The True Meaning of Horror: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE THE NEXT GENERATION

The White Elephant Blog-a-Thon at Lucid Screening celebrates the act of dumping bad movies in other critics' laps and watching them squirm.
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Aphorisms For Those Attempting to Survive The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation

We live in a world where an artwork titled The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is an object of adoration, and praise, powerful of influence. The 1974 film is so respected that sequels, remakes and whatever The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation is, may be deemed disappointments, unworthy of association, or sacrilege. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a standard to which film artists may aspire. Remind yourself, once in awhile, that this is the world you live in. I guarantee it will cheer you up.

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Two automobile accidents in the same car are required to drive our hapless saw-fodder teens into the dark Texas woodlands. Do two entirely separate car crashes in five minutes signal a thematic excess of mayhem throughout the entire picture? It does not. It does signal something about the plot logic of the movie.

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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation has a fourteen-syllable title which becomes increasingly nonsensical as one reaches the end. There is no chainsaw massacre. There is not a sole chainsaw death. There are no chainsaw injuries. There is not explicitly a "next generation" of chainsaw-massacrers within the film, though it may be a remake/boot/imagine of the 1974 film for a new generation of moviegoers.

Should one be viewing the film in its original release title, Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, one may ponder how a massacre can "return."

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For as much shit as I talk about Tobe Hooper and his post Chain Saw work, defenders of the wayward auteur can always take comfort: none of this is his fault.

Kim Henkel, co-writer and producer of Chain Saw '74, certainly less beloved, must shoulder all blame, however, for writing and directing The Next Generation. It is less curious to that Halloween sequels accumulated too much complicated, needless backstory over time, and began jettisoning sequels from continuity, or, more accurately, picking and choosing which threads to continue their convoluted, silly tale. Henkel, however, free to make a direct sequel to his own first story, to integrate those elements he may have liked from the two Chain Saw sequels, or (yeah, sure) find a means by which to smooth over continuity disjunction once and for all, opts for none of the above.

He takes a stranger approach, recreating the basic scenario even while acknowledging the entire series in a title card, then through a last-act subplot implies an ongoing, eternal cycle of Chainsaw Massacre Houses, set up by the Illuminati or something, and intended as a "spiritual experience" either for the perpetrators or the victims, or as a research facility for understanding the nature of the base emotion of horror. In the last few scenes of the film, a mysterious (in relative terms) manipulator figure with an atrocious haircut and a black suit, whom the credits identify as "Rothman" (James Gale) appears, scolds the villains on their Ultimate Purpose, and exits. Literally, boundary-less conspiracy theory has motivated all the Texas Chainsaw films. Figuratively, Henkel is attempting to equate his films, and if he is generous, all horror films, with philosophical thought experiments designed, as Rothman puts it, to uncover "the true meaning of horror."

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation proposes to explore The True Meaning of Horror. Do we find an answer to this grand question? Does it matter if you truly ask the question, if you name-drop the question?

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In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, four kids are stalked through the moody Texas nightscape by a family of weirdo lunatics, including a beefy guy wearing a mask made of cut-off human faces and very excited about a chainsaw. Every time it seems they have found assistance at the outskirts of civilization, their helper turns out to be another member of the nutzo posse. One extra-screamy girl survives by running and running and running. The end.

This perfectly solid plot sketch served Henkel well in 1974, and he does not invent a new one for The Next Generation. Henkel retains the most successful setpieces and iconic images from Saw '74 -- Girl on a Meathook, Chase Thru the House and Out the Attic Window, Sawing Down the Door, Heroine in a Bag, Sick-Ass Sunday Dinner at Murder House, Leatherface Spins Around in the Road -- and slightly expands them, but does not improve or "pump up" the scenes in any way either adrenalizing or satiric. So his Next-Gen Final Girl, Jenny (Renée Zellweger. Yes, for-reals), jumps out of the attic window... and then scrambles around on the roof, up a TV antenna, and jumps up onto an overhead power line, while Old-Gen Marilyn Burns was fine just smashing to the ground. The end result is the same: Leatherface slices the line and Jenny winds up KO'd on the lawn.

Henkel has, in the 20 years since writing a TCM-Universe story, apparently forgotten all the motivation behind his plot and character choices. He fills in the blanks willy-nilly to make a new tale with the old template, and the result is semi-coherent at best, only intelligible with more effort than the film has earned, and intensive knowledge of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and possibly sequels. While Saw '74 follows bickering hippie teens on an already spooky trip through Southern Gothic territory to check family graves for possible desecration, Next-Gen is about four kids ditching the prom and just kind of driving around town. It's a different situation, but it's not a stronger set-up. The hillbilly creeps of Saw '74 are all types, but they are quick-sketch interesting loony types, whose sociocultural motivations we can fathom. Next-Gen offers a wide freak gallery (yes, yes, completely out of continuity), but the character dynamics are not well-designed to play off each other, which is injurious in a screenplay so heavy on scenes of their interaction. Our new Leatherface (Robert Jacks) is simpering and dull, which is far more offensive than the full female drag costuming that offended so many Fangoria readers. Bartlett's Famous-spouting ignoramus W.E. (Joe Stevens) is just a guy in a plaid shirt with a single quirk. Darla Slaughter (Tonie Perensky) is a sassy real estate lady? A real estate lady is your scary backwoods stereotype? No comment. And though often touted as the film's sole comic saving grace, as family alpha male, self-mutilator and robotic-legged Vilmer, Matthew McConaughey looks like he's having fun, but his performace is entirely ear-sandblasting shouting and popping neck veins. McConaughey is not a performer loose-limbed and imaginative to have a "top" to go "over", and the result is unmodulated and embarrassing.

The cannibal family are not cannibals in The Next Generation. They still skin people, put them in deep freezers, hang girls from meathooks, and decorate with bones. Instead, they eat pizza. This is apparently some kind of '90s pop culture joke, as opposed to, say any kind of subtext that might be found in Saw '74 with its entire backstory built upon the family history with the local slaughterhouse. The posts stand in the same spots, but the signs themselves have been erased.

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Rothman enters the film far too late, in too cryptic a manner, and is not developed enough to register as a character, but for a brief moment as he outlines his desire to expose the Meaning of Horror, his direct orders to Vilmer and family, and detached demeanor, he becomes a stand-in for all horror filmmakers. Presumably the ancient shadow-government conspiracy is behind the deus ex machina airplane-propeller murder of Vilmer in the climax, wiping out an experiment that yielded unsatisfactory results. His chauffeured limousine is the chariot that whisks Jenny away in her final escape from Leatherface. The masked maniac alone survives, for he is the true iconic monster of the piece, and the keystone to future exercises in horror. Leatherface is an archetype of our genre-subconscious, and no plane to the skull will obliterate him, after all. But Rothman sits across from Jenny, assuring her she needn't be afraid, and that she'll be delivered to a hospital or a police station, if she likes. And Rothman expresses his deep regret that this best-laid plan has failed.

The stand-in for every horror filmmaker apologizes deeply and directly for the appalling, stupid mess of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation.

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There is one interesting, clever inversion of slasher formula that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation pulls off perfectly. As Jenny fights, runs, is beaten up and terrorized through the course of the film, Renée Zellweger looks prettier, cooler and more stylish.

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The new film seems unsure why it is repeating the old film so frequently, because it is not a traditional update of "dated" material; it openly acknowledges the first movie, and then, in a final-scene coda, makes confusing overture toward fusing both movies into a sort of Texas Chainsaw meta-mythos, intentionally repeating the first film's highlights with variation as if part of a grander metaphysical scheme. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation certainly does not earn this moment with its half-assed conspiracy subplot. Had the idea been properly developed as the central plot, it might have been a small moment of glory, not just for the franchise, but the genre. To wit, Jenny is delivered bloodied and frizzle-haired to a hospital, and questioned by a policeman played by John Dugan, who portrayed the withered Grandpa in Saw '74. As Jenny realizes his promises to solve the crimes are short-sighted, she stares off after a woman wheeled past on a gurney. The orderly is Paul A. Partain, wheelchair-bound Franklin in TCSM. The woman is original Saw Survivor Marilyn Burns. And the Final Girls stare at each other in understanding and despair: this cycle continues, will always continue. We need to be repeatedly submersed in fictional horror, so we can understand horror in our lives. The Final Girls in that hospital scene recognize each other as manifestations as a genre archetype, and within their world, they feel the weight of being the girl designated to shoulder the brunt of the Meaning of Horror.

This has been The Exploding Kinetoscope's grueling entry in the Lucid Screening White Elephant Blog-a-Thon. The 'thon continues all April Fool's Day '07... and be sure to check out how I forced Ben to write about the Burt Reynold's vanity carnival The End!

Lovefest '07: #1. Nose Rub

Winona Ryder in Alien: Resurrection (1997)
The door is going to open.

After the most harrowing battle in Alien: Resurrection, the surviving band of space-adventure people are being winnowed away by the star-monster, as tends to happen in Alien pictures, and they've even lost the cool guy with dreadlocks and the scrappy space pirate girl. And now, the door is going to open.

The cast waits, sweat drops freezing on their skin. Every gun trains in the direction of the door, about to open.

The metal jaws part. The camera moves in low, staring up in anticipatory fear at what will come through the door, when the door opens, because it's going to open. The door opens.

And standing motionless in the doorway is Annalee Call, presumed recently dead, gut-shot and drowned. From this vantage, she looms over the frame like the Colossus of Rhodes, and we stare up at her with the cast, every eye amazed. The camera glides up and over her body, and stops at one of those patent Jean-Pierre Jeunet angles, just a hair too high over the subject not to look off-kilter. The lights flicker and strobe, unidentifiable machines release white puffs of smoke like heavenly nimbus. But she doesn't look mythic anymore. She doesn't dominate the frame, but looks lost and isolated and miserable. She looks like a 5'4" drowned rat.

There is a beat of stupefied awe... then Ryder sniffs and rubs her nose, embarrassed.

The only explanation in the Alien mythos for Call to be alive, is that she's a robot. And look, it's an Alien movie, so we know there's going to be a crazy robot-reveal scene, and, to be realistic, we probably know who the robot is. By giving the plot point a funny, adorable, humane twist, the formula requirements are cleverly fulfilled and mildly subverted. Nobody writes a Girl, Resurrected scene like Joss Whedon. If there were ever any doubt whose script this is, this scene is the clincher. I can't say if the move was scripted, requested or directed, but it's the performance moment I want to isolate. Ryder undercuts the reverence in the reveal of her return from a watery grave just by rubbing her nose. It's a tiny but pivotal choice, playing to Whedon's technique of cutting through genre formula with warm, humanist comedy; it reenforces Jeunet's bonker-brained mutation of Alien series storytelling and toying with audience expectations.

All Winona Ryder has to do is stand there and rub her nose.

Lovefest '07: #2. Magic

Alyson Hannigan and Amber Benson in "Family"
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 5 (2000)
It's Tara's party, at the end of a life-changing birthday. She's lost her blood-family, but found out how much she means to her network of new friends. She's exorcised her worst self-loathing about her upbringing, having discovered she's not going to transform into a demon at 20, and taken the last step on her path to womanhood. And now she gets to slow dance with her girlfriend.

Y'know, of all Buffy characters, Tara has the most complete, mature understanding of the complexities of love. She makes the most difficult and adult choices about relationships. So this scene, which could just be sappy-pap goop -- not that I'd mind, for Tara and Willow earn the right to sappiness -- underlines something genuine and singular about the romance. Tara is naturally shy, but extraordinarily in-touch with her feelings, and can tell Willow a concrete reason her heart is surging at this moment: "Even when I'm at my worst, you make me feel special. How do you do that?" Willow's support has helped Tara squirm away from her oppressive family. It's wiped away some well-intentioned but foolish decisions she's made earlier.

Amber Benson has built Tara out of self-effacing tics designed to weave around Alyson Hannigan's solidly established mountain of self-effacing tics. Tara gives one of her finely-tuned, microcalibrated head jerks, squints and asks "how do you do that?", and Willow, in rare confidence answers: "Magic." Then we all cry.

If Willow's half-joke will resonate in unhappy ways in later years, do not despair too much, for we'll always have this scene. These sincere performances blow the sweetest of air through the characters, as the two witches in love float a foot above the dance floor, lost in a private moment of grace.

How do they do that?

Lovefest '07: #3. "You're Insane! My Own Mother is Insane!"

Edith Massey, Divine and Mink Stole in Female Trouble (1974)
The most perfectly equipped actors ever to wrap their mouths around John Waters' dialogue are Edith Massey, Divine, and maybe most of all, Mink Stole. They're the natural voices of his characters, the voices Waters must hear in his head as he's writing. Classic Waters is all wall-to-wall scenes of people screaming at each other, and these three beauties each take unique approaches to the challenge: Divine's sneering bellow, Stole's bitchy whine, and Massey's singular way of proudly announcing each line with her cracked cadence, as if she's just heard it for the first time. This mighty triumvirate of comediennes comes together to rip each other apart in this triumphant scene in Female Trouble.

For those behind on the score: Stole is 14-year-old Taffy, who has just returned home after attempting to reunite with her absent father, only to have him attempt rape, and succeed in vomiting on her. Massey is villainess Ida Nelson, currently imprisoned in a bird cage, and militant fag hag ex-aunt-in-law to Divine's Dawn Davenport, a white trash criminal fashion icon on the make. Whew! Though the scene is just three performers sniping at each other, Waters' overstuffed, absurdist plotting and the actors' lung-busting, headache-loud delivery turn it into a rising symphony of shouting matches. It becomes an illustration of the infinite variations on the reasons and ways people can yell.

Stole starts out alone on the floor, wailing and moaning about her trauma, then passes the baton to Massey, who bitches about her hand having been cut off. "I got you a hook, didn't I? Mother would kill me as it is!", Taffy cries indignantly. Ida rasps back "I'll thank you for this fuckin hook after I rip her eyes out with it!" This is charity and gratitude in the Waters universe. Dawn Davenport thunders in, chews out her daughter and mortal enemy just for existing, then taunts them pretty much equally over her own inability to feed them properly, and when she's done picks chunks of the scenery out of her incisors. Dawn's relationship with Taffy is a highlight, for though the child is a hideous brat, she's legitimately complaining about child abuse; Dawn's hatred for her daughter has little to do with the kid's behavior. She just can't stand giving a moment's thought to anyone but herself. "You're a pain, too, Taffy! A pain in my big fat asshole!" she yells.

It is hard to imagine anyone could top this world-class putdown, but, well, it happens. Dawn eventually has to gag the squawking Ida with duct tape, and Massey steals the scene with her immortal (improvised?) final, desperate cry of contempt: "Fucker! Pig fucker! Filthy hetero-stink-shit!!"

But in this bitchfest battle of wills, Taffy wins, when she announces she's going to join the Hare Krishnas. It is the ultimate affront, in Female Trouble's world of glamour, and ego-tripping. There's nothing in Waters that so perfectly encapsulates the great American rite of passage that is adolescent rebellion at all costs, as Taffy demolishing her mortified mother with her manic, sing-song declaration "You can't kill love, mother! You can't kill Krishna! Because Krishna is consciousness!" It's too much even for Dawn Davenport. Even for Divine. God bless the child.

Lovefest '07: #4. Chigusa's Last Reverie

Chiaki Kuriyama in Battle Royale (2000)
In woods humid, still,
The coolest girl in the world
runs, dreams, then wakes, dies.

Lovefest '07: #6. Be Free

Cristina Marsillach in Opera (1987)
Cristina Marsillach plays the traumatized opera ingenue, Betty, who's lost everyone she cares about in a string of serial murders, which she is forced to witness by means of eyeball-threatening needles taped to her face. But those celebrated scenes are not what need to be redeemed. What happens in the final moments of Opera may be a kind of Rorschach test for viewer's cynicism and generosity. The film's coda abruptly switches settings, from a violent, dark vision of Parma, Italy to the pastoral Swiss Alps, as our tormented heroine seeks some much-needed r-&-r, only to find herself walking into the story's last fake-out and twist scare. After witnessing the final stabbing of her last remaining friend, and turning the tables on the killer to bring him to justice, Betty, splattered with blood and emotionally exhausted, dismisses pursuing reporters, and wanders away from the crime scene. In her crimson-stained white blouse, she throws herself into the grass, and crawls on hands and knees through the wildflowers, as we hear her internal monologue in voice over:

"I no longer wanted to see anybody. I wanted to escape altogether...
Because I'm different.
I don't even vaguely resemble others, any of them.
I like the wind.
Butterflies.
Flowers.
Leaves.
Insects.
The rain.
Clouds."

She comes upon a lizard pinned by a twig, studies it a moment, and sets the helpless creature loose, calling after it "there my beauty. Go free."

What's going on in this scene? To be honest, I am well aware a lot of audiences find the finale infantile, laughable, embarrassing and/or simply terrible. Maitland McDonagh has evaluated that the only possible conclusion is that Betty has gone mad, probably from the horror and loss she's undergone, but mostly the internal resistance to the killer's insistence that a latent sadism inherited from her mother makes her get off on being forced witness to the murders. This is a frequent line of reasoning adopted by Argento apologists. To me that smacks of tough-guy excuse making and a false choice: either Argento is soft-headed about the spiritual, or hey look, at least the hero goes crazy at the end. It's just not a foregone conclusion either way.

We're privy to Betty's thoughts, but there's no definitive answer about her mental health, or sublimated motivations she's not even expressing to herself in the voice over. We can't know what's happened to Betty any more than we understand what's happened to Marc Daly in Deep Red, to Anne in Tenebre, or to Anna Manni in The Stendhal Syndrome, in the similar enigmatic closing shots of those films. All we can know is that Betty is changed. Her final voice over is a refutation of the villain's claim over her, a resistance to the possibility of complicancy with the violence, a self-absolution from guilt. In her final act of compassion, freeing the pinned lizard, she undoes the nasty work of the reptile-torturing little girl in Deep Red. Faced with a creature whose helplessness in bondage mirrors her own during the murder scenes, Betty chooses to liberate it. The attentive viewer will also see Betty shucking off her mother's influence in shaping her psyche: when Betty releases the lizard, she's set free.

Betty is the only character able to transcend the twisted meanness of Opera's world without being annihilated. Even if she has gone mad, and is manically overcompensating to prove it to herself, we watch Betty make the choice. Whether the capacity for sadism is present is not important: of course it is. It always is. She suppresses it. Until this scene, Opera is not at all about relationship between people and nature. It seems instead, that only by exposure to the darkest edges of human experience, is Betty able to consciously set herself apart from the brutish, insensitive species that populates the film. That is as fine a mission statement for horror movies as I know.

Half of this scene is a credit to Argento, the rest is all Marsillach's doing. Her strange performance is what allows the latitude for readings as divergent as McDonagh's and my own. Marsillach paws across the grass in rapture, ignoring the gore on her shirt. She smells deeply of some of the plants, pets some of them and simply stares and grins at others. The wild, ecstatic expression on her dewy features cannot be read, beyond the wide-eyed glee of her oneness with nature. Un-sane or not, it's frightening as she buries her face in the foliage and comes up open-mouthed with wonder. Promptly after the lizard's rescue, Betty throws herself flat on the ground, embracing the Earth itself, and the screen fades to black. Such awesome joy as Cristina Marsillach conveys, we can never know. Can we? Go my beauty.

Be free.

Lovefest '07: #7. "I Swear, From This Moment Forth..."

Patricia Arquette in True Romance
Alabama Whitman sits below Clarence's fire escape, on the catwalk around a truck billboard, grumpily smoking and wrapped in a blanket. She looks awful. When Clarence (Christian Slater) joins her on their perch above the city, the scene will become about confessing that she is a call girl, hired as his birthday present, but has accidentally fallen in love. Arquette plays the big moments by shouting and ranting, with tears spilling out of her eyes, but don't get distracted; consider for a moment that this is one of the few declarations of romantic feelings in the Tarantinoverse: when people are calm and collected, they're at their deadliest. There's nothing scarier in this world than bearing your heart.

'Bama's yelling at Clarence, though he hasn't done anything wrong, or gotten the least bit upset with her. She's angry at herself and scared at the boy's potential reactions. It's a short scene, but Alabama cycles through fear, resolve-building, self-hatred, backpedaling explanation, and finally a sweet and silly announcement of her personal moral code. "I'm a good person. And when it comes to relationships, I'm 100 % ... monogamous." Her courage pays off, she finds acceptance, and the relief on Arquette's face, which moments before was bent as if steeling to be smacked, is a beam of Southern sunshine in the chilly Detroit night.

From Clarence's perspective, this is not about finding a hooker's heart of gold: he didn't know she was a hooker, and he already saw the gold. It's about a dream girl stripped of her glamours and proclaiming her flawed, raw humanity from a billboard, and the astonishment of discovering the dream girl beneath the dream girl. The real one, pale and red-nosed from the cold and crying, a little stuffed-up and with a blanket draped over her head, is even better. Alabama belongs solidly in my list of favorite Tarantino characters, and like the best of actors to tackle the writer's vivid dialogue, Patricia Arquette gives the woman shape and dimension beyond the page.

To pinpoint a moment of the performance: Arquette, looking miserable and sick, silent and alone, holding her cigarette like it's her last possession. You can see her mentally rifling through frustration, self-pity and anger, trying to build up courage, as she grapples with the biggest, happiest feeling of her life. That's how it starts. By the end, she's smiling.

Lovefest '07: #8. It's Absolutely Revolting!

Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap (1961) as Sharon as Susan
Hayley Mills' tour de force comedic performance in The Parent Trap requires the 14-year-old to not only play thoroughly delineated twin sisters, but for a brief midsection, to play the girls impersonating one another. In this scene she does both. Boston-raised Sharon-as-Susan first calmly dupes her dad as he bumblingly attempts a heart-to-heart, then loses her cool when he says he's going to propose to his hateful new girlfriend. Exploding Kinetoscope favorite Brian Keith is great throughout, but here he gives his funniest 4-minute fluster: his Mitch Evers is a big, burly rancher completely undone by a young girl's cool judgement and her unleashed temper.

Sharon plops down at the piano and plays Chopin's "Nocturne in E Flat", half-ignoring her father's speech, sending the signal that his silly stuttering is beneath her interest, but keeping her back to Keith lets Mills dart her baby blues nervously around the room in counterpoint to her confident piano playing. Sharon's method of indicating her nonchalance almost backfires when Mitch realizes that his Susan does not play piano, and Sharon covers her tracks hilariously, by hunching over the keyboard and plinking out "Chopsticks". She doesn't miss a beat, either, as she turns her dad's self-effacement on him, by explaining he's far to old to be dating his 30-something fiance, mere seconds after he's nearly said it himself. The scene is all about Sharon's acting and improv skills, and powers of behavioral observation, and how quickly she can weave and dart about her father's arguments and steer him where she wants. The scrawny kid has to waltz with Brian Keith, for if Mills weren't playing it with precise body language, if we couldn't see the wheels turning in Susan's head, the scene wouldn't work. And it wouldn't be funny.

The argument escalates, and in the final beat, Mills does some prop work both cute and ingenious. Sharon swipes a throw pillow up from the sofa, as she becomes desperate to talk Mitch out of his engagement. She clutches the pillow to her chest as she pleads, flails it about in anger, and yanks it away from her dad when he tries to take it for fear of being smacked. Finally, when Sharon completely blows her stack and breaks "character", she becomes so frustrated that she can't express it verbally or physically, and Mitch doesn't even understand what she's talking about. To portray this meltdown, Mills stomps to the back of the room and, well, just starts poking random pieces of the set decoration with the pillow. There's a split second that gets me every time, in which it's clear that the screenplay has provided less of Sharon's scripted rant than necessary, so Mills begins ad libbing a furious monologue as her befuddled dad wanders out of the room.

SHARON: All right. I'm not screaming. I want to talk about this perfectly calmly and rationally... YOU CAN'T GET MARRIED, YOU'LL RUIN EVERYTHING! All the plans we made! The working, and scheming, the diagrams!

MITCH: What are you talking about?

SHARON: And my hair! Look at my hair! I cut it just for you! And my fingernails! I've bitten them all up because of you! Of all the thick-headed fathers! (Ed.: here the script has clearly run out) For days and works and weeks! Nothing! Nothing but work and -- and boys and... names and hair! Oh!

Boys and names and hair? If you've ever forgotten it: the kid was a natural.