The vegetarian allegory behind ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’
In the 1960s, Hollywood’s easing of the censorial Hays Code allowed movies featuring graphic violence to be released in the mainstream. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was a landmark entry into the horror canon, showing more violence and blood than was typical for horror movies until then. The same year, Mario Bava’s Italian horror Black Sunday highlighted the use of explicit onscreen violence with its shocking scenes of murder.
The rest of the decade saw movies like Rosemary’s Baby, Peeping Tom and Night of the Living Dead drive horror even further, cementing it as a genre with psychological and cinematic merit that could have genuine mainstream success. By the 1970s, many directors who would become iconic staples of the genre, such as John Carpenter, David Cronenberg and Dario Argento, emerged into cinematic consciousness. This is also the decade that slasher movies rose to prominence, with Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre becoming one of the subgenre’s earliest and most groundbreaking entries.
While it’s not strictly the first slasher movie, it is one of the most important, responsible for beginning the trend of a killer targetting their victims with a power tool as their choice of weapon. It is also one of the first movies to feature the ‘final girl’ trope, which has since become a common feature of slasher films like Scream and Halloween.
Hooper’s low-budget slasher changed the course of horror history. From the terrifying killer Leatherface to the dirty, sweaty atmosphere of the house, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is far from a pleasant watch, yet one that we cannot help but return to because of its sheer, disgusting brilliance.
The film follows a group of teenagers as they road trip through Texas, eventually stopping at an abandoned property owned by one of the girls’ families. However, they soon discover that the neighbouring house is inhabited by a group of bizarre characters, including Leatherface, who wears a mask made of skin. Subsequently, each group member, apart from the ‘final girl’ Sally Hardesty, is ruthlessly killed by Leatherface.
The movie has been interpreted in multiple ways, with some viewers simply choosing to enjoy the intense violence and others seeing it as an astute analysis of capitalism and American society. However, another theory has been popular since the film’s release – that it’s an allegory for vegetarianism.
One of the movie’s running motifs is animal slaughter, with some characters dying in ways typical of killing cattle or pigs for meat, for example, being placed on a meathook. There’s also plenty of animal carcasses and skulls decorating Leatherface’s house, who dresses like a butcher. In an interview with Bizarre, Hooper explained, “I gave up meat while making that film. In a way, I thought the heart of the film was about meat; it’s about the chain of life and killing sentient beings, and it has cannibalism in it, although you have to come to that conclusion by yourself because it’s only implied.”
Therefore, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre can partly be seen as a commentary on the cruelty of animal violence, with the deaths of innocent characters mirroring the cruel nature in which animals are slaughtered for their bodies for the benefit of humans. With Leatherface representing humans and the victims representing animals, it certainly paints humans as senseless and emotionless. Thus, the film has the ability to leave audiences questioning their stance on meat consumption, which was the case for Mexican filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro, who gave up meat after watching Hooper’s movie.
