Female Masculinity in Texas Chainsaw 1 & 2

This is my second time watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the same feeling I had the first time around was still present: this movie just isn’t any fun. Ongiri has talked about how this film doesn’t scare people like it used to, and I think that that’s generally true, but what makes this film unique on a purely surface level is just how miserable it is to watch. I wonder if audiences in 1974 felt the same way or if they reacted in the manner that Carol Clover outlines in her section on “Shock,” “Spectators tend to be silent during stalking scenes, scream out at the first slash, and make loud noises of revulsion at the sight of the bloody stump.” (Clover, 41). She continues to explain that this is an expression of fear/disgust at “real horror on one hand and a camp, almost self-parodying horror on the other” (41). I find it hard to believe that audiences would have reacted to this film in the same way as they would have to its sequel, which came out twelve years later, and fully engages in this double expression of “real horror” and campy excess.

I want to shift focus now to the second Texas Chainsaw film, because Clover spends more time talking about it than she does the first one, and it is really quite interesting along with being incredibly entertaining in a way that the first one is not. We have a protagonist in Stretch, a radio DJ who is independent and strong-willed but hardly the paragon of virtue that many a Final Girl tends to be. She defeats Leatherface (only temporarily) at the beginning of the film by presenting sex and orgasmic pleasure to him (his chainsaw stops working as it edges closer to her clothed vagina, and she starts telling him that she is enjoying it and then he makes noises that we are to assume is an orgasm). She essentially castrates him in this scene, his “penis” stops working, and then presents him with a new experience (ejaculation) that makes him powerless to stop her. The rest of the film is her evading his family members while Leatherface is caught between familial duty (murdering Stretch) and his newfound affection, even love, for Stretch. She handily defeats them in their own house, which has been repurposed as an underground network of caves owing to the fact that they now have a successful butcher business, all with only a little ineffectual help from Dennis Hopper’s vengeful Texas Ranger, who I believe is supposed to be the father of one of the victims from the first movie. The film ends with Stretch emerging from the cave with her own chainsaw in hand as she waves it over her head in triumph, a callback to the far more upsetting final shot of the first film. Stretch’s sexual agency from the outset gives her an advantage over the impotent and inbred members of the Sawyer family (they’re given a name in the second film) and it is her source of strength. 

Where the first Texas Chainsaw was radical in its repurposing of the slasher formula outlined by Psycho, the second one repurposes it even further. The victims are, for the most part, not friends of Stretch (she doesn’t seem to have many friends), and she is tomboyish and certainly not a virgin. No one rescues her, and it is her independence and sexual freedom that make her such radically different Final Girl.