Horror fans have a habit of humanizing their favorite monsters, perhaps the slashers especially.
Art the Clown, who currently holds the modern slasher championship title belt for his work in the ongoing Terrifier series, is a “rizz master;” Jason Voorhees, for reasons clarified through his backstory, gets sympathy votes from viewers no matter how many horny teenagers he kills (and no matter how brutally he kills them). We like to invest in optimism, the chance that behind the mask, or under the makeup, there lies a soul deserving of compassion, someone who, if circumstances allowed, we could “fix.”
No figure in slasher cinema’s canon is better calibrated for provoking our empathy than Leatherface, that misbegotten son of the maneating Sawyer clan and antagonist in Tobe Hooper’s American horror classic, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (as well as its sequels, reboots, and subsidiary titles, though few of them are good enough to justify the kinship).
Slasher movies rarely lend their killers as much immediately recognizable humanity as Hooper accords Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) in the original film.
Yes, he’s a hulking sociopathic murderer whose face mask is literally a face mask; yes, he commits such atrocities as hanging Pam (Terry McMinn) on a meat hook before dismembering her boyfriend Kirk’s (William Vail) carcass right in front of her. But The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s window into Leatherface’s family dynamic positions him as a victim, too.
He’s the sole provider as well as enforcer for his brother (Edwin Neal) and their de facto paternal figure, credited as the “old man” (Jim Siedow), but when occasion requires, he gender-switches, exchanging his “Killing Mask” (for, you know: killing) for his “Old Lady” mask (for domestic functions, a la cooking) and his “Pretty Woman” mask (at the dining room table); in the latter role, he is the object of their abuse.
Feeling tenderness for Leatherface, or barring that, at least a baseline understanding of his behavioral health, is so normal that it’s practically the consensus perspective on his character.
Formulations of Leatherface as an antihero are rarer, even if certain films in the series–2013’s Texas Chainsaw 3D, and 2022’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre–instill in him overcooked lofty motivations for his actions, like revenge or frontier justice.
Patton Oswalt, comedian, actor, and one of our great cultural critics, adds a new wrinkle to this secondary conceptualization of Leatherface in Alexandre O. Philippe’s new movie Chain Reactions, a documentarian tribute to Hooper’s masterpiece structured as an oral history.
Across five chapters, Oswalt and Philippe’s other interviewees–Japanese shock auteur Takashi Miike, horror critic and academic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, and genre filmmaker Karyn Kusama, plus a complete rando named “Stephen King”–each describe their nearly lifelong relationships with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, using personal experiences to center the film in broader social and historical contexts; giving the floor to a small cast of key individuals opens up not only The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s value–to the medium and to culture writ large–but also its meaning, captured best by Oswalt’s TCM theorem.
“The opening credits have closeup shots of storms on the surface of the sun,” Oswalt narrates over footage from the film. “In the rest of the movie, people are always looking up at the sun; it’s like the sun itself has become diseased, and is bathing the world in this madness, and it’s starting to take hold.”
He suggests that Hooper’s showing his audience one event unfolding as this solar hysteria spreads across the planet; the plot advances, and the film’s characters, whether Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) or the old man, each lose their sanity. By the time we get to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s famous closing shot of Leatherface swinging his chainsaw like a flapper spinning a dance cane, “the madness is fully taking hold of the Earth, and Leatherface is trying to kill the sun with his chainsaw.”
Thank god for individual interpretation and death of the author, because this is just as satisfying a read on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as anything offered by Hooper or Hansen.
If Texas Chainsaw 3D can invite viewers to accept that Leatherface is driven to kill by his fractured mental state, then Oswalt can invite Philippe’s viewers to buy into the idea that what we’re seeing in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a consequence of planetwide lunacy, an affliction of the sun’s rays, and that Leatherface is actually doing something about it, or attempting to, anyways. Striking down the sun with a Poulan 245 would be quite the feat.
Oswalt’s analysis of the film and Leatherface is fascinating, in part because it’s both totally unexpected and exactly the kind of creative cinematic take Oswalt is known for; and in part because it plays so well into the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series’ infrequent semi-reformations of Leatherface’s persona.
In Oswalt’s telling, Leatherface’s complete arc in the film is that of a witness: He begins in a fit of pique as Sally’s friends stumble upon his house, descends further into fear when his own family begins lashing out at him, and finally, strained to his breaking point at seeing everyone around him, whether strangers or familiar, losing their minds, directs his inchoate anguish at the sun.
Why the sun? It’s the entity responsible for the dreadful mania erupting around him, of course; Oswalt notes that people in the movie routinely gaze upward at the Lone Star State’s sky, and thus into the sun’s deranging glare. So, why not the sun? And why not recast Leatherface as the gristly avenger seeking to sever its grip upon mankind?
Horror fans and scholars alike have surveyed him as a misunderstood and maltreated figure in his own narratives over the years, after all; adding “unlikely would-be savior” to that profile consequently feels downright logical and facilitates the nihilism baked into The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s final image.
Each of Chain Reactions’ testimonies is a gift for devotees of horror generally and Hooper’s genre-defining all-timer specifically, certainly, but Oswalt’s reframes the film entirely–and that’s as twisted a miracle as the film itself.
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