Welcome to Bizarre Crimes: Essays on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Join us every day in October for a new piece of critical analysis on Tobe Hooper's legendary film, as Pop Heist's Matthew Jackson breaks down why this film remains one of the greatest pieces of horror cinema of all time. Subscribe to Pop Heist so you don't miss an essay!
This is the fifth installment of this 31-essay project, and we haven't even made it out of the first 10 minutes of the movie. I didn't really plan it that way — part of the high-wire act of the project for me is writing these things as they occur to me — but I don't find it unusual either.
We don't talk a lot about the Texas Chain Saw screenplay, not when there's so much to take in on screen in its final form, but Hooper and co-writer Kim Henkel really did beautifully engineer this thing. Every scene, no matter how brief, allows for the introduction of some thought, some fresh idea, some sign that this is all connected, no matter how chaotic the actual story seems.
Which is why we're still here at the beginning of the film, because it's just loaded with vital pieces of storytelling, and that includes the scene immediately after the wheelchair wreck. It's only about 40 seconds long, a blip of a structural bridge to get us from Franklin's accident to the cemetery, but it contains essential pieces of thematic power, and it starts with Pam and her book.
Pam's a chick in the early '70s who's into astrology, tying in to the hippie-esque aspects of our five youths in the most direct way we'll see in the entire film. She's got a big book called A to Z Horrorscope and Delineator, covered in cool astrological symbols. She's consulting the book while arguing with Jerry (Allen Danziger) over its effectiveness, and Jerry's incredulous, more the kind of cat who's likely to get into emerging disco music than astrology, the most urbane of the five. There is an element of playful tension here; no one's really fighting, but they are disagreeing and having a laugh at Pam's expense. It's a bit of lightness, of levity in what's otherwise been a rather dark affair so far, but it also tells us a few things about the thematic places the film will go. Think of it like a horoscope.
The tension between Pam and Jerry, who ropes Kirk into the conversation along the way, isn't presaging some future fight, but it is pointing the way toward one of the great conflicts of the film: The ideological conflicts between the new and the old, physically, spiritually, and otherwise. In many ways that we'll discuss later, the family of cannibals about to charge into this narrative represent the old ways, not just a more primitive way of living but one more connected to the primal, to a world of survival more than a world of coexistence. In her way, by trying to divine her friends' fates from the stars, Pam is plugging in, albeit much more peacefully, to the same kind of primal, totemic energy. The world of the film's villains is ruled in many ways by symbols, and Pam subscribes to the same kind of symbolic power in the stars. There are still unifiers between our villains and our five youths, which will make their clash later that much more horrifying and discordant.
More than that, though, as Pam reads, she talks about "malefic" planets, and their ability to grow even more malefic when they're in retrograde. Saturn, Pam tells us, is already a malefic planet, but now it's also in retrograde, so its sign could carry extra harm. Jerry doesn't believe this, but Pam does, and because I know what happens next, I believe it too, at least in the context of this fictional world. Meanwhile, Franklin's in the back seat, complaining about the heat of the sun, certain it's making him "crazy."
The sun as an engine of madness is something we'll return to again and again over the course of the film, and here that seed is planted. We already knew it was Texas in August, but now the heat is getting to our characters, and will soon overtake them in a number of ways. The Sun, at least in the context of this narrative, is malefic as well.
And the other malefic heavenly body: Saturn, the titan who devoured his children.
Saturn the cannibal.
Pam is not only right, but right in a way she will grow to regret. Malefic planets are aligning, and they're opening their jaws.
Next Time: Them That Laughs And Knows Better
If you haven't already, please consider supporting worker-owned media by subscribing to Pop Heist's newsletter or leaving a tip. We are ad-free and operating outside the algorithm, so all dollars go directly to paying the staff members and writers who make articles like this one possible.
