The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [354]
The house, littered with gnawed bones, is occupied by a family of psychopathic abattoir workers, including the young man they picked up on the road, who it turns out are also cannibals. One of them, Leatherface, wields a screaming chainsaw and wears a face-mask made from human skin. The film's only purpose is to keep the audience's sense of terror, horror, shock and disgust screwed to the highest pitch, as we see Sally's friends one after another hacked to death, dismembered, generally treated like animals in an abattoir (we see the girl being hung from a meat hook before her naked corpse is dumped in a freezer) and finally eaten. A particularly obsessional sequence shows the cripple being chased through the woods in his wheelchair, before he meets the same grisly end as the others.
We eventually see that, living upstairs in the house, is the most horrible monster of them all, the family's patriarchal old grandfather, accompanied, in a selfconscious reference to Psycho, by the mummified corpse of his wife, the grandmother. When only Sally is left, the director plays with his audience by allowing her to escape to what she imagines is the safety of a gas station on a nearby road. Except that she then discovers that the man running it is the family's father, who returns her to hellish captivity. Finally she is allowed a second `thrilling escape' and the film ends with her sitting alone on the back of a truck from which she has thumbed a lift, laughing in hysterical relief.
At least in Psycho, beyond the claustrophobic little nightmare world of Norman Bates's motel, there had still been a reassuring framework of normality and social order. The deformed monster could finally be seen being lifted out of his shadowy, nyktomorphic kingdom into the light of common day, sitting as a shrunken, pathetic figure in his prison cell. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre there is scarcely any sense of such a normal, ordered outside world at all. There is no hint of that archetypal ending which would show the monsters being finally brought to book. All that has happened is that one of their victims has escaped, leaving the family of homicidal cannibals to live on in their shadowy kingdom. The film's sole purpose has been to excite its audience by exposing them to as relentless and claustrophobic a stream of life-violating images as its creators' fantasies could come up with. And once the compulsion to `push back the frontiers' had reached this point, it would not be easy to find many further extremes of fantasy left to explore.
The heroine as hero
In the closing decades of the twentieth century, the pattern which has been the theme of this chapter worked towards its logical conclusion. The physical imagery of sex and violence, which had once seemed so novel and shocking when confined to just a few trail-blazing examples, gradually became commonplace across large areas of mainstream storytelling. Shots of naked couples engaging in the sexual act became an increasingly familiar feature of films and television dramas. Use of those once-taboo four-letter words became routine on the pages of novels