Tag: Leatherface

SPECIALITY OF THE HOUSE (“Alfred Hitchcock Presents” – S5 E12, 1959)

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibals on TVLeave a comment

We’re heading back into the early days of Cannibal Studies with this one! The TV anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents aired on CBS and NBC between 1955 and 1965. Produced and presented by the great auteur himself with a humorous introduction and postscript, the stories covered mysteries, thrillers and dramas. It remains timeless; in 2021, Rolling Stone ranked it 18th on its list of “30 Best Horror TV Shows of All Time”. Hitchcock was called “The Master of Suspense” and is considered one of the most important figures in cinema history. His films garnered 46 Academy Award nominations, including six wins.

The production team he put together for the TV series was a lot cheaper than a film crew, and he used them often to make his movies. A year after Specialty of the House, Hitchcock used his TV crew to make the film Psycho, a seminal film in the horror genre and in Cannibal Studies. Psycho’s story was itself adapted from the case of the so-called “Butcher of Plainfield”, Ed Gein, who would dig up bodies and use the bones and skin to make masks, accessories and furniture. Gein would make women suits out of human skin (which inspired Jame Gumb – “Buffalo Bill” – in Silence of the Lambs) so he could dress up as his mother (which inspired Psycho). His facemasks, made out of human faces, inspired the character Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and its many sequels.

This week’s 1959 TV show was also an adaptation, from Stanley Ellin’s short story “The Speciality of the House” about gourmet chef Sbirro, whose exclusive restaurant offers a “warm haven in a coldly insane world”. Sbirro serves a specialty called “lamb Armistran”, which turns out to be the flesh of patrons who had enquired too deeply into the mysteries of his kitchen. Ellin’s story was first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1948.

This production is fairly true to the short story. The wonderful Robert Morley is Laffler, a well-heeled import-export businessman, who has invited his protégé, Costain, to the very exclusive club/restaurant. They meet some of the other diners, including a rich Singaporean businessman (as if to show us that American elitism is not entirely white, but ironically played by Japanese actor Tetsu Komai) and another very cantankerous diner whose regular eating-partner has apparently resigned, immediately after becoming a life member. Laffler is astonished, because his three obsessions are lamb Armistran, which all the members crave, a longing to become a life-member of the club, and a yearning to “see the kitchen where these miracles are performed”.

On their first two visits, lamb Armistran is not served, much to Laffler’s disappointment. The dishes that are served are always superb, but there is no menu, no choices offered.

“My dear boy, when you’ve studied the art of fine eating as long and as vigorously as I have, you won’t trouble with menus…. Here at Spirro’s we have no doubts, we ask no questions, we only know that there is a genius in the kitchen!”

Spirro (the spelling in the story changed, for reasons not explained) makes an appearance while Laffler is complaining about not being allowed into the kitchen. Unlike the short story, in which women were not welcomed into the club, in the Hitchcock show Spirro is a woman (played by Spivy), very much in the style of the “monstrous-feminine” who, we are all subconsciously afraid, will reabsorb us into the feminine form from which we emerged. She puts a hand of Laffler’s meaty shoulder and announces, “I think we will be having the speciality of the house very soon, my friend.” She is looking at Costain; we realise by now that Laffler has become a nuisance to her and is likely soon to become lamb Armistran. The next night, when lamb Armistran is finally to be served, Laffler is very rude, refusing to sit with Costain, demanding to be served first, and insisting on more food on his plate.

Unlike Laffler, Spirro says of Costain, “He has very nice manners, your friend.” Manners, the rule of laws and language referred to by Michel Foucault as “the symbolic” are the basis for civilised, patriarchal societies. Rudeness is appalling, and you will perhaps recall Hannibal Lecter, decades later, saying “discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.” Laffler has been discourteous, intrusive, and so is destined to become a “life member”. When he makes a fuss about no more lamb Armistran on the following night, he is delighted to find Spirro inviting him into the kitchen, to “meet the chef”. Chef is clearly ready for the meeting.

Cannibalism here is presented as addictive. All the members crave not the superb cuisine served every night but specifically the “specialty of the house” which turns out to be the latest life-member. It is a myth that cannibals only want human flesh once they have tasted it; in fact, all the evidence seems to indicate that we don’t taste that much different to pigs. But the myth is enduring – think of the many stories of the Wendigo, a figure from Algonquin stories who becomes addicted to human flesh which makes him grow larger and therefore inevitably hungrier. Or the recent movie Bones and All, where the two Romeo and Juliet lovers are united not only in their affection for each other but their recurring fascination with human flesh. Or Cannibal Apocalypse, where Vietnam vets are infected with the wendigo bug.

Like many cannibal stories, the victim’s life is envisaged as being absorbed by the eaters. “Life member” is, therefore, an apt description for one whose life has been taken and now lives only in metabolisation into the body of the cannibal. These members are what are sometimes described as “innocent cannibals” – they love to eat meat, but are not aware from what animal it has been carved. Think of the appreciative consumers of the meat pies in Sweeney Todd.

But are any of us really innocent, if we know that some sentient animal has died to be on our plate? It might be a rare breed of lambs from the Ugandan border, or it could be a rude businessman. Ethics, as Hannibal once told us, become aesthetics. If it tastes great, if a person of authority and good taste places it before us, it is at least aesthetically, if not ethically, proper. As the new life member, soon to be lamb Amirstan, told us earlier in the show:

“My mother used to say – we eat what’s set before us, and we like it.”

The episode is available on line, including the link at the top of this blog.

Leatherface is back (again): TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (David Blue Garcia, 2022)

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films1 Comment

Netflix released the latest Texas Chainsaw instalment (the ninth!) on February 28th. It’s beginning to feel a lot like Easter (as in: how many ways can you tart up hot cross buns?) but there are some nice features to this one. For a start, well, it’s on Netflix, so a bit less likely to disappear into the Texan mud without trace, like some of the earlier versions. There have been eight sequels and prequels and unrelated but similar-named movies in this franchise, as well as comics (sorry, graphic novels) and a video game of the original.

The original film, in which “chain” and “saw” were two words, is still widely acknowledged as the best, despite its paltry budget and apparently impossible working conditions for the crew. It was released in 1974 by Tobe Hooper, who made a somewhat light-hearted sequel in 1986. It was a pioneer in “slasher” films and drew cannibalism out of the gothic into the sunlight, showing an alienated workforce in “flyover” states turning their (now unwanted) skills in killing steers toward killing tourists instead. It finished with Sally, the “last girl” escaping from a frustrated Leatherface, who was wearing his mask of human skin (fully biodegradable but not much use against viruses) and wielding his chainsaw in a way that buzzed of potential sequels.

This sequel takes place 48 years after the original (yep, now) and blithely ignores any plot points from the intervening movies, comics, etc. Leatherface is back, older but no wiser and still intent on killing teenagers, and so is Sally, the survivor, who is now a Texas Ranger and set on revenge.

And the cute teens, well, they’re everything that the locals hate – inter-racial, trendy, Gen Z “Influencers”, what the creepy gas-station owner (and there’s always one to set the scene) calls “gentrifuckers”.

They want to gentrify the town and set up a trendy area of gourmet cafes and authentic looking but modernised shops and galleries. Leatherface is in retirement in an abandoned orphanage, and Sally, well, she’s been looking for him for a long time apparently, although when last seen in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (not an episode of Star Trek), she was catatonic and strapped to a gurney. But now she’s hardass. When we first see her, she’s gutting a pig, just as Leatherface is slaughtering humans. The special effects are pretty similar for both, as are the body shapes, and, frankly, the characterisations. The original actors who portrayed Leatherface and Sally are both dead; the only original cast member is John Larroquette who does the voiceover, which half-heartedly tries to sound like a true-crime documentary, as he did in the original. The new Sally is Olwen Fouéré, the Irish actor, although this Sally seems to be more based on Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode in the 2018 reboot of Halloween.

The class struggle of the original Chain Saw has been lost here. The Texas of the original was filled with pockets of people abandoned by modern capitalism and so falling into degeneracy and violence. The new movie seems to valorise the “ordinary” folks who brook no bullshit from the “me generation” and defy the dehumanising effects of capitalism. It’s hard to feel sympathy for the influencers with their real estate auctions and cutesy town planning, or to feel terror at the thought that people might chop you up, but only if you insist on being a dick.

The terror of Leatherface himself revolved not around his nasty dental problems, badly fitting masks and noisy chainsaw, but around his family, the Sawyers, a group of odd but not obviously psychotic individuals who nonetheless were more than happy to chop up and eat innocents from the outside world, which had forsaken them. It felt like this could be any of us, screaming and dying and becoming the family’s dinner, should we venture into the wrong part of the Badlands. This new version is all Leatherface. Somehow, he now has a “mother” who looks after him in an abandoned orphanage, and she dies of a heart attack when the trendies tell her she has to move out, leading to his much delayed rampage. But Leatherface was always the weapon, not the villain, sometimes killing, and sometimes donning an apron and cooking for his dominant family. He doesn’t really work as a lone psycho, particularly when we sort of sympathise with him – he’s just lost his mum, weeps as he wears her face as a mask and then applies her makeup like Norman Bates in Psycho. Who can stay mad at that?

Tobe Hooper’s classic broke new ground in cannibal films and in horror generally. It encapsulated the early 1970s as the endless war in Vietnam and the demise of the hopes of the flower power generation ran into the chainsaw that was Nixon’s silent majority. The new one seems to reflect our time, where the young and idealistic are capitalistic exploiters and Leatherface and the Texan gun-toters are just being pushed too hard into the chainsaw of QAnon. Politics and war are no longer about truth and justice but just fake news in pursuit of tribalism. The film sums this up sardonically in the climactic scene where the busload of influencers are confronted by Leatherface and his chainsaw and respond by pulling out their phones and live streaming the whole massacre.

As Marx said, great historical entities (like Leatherface) appear in history twice – the first time as tragedy, the second time (or perhaps the ninth) as farce.

But here’s my problem with this film. After 83 minutes (which seemed much longer) I looked up from the screen and screamed (internally) “where’s the cannibalism?” Yes, there was a lot of flesh on display, and broken bones, and the occasional internal organ. But none of it got eaten, which, if I had more time, would have disqualified it from this blog. The thing is, cannibalism is not just one more nasty thing that mean people might do to you and me. It is the ultimate act of dehumanisation. Sally’s friends and family in the original were turned into slaughter-animals, chopped up, eaten, and presumably ended up in the family’s outhouse. That’s what we do to those we objectify: pigs and sheep and cows, and we do it to distinguish ourselves from other animals as somehow non-animal, part-god. The slasher might kill us, but the cannibal converts us into shit. Otherwise, we are all potential wielders of the chainsaw.

Without the cannibalism, this is just another slasher with too much emphasis on special effects rather than characterisation.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2022 has a 33% “rotten” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with one audience critic summing up:

“it isn’t very scary — and it definitely doesn’t help that the story hardly makes any sense.”

Young Leatherface: THE SAWYER MASSACRE (Steve Merlo, 2022)

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal filmsLeave a comment

Whether you loved or hated (or anything in-between) Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, it is widely acknowledged to be a seminal work in the history of slasher movies generally, and specifically of cannibal films. Total Film made it number one of the fifty greatest horror movies of all time (Psycho was number 6!) and Richard Zoglin of Time said that it set “a new standard for slasher films”. Ben Woodard called it “unambiguously the greatest horror film ever made.” That makes creating a sequel (or actually a prequel) all the more fraught!

Chainsaw was based partly on the real-life (real-death?) exploits of Ed Gein, the “Butcher of Plainfield”, who decorated his house with all sorts of furniture made of human bones and skin, but Gein had dug most of them up from graveyards. The man-monster from TCSM was Leatherface who wore a mask (well before the rest of us) and even made it himself (far more sustainable than the rest of us). It was, however, made of human skin, which you can’t get readily even on Etsy, and he sourced his raw materials from those travelling through his little corner of Texas, cutting them up with a large and noisy chainsaw, often bashing them on the head with a mallet first, as the more primitive slaughterhouses used to do to the cattle in their yards.

But why did he do that? We get some hints in the movie from his brother, the Hitchhiker, who makes it clear that the family had been “in meat” and worked in the local slaughterhouses, which had closed as industry fled the “fly-over” states. But a lot of people lost their jobs in the seventies, and most of them did not go out and buy chainsaws with murderous intent. So how did Leatherface get started? And whose idea was it to eat the victims?

Such questions have clearly been on the mind of TCSM fan Steve Merlo, who recently sat down for an interview with Bloody Disgusting about his intended feature film THE SAWYER MASSACRE, intended as a prequel to the 1974 classic.

The film has been crowdfunded through Indegogo (now closed unfortunately) but should have raised enough to see it released in about August 2022.

Here’s the plot from the Director:

While recovering from the loss of someone close, Jimmy’s friends bring him to the Texas countryside to escape city life. In need of supplies for their cabin, they head to a gas station where they are directed to an isolated farmhouse. The property is not as it seems. They find themselves hunted by the cannibalistic psychopath known as Leatherface.

Clearly, it follows the formula that was also seen in The Hills Have Eyes, Wrong Turn, The Farm and loads of other slasher movies where humans are on the table instead of sitting around it. But, as Merlo says,

“It is our intent not to copy what the original did, but use it as influence in a stylistic way. Our film will have more blood and kills, but will still be very subtle in its delivery.”

The film is due for release in 2022, the date that appears in IMDB. The film also has a Facebook, Twitter and Instagram page if you wish to follow its progress.