Zombie @z0mbiezbite - Tumblr Blog

My Over analyze of Texas Chainsaw Massacre PART 2

Buckle in guys

Part 1

Rejecting the Inbreeding Narrative in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

I’ve never liked the idea that the family in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is inbred. Frankly, I think it undermines what makes them truly unsettling. The film works best when there's ambiguity about their origins. Whether they have parents or not is irrelevant, what matters is that they feel abandoned by society. They're a reflection of what happens when a group of people is left to rot on the fringes of the world, forgotten and forced to fend for themselves.

The tendency for fans or critics to label them as “inbred” or portray Drayton as their father or uncle feels like an oversimplification. It's as if people need to reduce them to the stereotypical "dumb, inbred Texas cannibals" in order to rationalize their behavior. But that kind of reading misses the point.

The horror isn’t in some grotesque family tree, it’s in the fact that they’re still human. Twisted, yes. But not biologically broken. The implication that cannibalism must come from mental deficiency or genetic defect is lazy. It strips away the deeper social commentary that Hooper was aiming for.

Take the often misquoted line from Drayton in the original film: “Look what your brother did to the door!” People latch onto that as proof he’s the father, but anyone with siblings knows that’s exactly the kind of thing one brother says to another to shift blame, it's sarcastic and condescending. Similarly, when the Hitchhiker (Nubbins) mentions that “my brother used to work at the slaughterhouse,” it most logically refers to Drayton. It can’t be Leatherface because of his limited speech and need for supervision rule that out. And it can’t be Chop Top either, because he didn’t even exist in the first film’s canon yet. The brothers are equals in their own dysfunctional way, and that dynamic is far more disturbing than a traditional family structure.

Nubbins (The Hitchhiker)

Nubbins stands as perhaps the most overtly violent and unhinged member of the Sawyer family, a distinction that becomes more understandable when considering his role within the family’s horrific operations. As the family’s primary scout and initial executioner, he bears the burden of the “dirty work” before victims can be brought to Bubba. With Drayton functioning as the family’s breadwinner and reluctant participant, the responsibility for active hunting and killing falls disproportionately on Nubbins’s shoulders, especially during the times where LeatherFace was too young to kill.

His physical disability (evidenced by his pronounced limp) adds another layer to his characterization, suggesting either a birth defect, an old injury, or the physical manifestation of the family’s genetic deterioration. This impairment doesn’t slow his predatory nature; instead, it makes him appear even more unsettling, moving with an irregular, almost insectoid gait that adds to his otherworldly menace.

His fractured, stream of consciousness speech patterns suggest profound cognitive deterioration, possibly resulting from years of isolation, malnutrition, or even conditions like Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the human equivalent of mad cow disease, which would be grimly appropriate given the family’s consumption habits). Yet he retains enough coherence to communicate with Drayton, making him one of the few family members who can bridge the gap between the “respectable” eldest brother and the more feral members of the household. This positions him as a strange middle ground, too damaged to pass in normal society, but functional enough to serve as Drayton’s informant and enforcer.

The self mutilation scene where Nubbins casually slices his own flesh without flinching serves as one of the film’s most unsettling moments. Like his brother Chop Top’s similar behavior in the sequel, this disturbing display reveals how completely desensitized he has become to pain and violence. Franklin’s observation “it must take something in you to do that to yourself”underscores the profound wrongness the audience feels, highlighting how far removed Nubbins is from normal human experience. Violence isn’t aberrant to him; it’s mundane, even casual.

Yet perhaps most disturbing is Nubbins’s sadistic sense of humor, which distinguishes him from Bubba’s more mechanical brutality. When Sally is captured and terrified, he takes gleeful pleasure in tormenting her, repeatedly poking and prodding her while mockingly echoing her earlier urgency. This cruel playfulness reveals that his violence isn’t merely functional, he actively enjoys the psychological torture, savoring his victims’ fear and helplessness. This sadistic streak makes him arguably the most genuinely malevolent family member, as he inflicts suffering not just out of necessity or simple mindedness, but for his own twisted entertainment.

Visually, Nubbins embodies society’s deepest fears about poverty, disability, and the “Other.” His distinctive facial birthmark (shared with his twin Chop Top, confirming their genetic connection) marks him as physically different from birth, while his filthy clothes, bizarre mannerisms, and feral energy complete the portrait of someone existing entirely outside civilized society.

The travelers recoil from him instinctively, their revulsion reflecting broader societal anxieties about rural poverty, mental illness, physical disability, and those who don’t conform to accepted norms of appearance and behavior. He is the monstrous embodiment of what middle-class America fears might be lurking in the country’s forgotten margins, someone who is not only dangerous, but who actively revels in cruelty.

Why Bubba (Leatherface) Wears a Mask and Why It Doesn’t Matter

There’s a persistent theory that Leatherface wears masks because of some kind of skin condition or facial deformity. Personally, I find this explanation not only unnecessary but reductive. Attributing his mask-wearing to a medical condition strips away the profound thematic significance of what the mask actually represents. Leatherface doesn’t wear someone else’s face because he’s hiding a damaged one beneath, he wears it because he fundamentally lacks a stable sense of self.

The masks function as interchangeable identities: the “Pretty Woman” mask transforms him into a domestic caretaker and the grotesque housewife preparing dinner; the “Killing Mask” signals the butcher at work. Each face he dons isn’t a disguise, it’s an entire persona, complete with corresponding behaviors and roles. Bubba is a psychological blank slate, molded entirely by his environment and family expectations rather than any innate sense of identity. The mask doesn’t conceal a deformity; it fills a void where personality and autonomy should exist but were never permitted to develop. He is, in the most literal sense, whatever face he happens to be wearing at any given moment.

Why Leatherface Needs a Family

What makes Bubba truly tragic and genuinely terrifying is his absolute dependence on the family structure. He requires constant direction, validation, and purpose from his brothers and grandfather. His passivity, his childlike obedience, and his visible distress when criticized all point to someone who is fundamentally incapable of autonomous function. When Drayton scolds him, he whimpers and cowers like a beaten dog. When given orders, he follows them with mechanical precision. Left to his own devices, he would likely deteriorate completely.

Leatherface isn’t evil in the conventional sense that most horror villains are. He’s not driven by sadism like Nubbins, or calculation like Drayton. He’s a tool, a weapon wielded by a family that has constructed its own insular moral framework to survive economic collapse and social abandonment. The Sawyer family has warped him into the perfect instrument of violence, someone too mentally limited to question, too emotionally stunted to resist, and too dependent to ever leave.

Without his family, Bubba wouldn’t become some liberated individual, he would simply cease to function. That profound dependency transforms him from a simple monster into something far more disturbing: a victim who has been so thoroughly broken and conditioned that he has become complicit in monstrous acts he likely doesn’t even fully comprehend. His tragedy and his horror are inseparable, two sides of the same damaged psyche.

Foreshadowing Through Franklin's Dialogue

There’s also a great moment of foreshadowing in the van at the beginning of the film. Franklin talks about how the slaughterhouse used to kill cattle with a sledgehammer, but eventually they moved to more efficient means. Later, we see Grandpa trying (and failing) to kill Sally with a hammer in a dark, almost comical ritual. It mirrors what Franklin described and reinforces the theme of decaying tradition. Even violence in this world is outdated, clumsy, and inefficient. The family is stuck in the past, unable to evolve with the world, and their methods reflect that.

Also side note very weird but if TCM characters were animals they would be herbivores to show that they aren’t inherently meant to eat people (they would likely be farm animals) okay bye

#texas chainsaw massacre #texas chainsaw 2 #tcm 1986 #tcm 1974 #tcm #drayton sawyer #leatherface #horror movies #horror #chop top sawyer #tcm choptop #tcm nubbins #nubbins sawyer #slashers

My Over Analysis of Texas Chainsaw Massacre

I’m hyperfixated on TCM, here’s my character analysis and other thoughts for future TCM movies.

Part 2

DRAWTON SAWYER

 Drayton Sawyer, known simply as The Cook, is the eldest brother in the Sawyer family and the reluctant caretaker of his younger siblings: Leatherface, Chop-Top, and the Hitchhiker in the original film. With their parents absent and their patriarchal figure, Grandpa, too elderly and feeble to contribute anything meaningful, Drayton finds himself shouldering a burden of responsibility he never wanted. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986), he even laments, "I wouldn't wish this life on a one-eyed ferret with mange"a grimly humorous but painfully honest expression of his regret and disillusionment with the life circumstances have forced upon him.

Though far from innocent, The Cook is paradoxically the least sadistic member of the family. Unlike Leatherface or the Hitchhiker, who seem more directly engaged with the violence, Drayton assumes a pragmatic, almost managerial role in the family's gruesome operations. In the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), the Hitchhiker even accuses him of making everyone else do all the work, suggesting that Drayton deliberately distances himself from the physical act of killing. This reveals an important distinction: while their family was born into the meat business and raised in that brutal world, they weren't inherently born to kill humans. The shift from livestock to people represents a moral line they crossed out of desperation, not inclination.

Drayton's actions throughout both films reflect a commitment to self-preservation and keeping the family out of unnecessary danger. He furiously berates the Hitchhiker for returning to the graveyard and drawing attention to the family, just as he orders Leatherface and Chop-Top to stay off the phone in TCM 2, presumably to avoid leaving evidence or getting caught. While these aren't altruistic actions, he's protecting himself as much as anyone, they do reveal a protective instinct and a certain warped code of responsibility within the family unit. He's trying to keep them alive and hidden, even if the methods are monstrous.

It's worth noting that when Drayton does interact with victims in both TCM and TCM 2, he never physically torments them himself, that's always left to his brothers. During Sally's torture in the infamous dinner scene, he seems genuinely agitated awith the drawn-out cruelty. While his brothers seem to revel in the spectacle and the suffering, Drayton just wants it done quickly. Instead of participating in the torture, he talks to victims, circles around them, maintains a kind of psychological distance even when he's present. His outlook is ruthlessly utilitarian, shaped by years of being forced to "do what needs to be done" to keep the family fed, hidden, and alive. He's a man who's learned to compartmentalize horror as simply part of the job.  (Side note: This doesn’t mean Drayton doesn’t enjoy the killing/harming of people, it’s clears when he continuously pokes and beats Sally with his broom and mocks her when she wakes up at the dinner table)

This characterization makes the 2017 Leatherface film's portrayal of young Drayton somewhat questionable. In that film, the young Drayton character smashes food into a captive's face during a torture scene, behavior that directly contradicts his established character. The original Drayton doesn't engage in that kind of hands on, prolonged humiliation or physical torment. That's fundamentally not who he is. He delegates the violence and when forced to be present during torture, he manages from a distance.

The historical context surrounding the Sawyer family is crucial to understanding Drayton's transformation. During the early 1970s, the United States began aggressively modernizing slaughterhouses with automated machinery and industrial processing methods, rendering thousands of traditional butchers and bluecollar meatworkers obsolete virtually overnight. For a family like the Sawyers, whose entire identity was built around generations of work in the meat industry, this wasn't just economic hardship it was an existential catastrophe.

Their livelihood, their skills, their sense of purpose, their place in the world: all of it was stripped away by forces completely beyond their control. With their way of life destroyed, they spiraled into survivalist madness, turning to cannibalism and murder not merely out of sadistic desire, but out of twisted necessity and a desperate attempt to continue doing the only thing they'd ever known how to do.

By August 18th, 1973 (the day the original film takes place) the country was also on the cusp of the 1973 Oil Crisis, with gas shortages, skyrocketing inflation, and widespread economic panic looming on the horizon. The Cook's actions in siphoning gas from his own workplace to power the family's generator isn't just criminal opportunism; it's a desperate act of survival in a collapsing economy. The barbecue joint he operates, ironically serving human meat to unsuspecting travelers, becomes a grotesque symbol of this twisted self-sufficiency. He's found a way to feed people, make money, and dispose of evidence all at once, a horrifying but undeniably practical solution to multiple problems.

One element frequently forgotten or deliberately downplayed in discussions of Drayton Sawyer is his charisma and ability to pass as normal. Unlike his more overtly monstrous siblings, Drayton possesses the crucial ability to present himself as an ordinary, even charming person when necessary. In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), he owns and operates what appears to be a legitimate gas station, speaking to the teenage characters in a calm, friendly, almost fatherly manner. He's personable, helpful, seemingly harmless, exactly the kind of person you wouldn't think twice about.

This duality becomes even more exaggerated and darkly comedic in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986), where Drayton isn't just running a business. He's winning awards at chili cook-offs with food made from human flesh. It's simultaneously absurd and deeply disturbing: he's able to move through society completely undetected, even celebrated and praised, because he's mastered the art of performing normalcy. His food truck and public presence prove that he can operate in plain sight. 

Drayton is, in many ways, the "face" of the Sawyer family in the most literal sense. While Leatherface wears literal masks stitched from human skin to construct different identities, Drayton wears a social mask, seamlessly playing the role of the friendly small-town businessman while orchestrating horrific acts behind the scenes. This makes him arguably the most dangerous member of the family, not because he's the most violent (he clearly isn't), but because he's the most believable, the most human, the one who can walk among normal society without raising suspicion.

His charisma and social skills are absolutely key to the family's survival. Leatherface and the others simply couldn't function in public without immediately drawing attention and suspicion. Drayton, on the other hand, can hold a conversation, run what appears to be a legitimate business, charm customers, win over crowds, and maintain relationships all while keeping the family's horrific secret hidden. That public-facing persona is essential to maintaining the illusion of normalcy, which in turn allows the horror to remain concealed until victims are already trapped and it's far too late to escape.

Ultimately, Drayton Sawyer is a man corrupted and hollowed out by circumstance, someone who might have lived a quiet, unremarkable, possibly even decent life had society not systematically failed him and his family. His descent into madness and monstrosity wasn't driven by inherent bloodlust or evil, but by the crushing weight of obligation, grinding poverty, and the complete collapse of traditional rural labor and the American working class. When he says, "I wouldn't wish this life on a one-eyed ferret with mange," it isn't just self-pity or dark humor, it's a tragic acknowledgment of how little genuine choice he ever really had, and how deeply he resents the life he's been forced to live.  (Some might argue that Drayton hitting Leatherface with a broom shows he's more sadistic than this characterization suggests. However, that reads more as frustrated/abusive family dynamics than enjoying torture for its own sake. The line between "pragmatic killer" and "reluctant killer" can be thin. He does ultimately participate, he just doesn't linger over it.)  LEATHERFACE  Leatherface is a character I’ve hesitated to write about because he’s so often misrepresented. Popular portrayals tend to reduce him to a mindless, chainsaw wielding brute. But that image does him a disservice. Leatherface is far more complex, and at the core of his actions lies something disturbingly human.

He doesn’t kill out of sheer bloodlust. His violence is often an extension of his fear and obedience, particularly to his family. Being nonverbal, Leatherface lacks the means to express himself conventionally, which makes his body language and actions even more significant. He communicates through gesture, mimicry, and behavior. In many ways, he is a product of his environment, raised in a violent, cannibalistic household where killing is normalized and even expected.

Though he slaughters people, it’s less about personal enjoyment and more about survival, routine, and fear of punishment. Still, it would be naïve to say he feels nothing. Leatherface exhibits signs of detachment from the violence, likely the result of desensitization as the youngest member of the Sawyer family, exposed to murder from a young age. But in some moments, he does seem to participate with a strange sort of enthusiasm, possibly mimicking what he sees as familial bonding.

While Leatherface kills primarily because his family demands it, he's not entirely without agency or some level of engagement with the violence. In the original TCM, he pursues and kills victims on his own initiative to protect the family home, not just when explicitly ordered. When Sally wakes up in the human chair and screams, all three brothers mock her cries and while Leatherface may be imitating his brothers to feel included, he's still participating. In TCM2, he and Chop Top even share a celebratory high give after they believe they've killed everyone in the radio station, suggesting he takes some satisfaction in successfully fulfilling his role.  His brothers, particularly The Cook, regularly abuse him despite his superior size and strength. The Cook beats him with a broom when he fails to meet expectations, establishing a hierarchy based on fear rather than physical capability. Leatherface occupies what could be called the "housewife" role, he does the butchering, maintains the home, and suffers physical punishment when he steps out of line. This dynamic reveals how abusive family structures operate through psychological control and conditioning.

The most revealing moment comes in TCM2 with Stretch. When she shows dominance toward him (touching his face, speaking directly to him, treating him as a person rather than a monster) he doesn't kill her. Instead, he shows submission, completely disarmed by this unfamiliar dynamic. He's never experienced someone interacting with him outside the framework of violence and hierarchy. His response mirrors how he submits to his brothers, suggesting he responds to power structures rather than having his own internal compass for action.

Leatherface exists in the uncomfortable space between victim and perpetrator. He's been abused, controlled, and denied even the ability to speak for himself, yet he's also capable of autonomous violence and participates in his family's atrocities. This complexity is probably why he's so often flattened into a generic slasher villain, it's much easier to dismiss him as simply evil than to grapple with a character who defies easy moral categorization.   CHOP-TOP  I have very little and a lot to say about this character. Chop Top demonstrates a profound devotion to his family, going so far as to preserve and transport his brother's remains. This care extends to the entire household, everything has been mummified, including Grandma herself. While outsiders might view this macabre preservation as disturbing or even sadistic, it actually reveals a deep sentimentality. This becomes evident during the climactic sequence of TCM2, when Chop Top warns Stretch not to lay a hand on Grandma.

There's an intriguing irony in Chop Top being the only family member conscripted into military service during Vietnam. One has to wonder what circumstances or factors exempted his brothers from the draft. (I understand why leather face and Drayton couldn’t be drafted but I’m curious why Nubbins wasn’t drafted)

His experience in Vietnam clearly left lasting scars, both physical and psychological. During the radio station scene, Chop Top's bitter reminiscences about his time in the war reveal distinctly anti-establishment sentiments that align with counterculture and hippie ideologies of that era. It's a fascinating contradiction that a member of this violent, isolated family forced into the machinery of war, only to return espousing antiwar philosophy.

From a practical standpoint, his military service would have provided monetary benefits that could be sent home to support the family. This adds another layer to his character: he wasn't just serving his country, but inadvertently becoming a provider for the Sawyer clan through his soldier's pay, benefits, and allowances.

 HERE’S WHY FUTURE INTERPRETATIONS MUST NOT INCLUDE WOMEN FAMILY MEMBERS.  While this perspective may be seen as controversial, it’s one I feel compelled to express, not out of hatred toward women or to suggest that female characters inherently weaken a story, but because of what the Sawyer family represents within the symbolic and thematic structure of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre series.

The Sawyers are a grotesque, satirical reflection of the traditional nuclear family, a decaying American archetype. Interestingly, this dynamic functions precisely because the roles within the family are inverted or distorted. The absence of a traditional maternal figure is not a flaw, it is intentional and thematically important. In fact, the maternal role is subverted and absorbed by the male characters, most notably The Cook and Leatherface.

The Cook acts as the caretaker of the family. He cooks, keeps his family out of danger, and reprimands his brothers. Leatherface, particularly in the original film, performs explicitly gender coded roles: wearing a “pretty woman” mask while preparing dinner, shrieking in fear, and acting submissive to the older male figures. In essence, Leatherface becomes the twisted “mother” of the family, playing hostess and homemaker, albeit through horrific means.

This symbolic feminization of Leatherface is crucial to understanding the grotesque parody of domestic life that TCM presents. Introducing actual women into the Sawyer family risks disrupting this carefully constructed distortion. Female Sawyer characters could dilute the symbolic inversion that gives the original family its disturbing power. Instead of subverting traditional gender and family roles, it risks reinforcing them or worse, reducing the family’s horror to mere dysfunction, rather than social commentary.

It’s not about gatekeeping horror or saying that women can’t be monstrous. Women absolutely can and should be written as complex, terrifying villains when it serves the story. But in this particular case, the absence of women and the gender role perversions by men are central to the themes of the series: the death of the American dream, the collapse of traditional labor roles, and the madness that ensues when systems fail and families turn inward.

The horror of TCM isn’t just in the gore or the violence, it’s in the uncomfortable recognition of a family trying to hold onto traditional values in the most twisted, desperate way possible.   NO OVER THE TOP KILLING

When I think of gruesome unnecessary kills, I think of Leatherface (2017), where Betty Hartman’s death, impaled on metal spikes and then crushed by a dropping car engine, is engineered purely for shock value. It’s elaborate, mechanical, almost cartoonish in its excess. The kill exists to make the audience gasp at the audacity of the effect rather than to genuinely disturb them. It’s gore as fireworks display, completely divorced from the raw, documentary like brutality that made TCM so effective.

The original film understands that real violence is fast and ugly and undignified. Animals in slaughterhouses don’t die in elaborate contraptions, they’re dispatched quickly, efficiently, without ceremony. That’s what makes the Sawyer family so uniquely terrifying: they’ve applied that same cold, industrial logic to human beings. There’s no malice just the workmanlike execution of a task. The kills are almost incidental to the film’s real horror.

And that horror is primarily atmospheric and psychological. It’s in the aftermath rather than the act. The house itself becomes the true nightmare. Every surface decorated with bones, furniture upholstered in human skin, lampshades and ornaments fashioned from what were once people with names and families and futures. The artistry applied to human remains. The complete erasure of personhood, reducing individuals to raw materials, to decor, to meat.

There’s something profoundly disturbing about that bone-and-feather chandelier, or that armchair made of human skeletal remains, or Leatherface’s masks cycling through different “faces” like someone changing outfits. These aren’t just scary props, they represent a household where the line between human and animal has been completely obliterated, where slaughter has become so normalized it’s turned domestic, almost cozy. The family sits down to dinner surrounded by the remains of their victims as casually as someone might display hunting trophies.

The rotting animal carcasses, the chicken imprisoned in that birdcage, the oppressive heat and flies, it all contributes to this sense of decay and wrongness, a space where death has become so ordinary it’s woven into the fabric of daily life. The Sawyers aren’t monsters in the supernatural sense; they’re the logical endpoint of a certain kind of rural poverty and isolation meeting the dehumanizing legacy of industrial slaughter.

The genius of TCM is that it trusts its audience. It doesn’t need to show you Pam being carved up after she’s hung on that meat hook, the squeal of the chainsaw and her screams are more than enough. Your mind does the rest, and what you imagine is always worse than what could be practically achieved with 1974 special effects. The film denies you the catharsis of actually seeing the violence resolved, leaving you suspended in that moment of terror, forcing you to sit with the implication.

Modern horror films often can’t resist the temptation to show everything, to make the kills the centerpiece, to turn murder into entertainment rather than something genuinely harrowing. They mistake elaborateness for effectiveness. But true horror, just needs terrible certainty that no one is coming to help  OTHER THOUGHTS  Here are some additional observations worth exploring. Grandpa's condition likely stems from a prion disease (possibly Kuru) which is specifically contracted through cannibalistic practices, particularly consumption of brain tissue. This detail is medically significant because it reinforces a crucial point: the Sawyer family weren't born as killers or cannibals. No human is. We're biologically hardwired with natural aversions to consuming our own species. The presence of Kuru suggests this family's descent into cannibalism was learned behavior, a gradual corruption rather than an innate predisposition. It's a tragic testament to how environment and circumstance can override our fundamental human programming.  The symptom profile of Kuru aligns remarkably well with what we observe in Grandpa's condition throughout the films. Tremors and involuntary movements are perhaps his most visible symptoms (constant shaking and inability to control his limbs is defining, particularly evident in the infamous hammer scene where he lacks the strength and coordination to deliver an effective blow.) His complete immobility suggests severe cerebellar damage; he requires his family to physically carry and position him, unable to walk or support himself.

We see him struggle with swallowing during the bloo sucking scene in TCM, where the family must help him feed, and his vocalizations are minimal and garbled, indicating the disease's impact on speech muscles. Grandpa appears to have severely diminished cognitive function and dementia, showing little awareness of his surroundings, existing in a fog.

His progressive weakness and total bedriddenness define his state, he's completely dependent, unable to perform even basic motor functions without assistance. Grandpa's condition isn't simply old age, It's the end result of the family's cannibalistic practices literally eating away at his brain, a physical manifestation of how their taboo consumption has destroyed them from within. (Nubbins and Drayton most likely had it too)

What's also remarkably progressive about both The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and its sequel is their treatment of female characters and sexuality. The films refreshingly avoid the puritanical "punish promiscuity" trope that plagued so many horror movies of that era. The women aren't penalized for dressing practically for the Texas heat(wearing crop tops, shorts, and revealing clothing makes complete sense given the sweltering climate) and the films treat this as entirely normal rather than as an invitation for punishment.

Even more telling is the dinner scene in the original TCM, when Sally, in absolute desperation, offers herself sexually "I'll do anything you want." It's a heartbreaking moment of survival instinct, yet nobody in the family even considers taking her up on it. Their violence isn't sexually motivated; it's not about domination or gratification in that sense. This absence of sexual violence is almost subversive for the genre. The horror comes from a different place entirely, it comes from dysfunction, madness, and a family's complete detachment from societal norms, but not from sexual sadism. The Sawyers are terrifying for many reasons, but sexual predation isn't among them.  References:  TMC1, TMC 2, and sadly leather face (2017), I came up with all of this stuff after I watched TCM 1 and 2 for the 7x a day. I hate 2003 version and every other reboot, so I won’t mention anything with it except leather face (2017). If anyone wants a draft version of this, let me know.

(This has been cross posted on Reddit)

#texas chainsaw massacre #horror #horror movies #film #film discussion #slashers #leatherface #drayton sawyer #chop top sawyer #tcm #tcm 1986 #discussion #film analysis #tcm 1974 #texas chainsaw 2

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Zombie