The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Film That Terrified a Rattled Nation

This cultural history from critic Lanza (Phallic Frenzy: Ken Russell and His Films) is focused in its specifics and clever in its conceit. Surveying the American cultural landscape of the early 1970s through the lens of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 horror film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Lanza portrays the era as one of turmoil, rapid change, and violence. Lanza profiles real-life analogues to the film’s psychopath villains, including the San Francisco Bay Area’s never-caught Zodiac Killer and Houston’s Dean Corll, “the Candy Man.” He also examines the zeitgeist more broadly with chapters on Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal, changing conceptions of family based around the work of Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, and even the relaxing of obscenity laws and the mainstreaming of pornography with 1972’s Deep Throat. Lanza finds many rich connections between these trends and Hooper’s movie, some literal—for instance, that it was released by the same mob-connected company responsible for that earlier porno hit. Others are more abstract, such as Lanza’s reflection on how the film’s two families—one besieged and hapless, the other unstable and violent—relate to Laing’s theories. This is a smartly written, well-structured survey worth the attention of both horror film fans and sociologists. (May)