy, surreal effect is undeniable, nonetheless. Then we have our first true image of the movie, with two corpses wired to a monument in a cemetery, arranged almost in the shape of Texas itself. This is a disturbing scene, and it is shown to us in broad daylight. Other than what may be harder to see in the glare of the sun, there’s not a single detail obscured.
This one image provides a vaguely supernatural feeling, an omen of things to come, and an explicit piece of evidence of things that have already been done. Desecrated burial sites are one of the most common tropes in the history of supernatural fiction, a staple of both ghost and vampire stories. There’s even something pagan, something pre-Christian about it, like the Blót ceremonies offering up an animal sacrifice in Germanic paganism, displaying an animal’s corpse to appease the gods. In gothic fiction, this sort of image of a desecrated grave is almost always presented as an omen. It’s a warning to turn back, or a marker that you have, in fact, already gone too far. Either way, it’s traditionally a sign of things to come. In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, it very much is.
This kind of imagery is peppered throughout the film. It only becomes more explicit as it goes. When the group picks up the Hitchhiker, they understand their mistake from the minute he opens his mouth. At first, he tries to be civil and he engages in conversation with Franklin about the inner workings of the meat industry, talking about the slaughterhouse and the old ways giving in to the new, resulting in the loss of jobs and livelihoods. It would even be sympathetic, except for the fact that there’s something off about him right away. His wavering voice and unpredictable body language immediately give away that his attempt at polite conversation — even though he is clearly being truthful in his beliefs about the slaughterhouse — is a performance of normalcy, and not a very good one.
Things escalate quickly into occult territory when the Hitchhiker takes a photo of the friends and then burns that photo. After that, he cuts Franklin’s arm. Even though they happen back-to-back, these events seem unrelated but they feel as if they are part of one, specific ritual, something that the Hitchhiker is performing almost spiritually. The picture alone feels like he’s targeting them, or worse, that he has already sealed their fate. The photo is an effigy, a makeshift likeness of our protagonists in lieu of a more traditional sculpture. The burning of an effigy historically marks a change of seasons, a transition, the end of one phase and beginning of another. In the very blunt case of Sally and her friends: the end of their lives. Only moments later, they are literally marked when the Hitchhiker, after being thrown out, draws a strange symbol — a rune of his own design — on the side of the van, in Franklin’s blood.
These occult markers only follow the protagonists as they get closer and closer to the house, luring them towards their deaths. On a more straightforward level, they serve as a message to the individual family members, literally herding their prey. The marker that the Hitchhiker drew on the van is immediately noticed by the Cook, who owns the local gas station. In one of the more fascinating moments, especially having seen the film so many times, the Cook does not attempt to lure them toward the house. In fact, he tries to tell them to stay away from that old property, even though he is one of the people who will be killing them if they do not listen. When they arrive at Sally and Franklin’s grandfather’s house, ignoring the Cook’s warning, Franklin finds yet another occult marker, a strange arrangement of animal bones and feathers placed in the doorway.
The Cook almost represents a classic gothic archetype that truly became a horror movie staple later on, in the slasher films of the ’80s: the harbinger of doom. This is traditionally a person, usually an elder as they have seen and heard so much in their lives, who warns the protagonists of the dangers to come, sometimes even demanding that they stay away, that they don’t go where they should not go, that they don’t learn what should not be learned. They can be found in the text of everything from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth. The Cook almost embodies this character except that he of course turns out to be one of the killers.
But there is a character in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre who embodies these traits, there is a man spouting off about the things he has seen, but the irony is that he is nearly passed out drunk and no one is listening to him. In one of the more subtly provocative images of the movie, a drunk lies in the foreground on his back in the cemetery, saying that he’s seen things but that people laugh at an old man, while Sally is led to her grandfather’s grave in the background to make sure it has not been disturbed. She hears none of this, she doesn’t even know he’s there. But he is placed right in front of our eyes, while she is in the distance. He is saying this directly to us.
Of course, the role of the harbinger of doom truly belongs to Pam’s fascination with astrology. As she reads off their horoscopes, she inadvertently reveals The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as a work in cosmic horror in which the fate of our characters is literally written in the stars. The horoscopes for Sally and Franklin match up pretty perfectly to what happens to both characters. This is their fate, dictated by an uncaring, unknowing universe setting them up for a slaughter. Mercury is in retrograde, and they are out of luck, and there’s not a thing to do to stop what’s coming. That is, essentially, the message as Pam reads it. The horoscope’s only offer of solace is to “pinch yourself,” to accept the reality of what is happening, when the horror of it defies belief.
The film keeps up this balance, of a sweltering, realistically portrayed world with an unknowable darkness just out of reach, which we are being drawn closer and closer into, until it undergoes a noticeable shift. When Kirk, Pam, and Jerry each meet Leatherface and subsequently die within the farmhouse, there’s a taste of the surreal horror inside, but it’s still portrayed with an uncomfortable realism. That changes when Sally is brought back into the house, tied to a chair, and forced to stay for dinner.
The moment that happens, we have truly entered their world. We are in that supernatural, surreal environment, we have arrived at exactly the point to which every single bizarre, occult marker had been leading us. The irony is that once we hit that point, the family are suddenly portrayed as almost normal. Bickering, shouting, yes, but also domestic in their own way. From this moment on, Leatherface no longer appears in his yellow butcher’s apron or his “killing mask,” but rather as an “old lady” slaving over the stove to cook for his brothers, and is lastly seen wearing a pretty, dolled up mask and a dinner jacket to sit down for a nice supper. The only thing scarier than watching this brute kill each of our protagonists one after the other is to be subjected to his family’s version of normalcy. It is a vision that proves too much for Sally to take.
While Daniel Pearl’s cinematography is beautiful and artistic throughout the entire film, it truly goes for broke from this moment on, with frenzied, extreme close-ups of Sally’s screaming mouth and wide-open, bloodshot eye. We’ve been led into Hell one step at a time throughout the entire movie, and now we’re there, strapped to its dinner table, guest of honor at the feast of the damned.
At the end, Sally barely makes it out alive. It’s not what we’ve perhaps come to expect from a slasher heroine. She’s not a fighter and she does not, by any means, “kick ass,” because that’s not what The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is about. She’s been subjected to another world and has just come out the other side. She is Alice, having just experienced all the horrors and danger of Wonderland, forced to grapple with the utter unreality of it as she is spat back into the world. That, to me, represents so much of the beauty of this film and why it resonates fifty years later. It does feel brutally realistic, and it does feel like a genuine, abstract nightmare and the true terror of it is struck between the balance of those two things. It’s a balance no other movie could pull off, and it is why no other movie captures exactly the same kind of dread and panic that this one does.
