I'm really enjoying the cosmic horror reinterpretation of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It gets to a lot of the ambient horror of the film - what is terrifying is almost environmental, and the sense that the Sawyer family expresses something bigger and worse and more rotten to the USA than simply being cannibals.
The cosmic horror and the social commentary of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre fold together like two clasped hands. Much of the sense of cosmic horror and social commentary were probably accidental byproducts, but not wholly unintentional because there is no way to detach from either and there are some clear touchstones for both. And the extrapolation of these into more complex ideas is 100% attributing a degree of artistic intent which we know on record could not have existed. Too much of the movie was improvised in the moment due to low budget. Too much exists because everyone was physically and psychologically exhausted due to the miserable working conditions.
But it's such a good read on the final product. Everything from the seemingly undead grandpa to the blood symbol on the van to the sunspots for opening credits to the proto industrial score from Tobe Hooper fits so nicely into that theme, the rest of it falls into place. The heat, the nightime sequence, madness as the conclusion. It's wonderful, and when you understand the incomprehensibly vast monster is the USA itself, I think it's a way of making it understandable to a non-horror fan like it never has been before.
In many ways, the sun is almost as much a presence as any character. And when you look to the other attempts to approach the material after The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2, that sense of unknowable worship is very noticeably absent. Outside the hands of Tobe Hooper, we're left with people struggling to find a way into the material by the signifiers like cannibalism, the saw, or isolated rural communities. But none of them consider the real secret ingredient is that Tobe Hooper's movies are in awe of the environment, and his Sawyers are not just cannibals, but worshipers and mystics.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is almost infamous for its messy, grimy realism (in part because everyone was sweaty and couldn't take showers filming in the Texas heat), but those elements are like the costumes and casual nudity of The Wicker Man from 1973, set dressing to lend veracity to a story about something bigger.
It's one of those films that transformed horror films forever and never stopped being an influence on the genre, but for all that it remains difficult to convince both horror fans and non-fans that one of the reasons it has been so influential is because it was and still as a sincerely beautiful work of art.
