This week marks the 20th anniversary of Marcus Nispel’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a remake of Tobe Hooper’s iconic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Nispel’s gory and grungy slasher is hardly a great piece of cinema, but it is a surprisingly important one. Texas Chainsaw Massacre altered the course of mainstream populist horror cinema, at least for a couple of years, by ushering in an era of horror remakes.
Pop culture is inevitably guided by larger trends. This is particularly true of horror cinema, where the tendency to make movies cheaply and quickly allows studios to chase popular fads. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre arrived at the end of one such fad. The renaissance in teen slasher movies sparked by the release of Scream in December 1996 was already dying down, giving way to diminishing returns like Scream 3 and Urban Legend: Final Cut along with spoofs like Scary Movie.
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That late ’90s slasher fad was self-evidently nostalgic. In Scream, film nerd Randy (Jamie Kennedy) pauses a pivotal scene from John Carpenter’s Halloween to explain the rules of the slasher movie. Scream writer Kevin Williamson would go on to work on the slasher sequel Halloween H20, which would include a sequence of its characters watching Scream 2. However, there was a layer of irony and self-awareness to this nostalgia. These movies referenced classics, but stood apart from them.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre removes that layer of self-reflexive irony. It doesn’t just pay homage to one of the classics of American horror, it straight up remakes it. It reboots the franchise and starts over, as if offering a young moviegoing audience a chance to witness their version of the beloved horror movie. The gambit worked. The movie grossed $29.1 million in its opening weekend. “To say that it exceeded [our] expectations is an understatement,” conceded David Tuckerman of New Line Cinema.
Nispel’s remake had a profound impact on both the franchise and the larger industry. While many other major classic horror franchises, like Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th, tended to slow down as they entered the new millennium, Texas Chainsaw Massacre roared to life. The franchise has released more entries in the past twenty years than it did in the previous thirty, including the reboot, a prequel to the reboot, two sequels to the original, and a separate prequel to the original.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre made an even bigger impression on the horror genre as a whole. For the next seven years or so, theaters were flooded with remakes of 1970s and 1980s horror classics: Dawn of the Dead, The Amityville Horror, House of Wax, The Fog, Assault on Precinct 13, Black Christmas, The Hills Have Eyes, The Omen, When a Stranger Calls, The Wicker Man, The Hitcher, Prom Night, Friday the 13th, Sorority Row, The Stepfather, My Bloody Valentine, and many more.
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Of course, trends do not exist in isolation. These remakes overlapped with a similar push to adapt Japanese horrors like Ring and The Grudge for American audiences. More interestingly, they seemed to unfold in parallel with the “torture porn” fad, which really kicked into gear with the release of Saw in October 2004 and Hostel in January 2006. Both trends seemed to be displaced by the embrace of “found footage,” and many of these remakes were notably gorier than the originals.
It’s worth revisiting this trend in general and Nispel’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre in particular. There is a tendency to overlook the horror genre in discussions of popular cinema. This is most obvious when it comes to awards recognition, but also applies to general discussions of the artform. There’s also an understandable impulse to dismiss these sorts of remakes as inherently unworthy of discussion or scrutiny. Five years ago, Keith Phipps noted that these remakes were largely forgotten.
One of the more interesting – and frustrating – aspects of Nispel’s remake is the fact that it is a horror movie that exists in the context of decades of slasher movies. Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre may not have been the first slasher movie, but it was released before Halloween codified the conventions of the genre. Even watched today, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a delightfully and unsettlingly odd experience. It can seem uncanny to a viewer versed in the films that followed.
Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre begins with a sense of a world that is unraveling, reflecting the chaos of the early 1970s. It begins with a news broadcast about the handing down of an indictment, an invocation of Watergate. Sally (Marilyn Burns) and Franklin Hardesty (Paul A. Partain) are traveling with their friends to visit their grandfather’s grave, following a series of desecrations in the region. There’s an apocalyptic vibe to all this, recalling George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.
In contrast, Nispel’s remake is much more conventional in its framing. It is set in 1973, but there is no real sense that the larger world is collapsing. None of that apocalyptic dread hangs in the air. These teenage leads are not investigating a case of potential grave robbery. Instead, they are driving to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert after purchasing drugs in Mexico. This is a standard start to a slasher like this. The teenagers transgressed, so will be punished. They broke the rules, so must die.
In contrast to the irony that defined the meta-slashers of the previous few years, this is all played remarkably straight. The movie’s final girl, Erin (Jessica Biel), is entirely innocent. She is shocked to discover that her friends used the trip to Mexico as an excuse to buy marijuana. Her friend Kemper (Eric Balfour) jokes that she didn’t even drink the tequila down there. As such, Erin’s survival feels like it plays the socially conservative tropes of the slasher movie remarkably straight.
To give the movie some credit, it is at least somewhat equal opportunity in terms of the violence it inflicts on its teenage victims. In Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the male characters tended to die quickly while the female characters suffered longer. Nispel’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre reverses that dynamic somewhat. Pepper (Erica Leerhsen) dies abruptly in the distance, while Andy (Mike Vogel) hangs from a meat hook in place of Pam (Teri McMinn) in the original.
That said, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is hardly a reconstructed slasher movie. Nispel’s camera lingers on Jessica Biel, particularly her exposed midriff. It seems to luxuriate in shots of her running and panting. It’s an approach that feels very similar to how Michael Bay’s camera would treat Megan Fox during the Transformers films a few years later. Biel may not be hanging on a hook, but there are certainly times when Texas Chainsaw Massacre treats the actor as a piece of meat.
There is a sense that the remake is revisiting the original through the lens of the decades of slasher movies that followed, smoothing down the rougher edges of the original film to make it more easily fit within an established template. This is true of most of the uninspired remakes that followed, which would take messy and clumsy original films that were figuring out what these horror movies looked like in real time, and apply a “one-size-fits-all” structure to them.
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These movies could be grungy and grimy. They could feature graphic gore. However, these remakes also tended to be products of a more ruthlessly efficient studio system than the films that inspired them. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre sets early scenes to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama, a song that the original could never have afforded to include. Biel and Balfour may not have been movie stars, but they are more established than any actors in the original. There is a polish to these remakes that exists at odds with the power of the original.
Notably, there is no sense of mystery or ambiguity to Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski) in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The film offers the iconic horror villain a backstory involving horrific skin disease and even a name: Thomas Hewitt. Hooper’s original film was so scary because it suggested that this violence couldn’t be explained or rationalized. It had the logic of a nightmare. It’s very hard to replicate that sense of existential dread when so much of the appeal of a remake is the familiarity.
Then again, perhaps this makes a certain amount of sense in context. As with the “torture porn” trend, these horror remakes were largely a product of the Bush era. They existed in the context of the War on Terror. This may explain why they were so much more graphic than the original, and why they tended to fixate upon torture and brutality. The War on Terror was defined by a desire to understand the horrors lurking out in the darkness, to understand, “Why do they hate us?”
Released a little more than two years after 9/11, Nispel’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre is rooted in that moment. The biggest alteration to the original narrative is the introduction of R. Lee Ermey as Sheriff Hoyt, a sadistic local law enforcement official who feels more at home in Deliverance rather than The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Hoyt is a product of the Bush era. A former governor of Texas, Bush was likened to a western sheriff when he boasted about posting “Wanted” signs in the wake of the attacks.
Hoyt physically and psychologically brutalizes these teenagers. He forces Morgan (Jonathan Tucker) to reenact a suicide that the characters witnessed, pushing Morgan to place what he believes to be a loaded gun in his mouth. When Morgan resists, Hoyt handcuffs him and loads him into the back of his police car. He takes Morgan away, but not to experience due process. On the drive, he smashes a nearly empty bottle of liquor in Morgan’s face. It seems likely that Morgan is just going to disappear.
This is perhaps the most unsettling sequence in the film. It resonates with contemporary anxieties over the “enhanced interrogations” and “extraordinary renditions” that defined the War on Terror. Of course, Hoyt doesn’t have any authority to do what he is doing. In perhaps the film’s sharpest jab at the Bush administration, it is eventually revealed that Hoyt isn’t even really the local sheriff. None of this is as overt as the cultural context of Hooper’s original, but these are films of their moment.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is ultimately an underwhelming, generic, and gory imitation of a much richer film. It takes one of the most transgressive horror films of its era, and reduces it down to a standard slasher template. In doing so, it provided a sustainable model for mainstream horror over the next few years, an assembly line that could reliably churn out low-budget and low-effort films to solid box office returns.
In its own weird and grotesque way, Nispel’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre turned mainstream horror into a charnel house. It pushed away from the knowing detachment of the self-aware slashers, and embraced a more direct mode of recycling. It carved up the corpses of classic horror movies to be repackaged as subprime cuts.
