‘If Looks Could Kill, He Wouldn’t Need a Chainsaw’: Gender and Leatherface in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series
Please be warned, spoilers for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986), Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990), Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995), and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) lay within (and if you’re one of these people who thinks that there’s some kind of time limit on spoilers, well… that doesn’t make sense. People can only watch a movie when they watch a movie, and it doesn’t matter whether it's a day old or 100 years old, if they’ve not seen it, then they’ve not seen it, end of).
NOTE TO THE READER; Originally I conceived this piece to be a complete reading of the entire Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, including the 2003 remake of the original, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and its 2006 prequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, the 2013 sequel to the original, Texas Chainsaw 3D, and that film’s prequel, 2016’s Leatherface.
However, it became super obvious really early on that I just didn’t have the time to take on such a massive task, so I have opted instead to focus my writing entirely on the so-called ‘original timeline’, excluding the elusive All American Massacre (2000), by William ‘Tony’ Hooper, because I just couldn’t find it anywhere.
For clarity, the 2022 movie, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, has been included because, although Netflix list it as a ‘direct sequel’ to the original (presumably like Blumhouse’s 2018 release, Halloween), that film’s producer, Fede Alvarez, has stated that “that “direct sequel” refers to the film picking up fifty years after the original film, not that it’s erasing the original sequels”.
Hope this explains my reasons, and that you find reading this as insightful, interesting, and enjoyable as I found writing it. Thank you.
‘My brother here is tired of what’s-her-name’s face and he wants a new one! It just happens to be he wants this face right here!’
As James Rose wrote in his book for the Devil’s Advocate series, “No-one who has ever seen the original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is ever likely to forget the experience” (2013). Indeed, quite what movie-going audiences must’ve thought in 1974 when Tobe Hooper unleashed his horrific vision of monstrous, cannibalistic capitalism upon them I’ll never know. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a horror film in the purest sense of the term. It is near-unwatchable in its grisly, macabre onslaught, equal parts a brilliant piece of filmmaking and a ghastly, violent, and grotesque portrayal of a society left dissolution by its leaders, abandoned by their governments, and desensitized by the media. The vicious nature of the film, not only in the seemingly gruesome acts played out on screen, but in the very atmosphere itself — the image is grainy, the locations hot and smelly, the props rotted, and the cast sweaty and uncomfortable — is a sight to behold. I can think of no film, before or since, that has had quite the same impact. It is as if Hooper somehow captured a nightmare on film.
Upon release, critics spent most of their time commenting on the gore. Famed film critic Roger Ebert, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, said that it was “as violent and gruesome and blood-soaked as the title promises” (1974), while Variety gave the film a reluctantly positive review despite its “heavy doses of gore” (1974). Of course, as anyone who has seen the movie can attest, it is a difficult film to watch. Even now it remains a harrowing experience, pushing cinematic boundaries and oozing atmosphere. The whole thing just looks horrific, and that’s before we’ve even come to the cannibalistic monsters who spend most of the runtime tormenting our cast of teenage protagonists.
However, all this talk of onscreen violence, blood, and gore is ironic considering the film doesn’t actually contain a single drop of blood.
Perhaps one of the most well-known secrets about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is that it actually doesn’t ever actually show the gruesome acts at its center, instead opting to expertly cut around the horrific imagery and hide the more extreme and would-be-gory moments from the viewer. Of course, this has the effect of exaggerating the violence, creating “discomfort in the viewer through disparate and chaotic audio/visual elements (Weissenstein, C. 2011). Legend has it Hooper hoped the film would be passed by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) uncut with a PG rating. This never seemed believable to me because, well… I would assume he knew what kind of movie he was making. Whether it’s true or not doesn’t really matter, though, the film did not get his desired rating, and Hooper was instead left in a difficult position given that there was literally nothing he could actually cut.
The violence of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is perhaps its most oft-discussed facet. For me, however, despite its brutality, the violence pails in comparison to the psychological torment inflicted upon the film’s final girl, Sally Hardesty — played with such horrific realism by Marilyn Burns that the fact that her performance often gets outright overlooked is a travesty. This is never clearer than in the film’s now-iconic and deeply disturbing dinner scene. Sally, having attempted to escape from the murderous cannibalistic clan that has offed her friends, is dragged back to their farmhouse and placed at the head of the dinner table. It is here that Hooper reveals his twisted nuclear family in all their blood-soaked, psychopathic glory; an aging, almost corpse-like grandpa, an overworked, abusive patriarch, a gibbering, twitchy youngster, and, of course, the ‘mother’ of this nightmarish bunch, Leatherface himself; complete with apron and… erm, a woman’s face.
Hooper’s depiction of Leatherface as the would-be matriarch of the family sits almost entirely, within the realms of the first film at least, inside his “vicious take on the consumerist nuclear family structure” (Dudenhoeffer, L. 2008), but it marks the beginning of the series’ ongoing exploration of gender and gender identity through Leatherface and, through that, its troubling depiction of transgenderism.
Admittedly, on the basis of the first film alone, this reading is a bit of a stretch. Hooper’s movie shows little to no interest in Leatherface as a gender-bending character outside of this warped nuclear family, and while the now-iconic masked killer does take on the traditionally feminine roles — preparing the food, serving dinner, etc. — the movie seems to be far more focused on cannibalism as capitalism and the erosion of traditional American values. As Robin Wood puts it in his influential essay An Introduction to the American Horror Film, in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre “cannibalism represents the ultimate in possessiveness, hence the logical end of human relations under capitalism” (1979).
That’s not to say Hooper was entirely without interest in this facet of Leatherface’s personality, mind. It’s worth noting that Leatherface changes what mask he is wearing depending on what task he appears to be doing throughout the film. He wears the mask of an old woman when doing the housework, he dons the aforementioned woman’s face when dishing out dinner, and then there is perhaps the most recognizable and iconic mask, which he wears while murdering his victims and preparing them for consumption.
Moreover, unlike other iconic masked slashers — such as Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th series, or Michael Myers in Halloween — Leatherface’s masks do not appear to be an effort to obscure his identity, rather they are the direct opposite. His identity alters depending on the mask he is wearing. In terms of a trans reading, this could be seen as somewhat troubling, given it would suggest that trans folk are not only masking up and hiding behind it but that they are doing so by taking on the faces of women. It’s a suggestion that leans into the idea that sees trans women “positioned as imposters […] as perpetrators rather than victims of male violence” (Ahmed, S. 2016).
It’s probably also worth bringing up the fact that the film presents itself as a recreation of true events. The opening text crawl and monologue (something that would become a staple of the franchise moving forward) directly encourages audiences to take the film as if it were fact. That it was also inspired by real-life serial killer Ed Gein — whose gruesome exploits also inspired Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) — should also be mentioned. This essentially invites real-world comparisons, and in doing so also adds to the damaging representation of transgenderism already present throughout.
However much these aspects of the film cannot be ignored, the optimist in me chooses to read it more positively.
Leatherface’s gender-swapping and mask-wearing have absolutely nothing to do with his family’s eating habits or his role as a killer. In fact, it is left almost entirely unexplored and unmentioned in the film. He is simply whomever he identifies as at any given moment, and the rest of his family seems to accept this as a given. Of course, we can’t ignore the fact that we’re talking about a group of sadistic, cannibalistic murderers, but I digress. The point is, as noted by Red Broadwell in their fantastic article for Gayley Dreadful, “unlike the other killers mentioned, there is no surprise unmasking of Leatherface; his true face is never revealed. This makes his masks his identity, emphasized further by the fact that he has different masks for whatever role he decides to perform” (2021).
In terms of a trans reading of the film, this serves to both distance Leatherface’s gender identity from his role as a killer, and yet also intrinsically link the two. The film presents this facet of his personality as yet just another element of the nightmarish onslaught of horror Sally and her friends are subjected to. And, I’d argue that by making these masks presumably the faces of Leatherface’s prior victims, it goes one step further, really accentuating an idea espoused by those self-proclaimed so-called ‘gender critical’ feminists that position “trans women as violent male subjects infiltrating women’s spaces and appropriating women’s bodies” (Pearce, R. 2020). I mean, literally stealing women’s faces to wear as your own is about the most ‘on-the-nose’ (ahem…) form of appropriation you can get!
As the series would progress, the gender-swapping aspect of Leatherface would be brought further into the forefront until, finally, it becomes one of his most defining traits. This focus on gender does actually sort of make sense, especially when placed in the context of Wood’s other influential essay, Return of the Repressed. In it, Wood observes that “commercial cinema has analogies with mass dreaming; in examining the evolution of a genre one finds oneself studying the evolution of civilization’s unconscious; horror films are our collective nightmares”. Given this context, and Wood’s own Freudian readings, we can see gender fall into the category of sexual repression, and, as Wood notes, “what is repressed must always struggle to return, in however disguised and distorted a form” (1978). To put it simply, Leatherface’s gender-bending in Hooper’s 1974 original, is both an allusion to the warped return of the so-called traditional nuclear family and a manifestation of sexual repression and gender confusion.
The masked maniac’s sexual desires would be explored once again by Hooper himself in the 1986 sequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Hooper reluctantly returned to the world he had created at the behest of the infamous Canon Films (if you wanna know more about them, I definitely recommend checking out the documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014). It’s… er, bonkers!). The film, which ups the gore and the weirdness, sees the cannibalistic family of the original — now given a name; the Sawyers (geddit!?) — torment a late-night radio DJ, Vanita “Stretch” Brock, played by American actress and producer Caroline Williams, after she finds herself in possession of an audio tape of one of the murderous clans vicious attacks. Initially, the film seemingly revels in the insanity of the family, and their first encounter with Stretch at the radio station is as manic and grotesque as anything in the original (albeit with way more production value and, thusly, a way less grimy atmosphere), but the onslaught is brought to an abrupt and disconcerting halt when Leatherface molests Stretch with his chainsaw.
The subtext here is not subtle; as Carol J. Clover outlined in her seminal essay, Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film, “the killer’s phallic purpose, as he thrusts his drill or knife into the trembling bodies of young women, is unmistakable” (1987). Moreover, the placement of the titular chainsaw as a phallic symbol takes on new meaning when we note that Leatherface is unable to successfully kill Stretch with it. At this moment he panics, pulling frantically on the power cord and desperately trying to rev up his weapon, which is all a not-so-subtle stand-in for his own impotence. Stretch uses this to her advantage, seductively speaking to him as a means to plot her escape, but the implication is clear; for Leatherface — as Sam Moore notes in his essay on the film — “romantic desire and violence are inseparable from one another” (2021).
The sexualization of violence throughout The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 certainly adds a troubling element when viewed from a trans perspective. If we are to take Leatherface as trans, then the sexual desire brought on through violence paints an incredibly negative depiction of transgenderism. Of course, as I often find myself doing while writing these pieces, it is always of paramount importance to point out that Leatherface is demonstrably not a transgender character, but he does fall into that confusing category of ‘movie trans’, whereby anyone with any kind of gender ‘issue’ ultimately finds themselves coded as transgender. I’ve outlined this kind of thing in far more depth before (please see my pieces on Hitchcock’s Pyscho and on Hammer’s Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde for that), but it’s worth mentioning again, just to be safe.
Leatherface’s use of violence as a sexual outlet puts him in a similar camp as Norman Bates in the aforementioned Psycho. Both characters respond to their own sexual desires with murderous violence — in Bates’ case his sexual desires trigger the personality of ‘Mother’, in Leatherface’s case violence itself becomes a stand-in for intercourse — but in the case of Leatherface in particular it is especially troublesome.
In using violence as a sexual outlet, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 positions Leatherface as something of a sexual predator, and his placement as a trans-coded character in this regard does little to paint a positive representation. To again quote Ruth Pearce in her essay, TERF Wars: An Introduction, “trans women’s bodies have been discursively associated with dangerous male sexuality and potential sexual predation” (2020), and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, at least in this respect, only furthers the dangerous and damaging ideology of many anti-trans groups and organizations. Leatherface’s lust for violence becomes sexual predation, and thus his transness becomes conflated with his position as a ‘sexual’ predator.
In a sense, one could view The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 as a wholly anti-trans narrative. If Leatherface is coded trans — and as we’ve already outlined he is — then it stands to reason that his placement as the film's antagonist places its protagonist as anti-trans since they are on opposing sides within the narrative. Viewing it as such makes the trans aspects of the film even more problematic than they already were; since (within the context of the film) this means that not only are trans folk violent, dangerous, and harmful, but they actively seek out folk who seek to maintain order and end violence and murder. However, there is a problem when viewing Stretch as anti-trans, since she does at several moments throughout the film display a willingness — albeit entirely born from a desire to survive her encounter with the Sawyers — to understand and even, to a certain degree, sympathize with Leatherface.
We see this most obviously during the sequence in which Stretch begs Leatherface to help her hide from the other Sawyers. In this scene, Leatherface attempts to get her to don the face of her co-worker (who, we learn moments later, is still alive…), much like himself. It is as if the killer views wearing these ‘masks’ as a means of total disguise. The suggestion is that Leatherface believes Stretch will essentially become ‘invisible’ to the rest of his family with the mask on, and, as noted earlier, this suggests that he himself wears them to disappear behind the face of another. To him, there will be no difference between Stretch and the body of her co-worker, so long as she remains under the mask.
This is noteworthy because “‘gender critical’ feminists have criticised social developments such as LGBTIQ-inclusive school education and positive media representations of trans people” as an example of so-called “‘gender ideology’” being forced upon the general populace (Pearce, R. 2020), and if wearing these faces is, to Leatherface, a way to ‘become’ someone else, then by forcing Stretch to wear one he is essentially forcing his ‘transness’ — or ‘gender ideology’ — upon her (the face she wears is, after all, that of the opposite sex). This would suggest that Stretch isn’t in fact the stand-in for the anti-trans brigade, but rather a substitute for the ‘ordinary people’ who are at threat from trans folk (lol!).
Stretch is given far more agency that her predecessor, Sally Hardesty. Whereas Sally, along with her friends, merely stumbles upon the Sawyers and survives almost entirely on pure luck and circumstance, Stretch becomes a specific target for the cannibalistic clan after playing a recording of one of their murders on the radio. Moreover, she then actively seeks to involve herself further, following Leatherface and his brother, Chop Top, to their lair in an abandoned fairground (man, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is a really weird movie) after the aforementioned attack on the radio station, in an effort to rescue her co-worker, L.G. In terms of being an anti-trans narrative, this would mean the film is essentially saying that Stretch is the victim of an attack by trans folk for simply doing the right and moral thing…
So, if Stretch is not the anti-trans stand-in, then who is? Well, that would be Dennis Hopper’s Lt. Boude “Lefty” Enright. Enright is the uncle of Sally and her brother Franklyn from the original film, and he is a man on a mission of vengeance. As such he is given a personal stake in the narrative (something many anti-trans personalities claim to have. Indeed, look at J. K. Rowling and her ‘impassioned’ piece… ugh). His character is entirely focused on taking out the Sawyers, and he is the subject of ridicule from people who refuse to believe that they even exist. As Stretch herself notes, no one takes him seriously, not even the police. In this instance, the police can be a stand-in for systemic structures in general, and this positions Enright best as a surrogate for so-called TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists), who often believe themselves to be fighting the ‘good fight’, positioning “gender egalitarianism, sexual liberation and LGBTQ+ rights as an attack on traditional values by ‘global elites’” (Pearce, R. 2020) — more on this later. Furthermore, it is worth noting that it is Enright who ultimately succeeds in destroying the Sawyers (kinda… the Sawyers sort of destroy themselves — wonder what that would mean to this reading — but Enright, at the very least, gets to have a heroic chainsaw sword fight with Leatherface!), albeit at the cost of his own life too.
The final image of the film sees Stretch atop a rock tower, manically wielding a chainsaw in an image that calls back to the finale of Hooper’s 1974 original. It’s a moment that has been read as when Stretch, like so many ‘Final Girls’ before her, “specifically unmans an oppressor whose masculinity was in question to begin with” (Clover, C. J. 1987). Meanwhile, in our reading, Stretch, as the apparent ‘ordinary person’ here, has been saved by the ‘gender critical’ so-called feminists (Enright) and turned the tools of her oppressors against them.
I should probably say at this point that I don’t really subscribe to this reading, nor do I believe anyone else does either. For the record, I actually love this movie and think it’s a gloriously deranged little film that’s as funny as it is horrific. I definitely don’t agree with the notion that Hooper’s “decision to turn his iconic horror family into a black comedy remains one of the most puzzling decisions in horror movie history” (Blankenship, M. 2020). If anything, I would actually say it’s a logical extension of the black comedy very much present in the original. Moreover, Leatherface doesn’t even change his mask at all throughout The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, I don’t think, and the trans community was nowhere near as prominent or well-known in ’86 as they are today (and that includes anti-trans groups as well), so I very much doubt Hooper even considered a potential trans reading of his film, let alone deliberately put any of this into the movie! Still, it’s been interesting, right. Right!?
Whatever…
Leatherface may not change his mask at all in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, but he most certainly does in Jeff Burr’s 1990 slasher, Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III. In fact, the film opens with our iconic mass murderer killing a young woman and then ‘masking up’ her face in front of her sister! It’s a pretty decent, unsettling, and atmospheric opening for a film that ultimately winds up being a far lesser property than its two predecessors. If the original was Hooper’s nightmarish vision of Hell, and the sequel was his blackly comic reworking, this threequel is the studio-led, franchise-minded version, and it is one void of any real personality or originality. Produced by New Line Cinema in the hopes of kickstarting another Nightmare on Elm Street style ongoing series, Leatherface is “just another generic slasher flick with nothing beyond the Leatherface connection to recommend it to discerning fans” (Parcillian, C. 2000).
Still, that opening certainly does bring us screaming back to the ‘transness’ inherent in the now titular character of Leatherface. On top of that, the film also openly invites us to view Leatherface and his masks as a character adopting different identities depending on ‘who’ he’s wearing. As the opening text crawl and monologue inform us; after the arrest and execution of W. E. Sawyer (whoever the hell that is supposed to be. The continuity of the franchise gets super confusing from here on out), “the jurors concluded that “Leatherface”, presumed to be an unapprehended killer, was in fact an alternate personality of Sawyer’s, activated whenever he donned a crude mask made of human flesh”.
Leatherface as he appears in Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III is far closer to your more traditional masked slasher than he has been up to this point. The family is still at play, but there’s no doubt that a decision has been made to shift the chainsaw-wielding madman center stage — I mean, his name is now the title — and as such he also ultimately winds up losing a lot of his intrigue and complexity. Hooper had Leatherface as the twisted ‘mother’ of his batshit nuclear family, but Burr turns him into a less interesting Jason Voorhees, whose focus is now almost solely on the brutal murder of an interchangeable group of randoms.
It’s ironic, really, because for all their claims that they wanted to “bring the series back to the gritty realism of the original” (Blankenship, M. 2020) and distance it from the more overtly comedic tone of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, ultimately New Line wind up losing the very uniqueness and absurdity that made the original so successful. It’s also the least interesting film of the bunch (or, at least, of this particular continuity… the timeline is weird, it doesn't make sense, but the films being discussed here all sort of exist in a singular narrative), and, as such, is the one that brings the least to the table. There’s really not an awful lot to say about Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, especially in terms of a trans reading, because other than that opening sequence outlined above, the film literally doesn’t bother to do anything with its titular icon other than have him lumber about murdering and tormenting a group of poorly defined walking corpses (and also Ken Foree).
However, an argument could be made that this actually makes the film all the more problematic. By opening the movie with the aforementioned mask creation, and then dropping any notion of the transness or identity confusion present in the previous two entirely for the remainder of the runtime, one could say the film is essentially boiling these traits of the character down into a singular ball of ‘movie psycho’. In a sense, this approach basically acts as a more simplistic and less overt way to the approach of Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980). In De Palma’s film — as I also already covered briefly in my Psycho piece — the killer is trans, and therefore of course they are a killer. Leatherface almost reverses this; Leatherface is a psychotic killer, and therefore of course he experiments with transness.
Admittedly, this isn’t a deliberate attempt by the filmmakers to embed this kind of reading into the narrative — that’s obvious — it’s just an unfortunate side-effect of how they handle the character. By choosing so definitively and deliberately to tie the film back to Hooper’s original (not only in the aforementioned behind-the-scenes quest to return to that film’s “gritty realism”, but also in opening the film with a text crawl and monologue that directly positions it as a continuation) the film winds up carrying over the gender-bending aspects of Leatherface too. Therefore, a lot of the readings of the ’74 movie also apply here, and that, coupled with the opening scene, means that a trans reading is still very much on the cards.
It is worth noting, however, that much like the original, Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III doesn’t actually kill off its titular killer. There is a moment late in the film that seems to be a, as Carol J. Clover calls it, “Final Girl sequence”, which acts as “ a footnote to what went before — to the quality of the Final Girl’s fight, and more generally to the qualities of character that enable her, of all the characters, to survive what has come to seem unsurvivable” (1987), however, the movie actually ends with Leatherface revving his chainsaw once more as the movie’s would-be final girl, Michelle (played by Kate Hodge), drives away with Benny (played by Ken Foree). Of course, this is most likely down to New Line’s desire to franchise the character of Leatherface and capitalize on him in much the same way they had done with A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger — after all, New Line is the ‘house that Freddy built’ — but what does this facet mean in terms of a trans reading?
If the purposeful placement as a continuation means that we can carry over readings from the original film, then it stands to reason that the same can be said of that movie’s direct sequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2. And so, while there is no obvious Enright figure here, and thus no obvious stand-in for those pesky ‘gender critical’ feminists, we can look at Leatherface as an extension of the anti-trans narrative outlined above. Ken Foree’s Benny is perhaps the closest the film has to a character that fills the Enright role; after all, while Enright was a police officer hellbent on vengeance, Benny is a survivalist, meaning that he is the most equipt and most experienced of our heroes to tackle the onslaught of violence Leatherface and his murderous clan brings upon them.
Unlike Enright, however, Benny actually does survive his encounter with the Sawyers and most definitely rescues Michelle, showing up in the film’s closing moments as the deus ex machina, ready to drive off into the sunset and away from danger. Carol J Clover calls this a “Red Riding Hood” ending, in which our final girl is “saved through male agency” (1987). But in our reading, Benny isn’t so much a male character as he is an anti-trans character (like Enright before him, his position against the Sawyers places him as such), and thus the film essentially ends, much like its direct predecessor, with the villainous ‘transgenders’ being all but obliterated by the ‘ordinary people’, who are ultimately rescued by the ‘anti-trans brigade’. That Benny is a survivalist adds another layer to this, and places him even more in line with Enright, in that he — and therefore the TERFs — were the only ones to have the forethought to see the danger, recognize it, and so prepare for it.
And boom! Just like that, we’re building our own little niche; it’s trans film theory, y’all!
Again, I feel like it’s worth pointing out that, although I most definitely don’t have the same fondness for Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III that I do for Hooper’s original and its direct sequel, that doesn’t mean I necessarily personally view the film in this way. This is an exercise in film analysis, and it is — at least as far as I’m concerned — an important one. While trans readings may not be as obvious or as overt as other readings (and they almost certainly were not in the minds of the filmmakers themselves when producing these particular works), they do help shed some light on problematic trends in cinema. Leatherface, like Norman Bates before him, may not actually be trans in real-world terms, but — as I have said before — as far as cinema is concerned, as a character he falls into that awkward category of ‘movie trans’. As Tina Kubrak notes in her essay, Impact of Films: Changes in Young People’s Attitudes after Watching a Movie, movies can “change [audience’s] attitudes towards certain groups of people and cause newly formed opinions on various issues” (Kubrak, T. 2020), so… yeah, these things matter.
Regardless of your thoughts on the above, however, it’s impossible to deny that the transness returns in the next entry of the Texas Chainsaw franchise. Indeed, the original film’s co-writer, Kim Henkel, doubled down on this when making 1995’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. Speaking on his approach to Leatherface, the writer/director claimed he wrote the character as one who assumes the persona of the person whose face he wears (Henkel, K. 1996). This would suggest, then, that Leatherface’s gender-swapping antics are perhaps more complex than they would initially appear. It most certainly seems to be the case in The Next Generation — which is, admittedly, often regarded as the “black sheep” of the Texas Chainsaw family — in which he spends most of the film dressed as a female, and adopts a kind of traditionally feminine tone, even going so far as to become submissive when yelled at by Renee Zellweger’s Jenny (who essentially takes on the Sally Hardesty role in the film).
As a film Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation is oddly preoccupied with gender — it opens with Renee Zelwegger’s Jenny getting ready for her prom by applying make-up in a sequence reminiscent to the numerous ‘getting ready’ scenes in movies as varied as Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), The Breakfast Club (1985), and Clueless (1995) — and toys around slightly with stereotypical female roles; Jenny is our obvious final girl, while Tonie Perensky’s Darla fills a kind of traditional ‘bad girl’ archetype. The elements were outdated in ’95 anyway, but it’s in the movie’s depiction of Leatherface that things get really messy.
The film spends an unusually large amount of time basically going out of its way to emasculate Leatherface. Gone is the foreboding, looming figure of the previous three iterations of the character, in The Next Generation, Leatherface is portrayed as kind of timid and kind of pathetic. As noted by Justin Yandell of Bloody Disgusting, “Leatherface, once efficient, methodical and near-silent, now struggles to competently capture or kill his victims” (2017). Let’s not forget that, despite the fact that he was the main draw of the franchise at this point (the last one even put his name in the title), it’s not Leatherface who serves as the movie’s primary antagonist. No, that honor goes to Matthew McConaughey’s Vilmer, who — as we learn later in the film — kills people not for the cannibalistic desires of the Sawyer family (now they eat microwave pizza!), but rather because he works for the fucking Illuminati (and no, that’s not a joke. That the Sawyers work for a ‘global elite’ is literally a key development of the plot)! As promised earlier, I’ll come back to this point in a moment, but the addition of the Illuminati subplot is a weird choice considering cannibalism has essentially been the franchise's one consistent trait.
Side note; despite the film’s confused and weird choices, McConaughey is an absolute blast! He chews up the scenery like a pro and clearly relishes the opportunity afforded to him by the script to go full-tilt maniac. I would love to see a return to this kind of unhinged, wild performance from McConaughey, especially now he’s far more seasoned and respected as an actor.
Anyway, the point is that by taking the agency and intimidation away from Leatherface while simultaneously dialing his transness up to 11, The Next Generation is essentially telling audiences that his transgenderism is both intrinsically linked with his violence and also that he’s now ‘lesser’ because of it. Indeed, he spends the bulk of the movie wailing and screaming like a petulant child, and is constantly told off or yelled at by most of the other characters — including our final girl in the aforementioned put down— to whom he almost always submits. It’s a device that plays up traditional gender norms and reinforces “the gendered and misogynistic discourses that have long positioned […] women as the ‘weaker sex’ needing protection” (Pearce, R. 2020).
It’s not like the movie doesn’t encourage audiences to make the connection between its chainsaw-wielding icon and transgenderism, either. Beyond the overt trans aspects present in the character, as noted by Reyna Cervantes in her article for Screen Queens, “the film was heavily marketed with a cross-dressing Leatherface […] front and centre: fishnet stockings and all” (2020). To invite such a reading so deliberately is troublesome, especially given the film’s constant conflation of Leatherface’s supposed transness and his murderous impulses. The film climaxes in a sequence with Leatherface chasing down our heroine while wearing a black dress and a woman’s face, complete with make-up. The movie basically plays this for twisted laughs, foregoing any attempt at a sincere or open exploration of gender dysphoria and instead opting to simply turn the whole thing into a maniacal manifestation of trans-panic.
Moreover, the audience is constantly reminded that Leatherface is a man wearing women’s clothing (and face), as several of the characters consistently point out this fact. It’s a move that only reinforces the idea that trans folk (and trans women in particular) are dangerous, monstrous, violent, and psychotic. Much like Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III before it, The Next Generation basically links its antagonist’s propensity for hacking innocent people up with a chainsaw with his cross-dressing habits. Once again, here the message is clear and simple; Leatherface is a psychopath and therefore of course he is trans. It’s… problematic, to say the least.
And then there’s the Illuminati… sigh.
As I mentioned earlier, it turns out that in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, the Sawyers haven’t been killing people simply to eat them (or enter cannabalistic chili into a cooking contest), but rather that they are employed by a shadowy organization that want them to terrify people into experiencing some kind of moment of enlightenment. It doesn’t really make sense, and it’s a development that feels incredibly shoehorned in and unnecessary, but in terms of our trans reading of the franchise, it certainly adds a more insidious and troublesome element to some of the things we’ve already discussed. I noted while reading The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 that Enright’s position as a stand-in for those ‘gender critical’ groups comes, in part at least, from the fact that he alone knows the ‘truth’, and that he is hampered in his investigations by society and systemic beurocracy. This is also something Benny, our stand-in during Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, experiences to a degree; as a ‘survivalist’, he is also considered to be preparing for something most folk don’t really consider a thing. All of this lines these characters up with the aforementioned organisations, who, as we already covered, view ““gender egalitarianism, sexual liberation and LGBTQ+ rights as an attack on traditional values by ‘global elites’” (Pearce, R. 2020). Told ya we’d get back to that.
The inclusion of the Illuminati in The Next Generation moves this specific aspect of the reading beyond the realms of mere suggestion and into something far more concrete. Leatherface and the Sawyers are quite literally attacking ‘traditional values’ while acting on the orders of a mysterious, sinister ‘global elite’. What’s more, the film ends with Jenny being picked up in a limo, having escaped Leatherface, by the face of this shadowy organization — whose name is Rothman (subtlty be damned!) — who then proceeds to willingly take her directly to the authorities, suggesting that they have total omnipotence over everything.
We could take this one step further; in Justin Yandell’s aforementioned reading, which he outlines in his solid article “This is Appalling”: ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation’ as a Commentary on the State of Horror Circa 1993, the film becomes a meta-commentary on the genre flicks of the time. Yandell positions Rothman as “the literal producer pulling the strings”, and by way of this concludes that when Rothman shows up at the end to rescue Jenny, apologizes to her, and “declares the whole thing an abomination”, it is essentially “a summation of Henkel’s view of the then-current state of the horror genre, or more specifically the slasher subgenre, or more specifically still, the Chainsaw series” (2017). If we take this idea as a basis, then Rothman’s shadowy organization is playing these murderous ‘games’ for the benefit of the movie-going audience, who delight in the increasingly twisted and gory displays put up on the screen. Like Michael Haneke’s 1997 Funny Games (and its 2007 ‘remake’, also directed by Haneke), Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation is essentially saying that “the audience are distressingly complicit in the on-screen violence” (Kermode, M. 2011).
With this context in mind, when viewed through our trans reading, the audience is basically being derided for not calling out this supposed ‘gender ideology’ when they see it. As with the violence of horror films, the movie is more or less suggesting the audience is complicit in the supposed erosion of ‘traditional values’, and that is it only those who stand against it that can be considered moral and righteous. Of course, there’s no way Henkel considered any of this when he made the film, which, in case it wasn’t already, is made very obvious when you watch his 2012 horror Butcher Boys, which was originally written to be a continuation and delves a little deeper in the Illuminati elements of the plot.
The fact remains, however, regardless of Henkel’s actual intentions, that Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation does a lot of damage in terms of trans representation. At best, its depictions of Leatherface as a crossdressing, unhinged, and ineffectual lunatic does little to dispell the supposed concerns of those who espouse anti-trans rhetoric, and, at worst, it actively encourages and reaffirms these ideas. Perhaps more pertinent, though, is that much of the gender-bending qualities The Next Generation emphasizes in Leatherface were already present across the franchise. The Next Generation may very well be the one to make these things overt, but it has not introduced them. The franchise as a whole, as I hope is clear from this piece, has a troubling and problematic relationship with transness, and it is one that feeds into Hollywood’s continued use of trans characters as monstrous villains and the dreaded ‘other’.
Over the course of the next few years, the franchise would struggle to find its footing. A seemingly never-ending series of remakes, reboots, prequels, and alternate timeline sequels would all attempt to bring the franchise ‘back to its roots’ (which is basically Hollywood speak for, ‘we’re trying to ignore the shit ones’), but the timeline would suddenly find itself — somewhat confusingly — brought back to its original form when the Netflix released Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022). Produced by Fede Alvarez, the director of the (in my opinion at least) excellent 2013 remake of Sam Raimi’s cult classic The Evil Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre is more or less a film that takes a fairly simple approach to the property. It tries to sprinkle in some vague ideas about gentrification and the divide between ‘city-folk’ and ‘country-folk’, but ultimately it’s way more interested in getting to the gore.
For what it’s worth, I actually enjoyed the hell out of it. It’s hardly groundbreaking, but it’s a lot of fun, and the way it sets itself up to be a Texas Chainsaw version of Blumhouse’s Halloween (2018), only to immediately wipe out a returning (and vengeful) Sally Hardesty — here played by Olwen Fouéré since the original actress, Marilyn Burns, tragically died in 2014 — once she finally arrives on the scene to take out her iconic nemesis is absolutely hilarious. Don’t get me wrong, I totally understand why it upset so many people, but it’s exactly the kind of bold, brash, and subversive ‘fuck you’ filmmaking I can’t help but applaud, and so the movie wins a lot of points with me simply for daring to be so damned dismissive of audience expectations and gleefully revel in its gory, over-the-top violence. In fact, it’s probably the first movie in the franchise (or, at least, in this timeline) to actually really deliver on the promise of the title. After all, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2022 genuinely does feature a full-blown massacre. With a chainsaw. In Texas. So… yeah!
But for all its delightfully grizzly set-pieces and unhinged refusal to play by the rules of belated sequels with returning legacy characters, it is also a film that continues to further the problematic trans aspects of the franchise, and while I can be pretty damned forgiving in a lot of these cases because historical context and basic logic allow me to understand why these things happen, here in 2022 it just feels that little bit more icky and troublesome. Like, they should have really known better, right? Leatherface’s transness is hardly an unexplored topic, after all (there are enough quotes and references in this piece alone to prove that, surely?), and it’s not like there isn’t a discourse surrounding “the complex ways in which the characters in transgender horror films are constructed as objects of fear” (Miller, L. J. 2017). The fact is, whether you choose to consider Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2022 as a continuation of the already established timeline, or as a reboot and direct sequel to Tobe Hooper’s 1974 original alone, either way, the character's transgender qualities are still recurrent, and even if they weren’t, the 2022 movie re-establishes them anyway!
When we first meet this iteration of Leatherface he is without mask, however — after a series of increasingly unfortunate events — the hulking antagonist quickly finds himself with a new face to wear. The face in question happens to be that of his new ‘mother’, Ginny (played by the Borg Queen herself, Alice Krige), and it is once he dons her skin that he truly erupts and proceeds to violently carry out the aforementioned massacre. It’s likely that the filmmakers simply wanted to ‘get him into character’ as fast as possible, and Krige’s body was the one easiest for him to access in order to do so, but the fact remains that this is yet another instance of Leatherface mutilating a woman’s body and then putting on her face, and the film does explicitly draw attention to this fact, with Nell Hudson’s Ruth’s horrified exclamation that “he’s wearing her face!”.
That alone is enough to bring back a lot of what we’ve already discussed, but the film then kind of goes one step further. Once he returns home, Leatherface — still wearing his new mask — sits down at Ginny’s dressing table and begins to apply make-up. Now, whether you care to admit it or not, this is clearly an example of Leatherface’s gender-bending qualities in action and, as we’ve already covered in great detail, this kind of thing will always wind up fuelling the problematic horror movie fire in which “trans [folk] are presented as abject beings — or anything that is considered gross because it is outside of the self” (Holtz, J. 2019).
That the film takes the time out to present us with this scene and then proceeds to so joyfully jump into the ensuing gorefest is really frustrating. One of the things I was most curious about when this particular Texas Chainsaw movie was announced was to see if and how they were going to handle this particular facet of the character in a modern context. Turns out the answer is that they’re going to do exactly the same thing as has already been done, and in doing so feed into a genuinely scary mindset that has only grown and become more popular in recent years.
Honestly, I’d have been more impressed if the film had opted to just ignore it completely, but to go out of its way to actively uphold this outdated representation is just… well, it fucking sucks! It’s a really sour note in what is an otherwise enjoyable splatter-fest that, as I’ve already said, I actually really liked. I’m not sure what the filmmaker’s reasons for including it were, but as it stands, that they chose to include this sequence in particular despite the fact that later in the film they show themselves to be more than willing to demolish established franchise expectations (killing off Sally Hardesty, and so brutally for that matter) doesn’t sit well.
The addition of the school shooting subplot doesn’t help matters, mind, especially since we’ve recently seen the tragic Texas shooting at Robb Elementary School lead to a direct conflation of transgenderism and violence, with the false claims that the shooter was trans even being “amplified by US politicians and political influencers, some of whom also more broadly linked transgenderism to violence” (Sardarizade, S. 2022). Admittedly, this is just a super unfortunate coincidence, since the tragedy occurred well after the film’s release, but it does exemplify part of the problem, and clearly illustrates just why these kinds of representations are such an issue to begin with. Moreover, the film itself draws a direct line between the very real-world issue of school shootings (‘merica, sort out your fucking guns!!!) and the violent onslaught brought on by Leatherface, with Elsie Fisher’s Lila suffering from the trauma of having survived a school shooting now faced with yet another massacre, and essentially overcoming said trauma by ‘defeating’ Leatherface. Much like the original’s claims to be inspired by a true event, this serves to openly and actively invite real-world comparisons.
Transness and trans representation in horror isn’t great. It’s a problem that — at least in terms of the films discussed here — seems to be inherent within the franchise as a whole, and it would appear that it shows no signs of changing. For the record, I adore the Texas Chainsaw films (especially the original, which is by far one of the most terrifying and engaging experiences I have ever had watching a film), and this element of them doesn’t change that. But it is disappointing. Trans representation in horror has a long and difficult history, and it is undeniably problematic. Even assertions by filmmakers themselves that these characters aren’t really trans, that they have been abused or forced to wear a ‘disguise’, or any number of other worrisome excuses that get thrown out, is just another part of “a harmful narrative about trans women where we are portrayed as either weak and passive, or as skin-wearing monsters” (Nelson, E. 2020).
Personally, I don’t really believe that there is any transphobic intent behind the scenes when it comes to Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2022, but that’s not really all that important. As a movie, it is one that adopts an outdated and dangerous trope, leaning into it for yuks. Like the rest of the franchise before it, it rolls Leatherface up into that confusing mess of ‘movie-trans’, where transness is ‘other’, and ‘other’ is bad. To quote Lucy J. Miller in her article Fear and the Cisgender Audience: Transgender Representation and Audience Identification in Sleepaway Camp, “the fear the audience experiences in transgender horror films reflects the cisgender lens through which the films are constructed and viewed, an approach that reinforces an ideology of cisnormativity’ (2017). Whether Leatherface is trans or not (and he demonstrably isn’t) doesn’t really come into play. In film terms, and therefore as audiences view it, there is no difference. Leatherface as trans is a complex topic in and of itself, but ultimately it still falls into the realms of problematic representation, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2022 does very, very little to attempt to change or even challenge that. In fact, it does nothing. It just upholds it.
It’s a shame to end on such a dour note, because the franchise itself is a piece of horror history, and deservedly so. But hopefully, in discussing these things from a place of love, I’ve helped to shed some light on just why the issues of representation (and specifically trans representation) matter when it comes to film. As the world becomes slowly more aware of the trans community and the problems we face, understanding how media — even beloved and brilliant media like The Texas Chainsaw franchise (yes, even schlocky nonsense like Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation) — has fuelled the fires of harmful rhetoric and dangerous ideologies can help us learn not to continue making the same mistakes in the future. And while, even by my own admission as the person who wrote all this, some of the readings here are a hell of a stretch, those things are still hidden away in the films in some shape or form (I mean, this was just a fun little exercise for me, and I was still able to pull them outta my ass) so shouldn’t be ignored or dismissed entirely. After all, if we really want progress, picking apart and critiquing things that feed the problem is key. Even if we love them. And these films, man… I do love them. They’re crazy, wild, weird, nightmarish, and insanely fun. ‘The Saw is Family’, as they say.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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