Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [69]
Roger Ebert called it one of the “most pessimistic” movies ever made and argued that Polanski made Macbeth like Manson (Ebert shuddered at Shakespeare’s image of a baby ripped untimely from a mother’s womb) but put us on the side of the murderous king of Scotland. As part of the promotion for the film, legendary British theater critic Kenneth Tynan, who wrote the adaptation, published a diary in Esquire that captures a portrait of Polanski at home, lounging around his house surrounded by a gang of submissive women reading magazines. Barking out orders, he comes off as a bully with no patience for anything less than total fealty. It’s almost as if Polanski had become what his original critics always suspected. Or perhaps he was playing a role. When Tynan questioned Polanski about using so much blood and excess carnage in the scene at Macduff’s castle, after the murder of his children, the director responded bleakly: “You didn’t see my house in California last summer. I know about bleeding.”
After the Manson murders, the press treated killers like Ted Bundy and David Berkowitz like celebrities. Responding to the attention, the FBI promoted the importance of catching serial killers, which gave them a reason to expand. As urban blight and crime soared during the decade, the population of maniacs increased in the press and on movie screens. At times, the killers, the government, and the movies seemed to be working together. In one of his final letters to the police in 1974, the notorious Zodiac killer, the Southern Californian who eluded the police for years in a case that remains unsolved, took time out to review The Exorcist, calling it “the best saterical comidy [sic]” that he had ever seen. Reports that Ted Bundy, perhaps the most famous serial killer of the era next to Manson, was inspired by Bob Clark’s sorority house horror Black Christmas led NBC to cancel the film from its schedule. The press added glamour to these characters, making them objects of fascination that the movies picked up on.
THE TEX AS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE introduced horror audiences to the masked serial killer. Of course, criminals had covered their faces in movies for generations. The Italian giallos have a long tradition of killers in form-fitting white cloth masks. But while the masks for these maniacs served a functional purpose, to disguise, the masks for American slasher antiheroes were more about character—or lack thereof. The mask of Michael Myers in Halloween or Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th did not hide an identity; it created it. The mask was their uniform.
Leatherface, the hulking man-child responsible for killing victims before feeding them to his family, wore the skin of his victims on his face, a costume choice inspired by the Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein. He also set the standard in fashion in accessories (meat hook, chain saw) and personality (little to none) for a generation of serial killers.
Leatherface has a simple goal: make dinner. When we first see Leatherface, played by Gunnar Hansen, he knocks one of the kids in the van looking for gas on the head with a hammer. It is one of the most highimpact introductions in the history of horror. The scene, less than a minute long, takes