Leatherface, Hooper/Henkel, & incestuous Texas family trees

It’s Halloween soon, and also it was Friday the 13th the other day, so I think it’s only natural to discuss Texas Chainsaw. Leatherface made a good impression on me at FrightFest a couple of months ago, and I went in unsure what to expect; the horror sequel machine churns out a lot of garbage on the one hand; on the other, Lionsgate made the ballsy move of hiring the two guys behind Inside, the brutal home-invasion thriller from the French neo-extreme movement. So it could have gone either way really, but I was pleased with the end result, which was well-characterised, nicely paced, well-shot, unpredictable and nasty in the right places. What it’s not, though, is a Texas Chainsaw movie, at least not a stereotypical one. Instead, it belongs to the long line of twisted romantic crime drama road Westerns. You know the ones: Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, Wild at Heart, True Romance, Natural Born Killers and The Devil’s Rejects, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2; where TCM2 took on a divisive comedic tone, Leatherface plays things straight and doesn’t really get going with all the familiar imagery and tropes until pretty near its end.

I’d call that a good thing; the last three films in this ignoble franchise have been so samey you might have trouble telling them apart. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the remake of the original, and spawned all the other classic horror remakes, all of which were pretty hard to tell apart from one another. Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning was a prequel to the remake. It was also superior, but that isn’t saying much. Texas Chainsaw 3D was a direct sequel to the 1974 original, establishing a new and humdrum continuity in which Leatherface also takes place. Those three films are incredibly similar, not just tonally and structurally, but also in terms of plot developments. All three feature corrupt sheriffs, twisted matriarchs, Vietnam trauma and Southern Gothic-style melodrama. Curiously, as much as these pictures try their darnedest to be nothing but formulaic Chainsaws, none of these are features present in the original.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is still, to my mind, one of the most astonishing films ever made. It’s famous for its brutality (which has been greatly exaggerated) and its relentless energy (which hasn’t), but I think what’s often overlooked about it is the eerie, off-kilter atmosphere which you can’t really find anywhere else in cinema before or since. Night of the Living Dead maybe comes close with its intense nightmare logic, as does the obscure Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood. But neither are quite so unforgettable, surreal or haunting (they also both predate Texas Chain Saw Massacre). I have a hard time defining what exactly makes it such a unique picture. I think part of it has to do with how beautifully shot it is for such a nasty, downbeat film, part of it has to do with its mostly-daytime setting (note every sequel takes place mostly at conventional nighttime), part of it with how minimalist its storytelling is; it really recreates the quality of a nightmare in a way few films can be said to. Ultimately, it’s just a picture that’s more the sum of its parts, a lightning-in-a-bottle type of thing that came out of the collaboration between director Tobe Hooper and co-writer Kim Henkel, neither of whom went on to replicate their success here (Hooper did helm some other horror classics, like Salem’s Lot and Poltergeist, but both are successes on a considerably more conventional level). There’s a certain tension created by Hooper’s hazy, head-film atmosphere (his debut, Eggshells, was thoroughly hippie and “head”) with the apocalyptic imagery Henkel inserts. It’s like a bad trip, the real death of the 60s.

The horror classics of roughly the same era aren’t the same at all; Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street and Hellraiser are all great films, and Friday the 13th is a movie too, but these are all harmless fun, ghost-train movies that spawned sequels sticking more-or-less exactly to formula. The first batch of Chainsaw sequels, the ones that came out prior to the remake, nobly each try their own thing, each redefining in turn what the series was really all about. First Hooper made a reluctant return to the series with 1986’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, sending-up his own previous work, killing off the entire cannibal clan, and giving us the series’ first corrupt lawman in Dennis Hopper’s (awesome) Lefty Enright, who unlike later lawmen is not portrayed as being just as bad if not worse than the murderers he pursues. Many of the elements first introduced here would be picked up on by later instalments, even as they ignored its events. Those elements include the appropriate family name, Sawyer, not mentioned in the original.

New Line then acquired the rights to the series and made an attempt to turn it into a Friday the 13th-style moneyspinner with Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III. Despite the number in the title, the only acknowledgement it gives to the second film’s events is a brief and ambiguous acknowledgement in its opening subtitle. Making the movie’s name further misleading, Leatherface doesn’t really earn the top-billing the title gives him. Presumably the intent was to make him a bankable icon like Freddy, Jason or Pinhead (neither of the latter two were the main villain in the first film of their series, either). While he’s the only family member to feature in every film of the series, he’s not a main concern in any of them, acting instead as more of a henchman or attack dog for the main villains, with TCMIII being no exception. In the first film, that main villain is probably the Hitchhiker; in the second film, it’s the Hitchhiker’s twin brother Chop Top, played by horror legend Bill Moseley. Here, it’s Viggo Mortensen as Tex Sawyer, an unaccountably handsome scion of the inbred Sawyers. The film does feature a few reasonably effective chase sequences and some enjoyably unhinged doomed teens who make a change from the usual flat slasher characters. But, while it may be more enjoyably executed than most, TCMIII is nonetheless a formulaic slasher.

When Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III failed to ignite the franchise “buzz” New Line had hoped for, they gave the series back to its old co-creator, Kim Henkel, for one of the oddest horror sequels ever filmed. Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, filmed under the moronic title of The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, once again ignores continuity, with another surprisingly good-looking young man, played by Matthew McConaughey with a screwy robotic leg, leading the clan, whose family name is now Slaughter (ridiculous). It’s all pretty generic until the finale, which reveals that the Slaughter clan are employed by the Illuminati, who run the government, planned the JFK assassination, and were apparently responsible for the events of the film. Apparently, true terror leads to spiritual enlightenment, but in this case it turned out horrible*. The Illuminati’s representative Rothman, who may not be human, rescues final girl Renée Zellweger and apologises for the horrible experience he put her through. Henkel was apparently interested in further exploring the conspiracy-theory symbolism he wove so subtly into the first movie, but this may be taking things a bit far. If it’s intended as meta-commentary, the only discernible message is “Sorry this film turned out a bit shit”. It languished on a shelf for two years until Columbia cashed in on the sudden stardom of McConaughey and Zellweger by finally releasing it, causing a minor stir when McConaughey’s camp attempted to prevent its release, not unreasonably fearing embarassment by the association.

And after that point, we got three generic Chainsaws and then Leatherface. While Leatherface avoids pandering by paying homage to every famous moment of the original, it still mixes ideas from all of its predecessors into its formula. As is so often the case with these long-running film franchises, it feels like a kind of Pop Cultural Osmosis has gone on, whereby the formula becomes a bastardised version of the original, supplemented with small parts and ideas from each of its successors. But Leatherface actually tries to do something new with that formula. In that respect it reminded me of Psycho II, which might be the most commendable sequel ever made, and it similarly managed to work a mystery that familiarity with the original didn’t give away; it’s not until the film’s final act that we’re sure which of our main characters is actually going to grow up to become Leatherface. If directors Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo are to be believed, they even toyed with making a female character become Leatherface, which would retroactively have made the Leatherface of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Texas Chainsaw 3D female also. Now that’s daring.

*Says Henkel: “Of course, it does produce a transcendent experience. Death is like that. But no good comes of it. You’re tortured and tormented, and get the crap scared out of you, and then you die”. Er, yeah.

Joseph Conrad, 20th-Century cinema, & Hearts of Darkness

THERE IS A particularly portentous moment in Peter Jackson’s King Kong: the ship boy, all along, has been reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, having been attracted to it because it’s a maritime adventure story; however, they’re nearing Skull Island, and he finishes the book, reflecting “It’s not just an adventure story, is it?”. The subplot probably wasn’t necessary in a film that’s already a three-hour remake of a 100-minute film, but it’s indicative of the mythopoeic approach Jackson took on it (by the way, I really enjoyed Jackson’s Kong: I can handle a little pretension). Soon afterwards, there’s a Conradian moment where the crew end up getting themselves bitten by one of the native boys, trying to bargain with him using a chocolate bar.

That what was, in 1933, a straightforward adventure film should become, in 2005, an epic with literary & philosophical ambitions shouldn’t be surprising. The influence of Heart of Darkness extends not only to those intellectuals who embraced it, the T.S. Eliots & Orson Welleses, but to the entire adventure genre. Previously, there had been other writers working within the same broad colonial adventure genre; there was, for instance, H. Rider Haggard, whose novels & short stories present vast imaginative vistas, or the political consciousness-raising of Rudyard Kipling, but Conrad’s stroke of genius – his presentation of the journey into the heart of wilderness as a philosophical voyage into the dark heart of humanity – has had a transformative, though slow, effect on that type of narrative, & you would now have to look hard nowadays for travels into the wilderness that aren’t Conradian. Even the source material suggests this, with Marlow’s early line that the Thames, too, has been one of the dark places of the world*.

One major early Heart of Darkness was William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Parodying R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, where that novel – an entry in the prolific “Crazy Island” genre – saw a group of British schoolboys create a paradise of reason & order upon being shipwrecked, Golding’s novel has them descend by choice into savagery. Filmed in 1963, 1976, & 1990, Lord of the Flies is a major high-school text, & many subsequent Hearts of Darkness have drawn equally upon it & the original – witness, for instance, the Alex Garland novel/Danny Boyle film The Beach.

Hearts of Darkness are, for whatever reason, especially prevalent in the cinema. John Boorman’s Deliverance & Ted Kotcheff’s First Blood, both based on novels, locate their heart of darkness in the forests of America. Rural America is a brutal, cannibalistic place in a huge number of horror films, the most notable of which include Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre & Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes (both of which, naturally, received remakes). Lars von Trier’s foray into torture porn, Antichrist, draws on several of the pictures cited here & makes its rural landscape literally hostile.

Great Britain as a setting is largely too small & orderly to accomodate the necessary wilderness, but a few have gone for it anyway. Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs has quiet American Dustin Hoffman move to Cornwall, wherein he is bullied by the local nasties to the point of violent retribution. Rod Lurie’s 2011 remake moves the action to the American Deep South. Eden Lake featured an encounter with a brutal gang of happy-slapping delinquents in the English woods, while Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (based on a novel, Ritual by David Pinner) sends an evangelising Christian policeman to a remote Scottish island full of pagans, with unhappy results. The Wicker Man‘s remake, by Neil LaBute, unprofitably moves the island in question to the Pacific Northwest, while the sequel The Wicker Tree, which was first published by Hardy as the novel Cowboys for Christ, implausibly finds paganism alive & well in the Scottish Borders (“with England”!).

Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust depicts the clash between civilisations in the rainforests of South America, as do a host of lesser cannibal movies. South America was also the setting for Werner Herzog’s twin colonial-satire masterpieces, Aguirre, The Wrath of God &, even better, Fitzcarraldo. Fitzcarraldo is the tale of a Jesuit who goes mad in the jungle, insisting a river steamship be dragged overland up a mountain, in order to deposit it in a different river, & became all too literal a metaphor when its director went mad in the jungle, filming the picture by dragging a real steamship over a mountain. Roland Joffé’s The Mission plays almost like a more respectable, less immediate version of Aguirre, The Wrath of God.

A number of Australian films find their heart of darkness in that strange, mystic landscape: Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout; Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock & The Last Wave**; Colin Eggleston’s Long Weekend, which also got a remake by Jamie Blanks, & which plays like a mash-up of Roeg’s Walkabout & Don’t Look Now, in which a heart of darkness of sorts is found in the foul waterways of Venice.

The biggest & probably best of all of these cinematic Hearts of Darkness was, of course, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which brilliantly relocated the novel to Southeast Asia in the Vietnam War. Dense, yet also sprawling, the picture brilliantly identified all of the many inter-related thematic threads of the novel: the insanity of colonialism/war; the inner darkness of humanity; the ultimate failure of language; the façade of civilisation; the brutality of invading cultures to indigenous ones. So complete an adaptation was it that by the time a more faithful version arrived, directed by Nic Roeg & starring John Malkovich as Kurtz, it felt superfluous; not only had it been done better already, but Roeg himself had already gotten Heart of Darkness out of his system with Walkabout (ostensibly based on a minor novel). Even the Apocalypse Now making-of, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, felt more authentic, depicting Coppola, Herzog-like, going mad in the jungle.

Even the less thoughtful pulp adventures, like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or certain of Tintin’s adventures, tend to have a touch of Conrad. Videogames, too, have had their Hearts of Darkness, though the otherwise fine Heart of Darkness wasn’t one of them. Spec Ops: The Line draws equally from Heart of Darkness & Apocalypse Now, while setting its action in Dubai. Far Cry 2 explicitly drew on Heart of Darkness, but really every title in the series owes something to it. We might even get a whiff of it in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, a game of jungle survival & weighty introspection, which received two similar sequels. Michael Ancel, who proved a left-field choice to develop Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie, explored another Heart of Darkness with Beyond Good & Evil, which, like the aforementioned game Heart of Darkness, really didn’t owe that much to the text it was named for.

Personally, I hope we see many more of these. It’s probably my favourite novel, & it might well be my favourite genre, too.

*This line, & how fertile the simple idea of transplanting Heart of Darkness to other settings has proven in practice, suggests Chinua Achebe is wrong in asserting that Conrad’s novel relies on a racist, imperialist view of Africans. The rest of Conrad’s bibliography succeeds in imbuing a similar horror to South America, the West Indies, London, & the open sea.

**The Year of Living Dangerously & The Mosquito Coast, too, are suggestive films. Weir must be the cinema’s foremost Conradian.