Over at EW, resident critic Owen Gleiberman has written up a pretty nifty take on 1974's Texas Chain Saw Massacre - a film which he calls "the template for modern horror" - and what it meant to (and where it stood at) the time when it was released. I especially liked this bit:"What Chainsaw channeled, far more than any other horror film of its time, was the dementia, the terrifying insanity, of violence. It made you feel like you were really experiencing what it was like to be murdered.
And Leatherface was such a relentless, inexplicable force — a human pig out for vengeful slaughter — that there was something almost cool about him..."
I guess within the argument that Owen's making here - that Leatherface was the template for all slasher-killers to come, from Jason to Jigsaw - there is some truth to the "cool" comment. He was emulated for sure, although I think Owen slightly oversells the way the slashers-to-come copycatted him (Is Michael Myers really just a "a domesticated suburban version of Leatherface"? I don't know...). But "cool" is notsomuch a word I like attaching to Leatherface. He's the opposite of cool. He's... kinda mousy, really. He can't stand up for himself amongst his family members. Sure, he's fierce with the slabs-of-meat humans that come along, but he's really
a big fucking baby in the end. Which I'm not knocking, I find it genuinely unsettling, the infantile nature of this enormous hulking murderer being played up. But "cool"... I dunno about that..
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