The Beginning Brings the Horror of War
In 1974, Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel unwittingly set in motion one of the most prominent franchises the horror genre has ever seen with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It was a nerve-shredding indie movie that focused on atmosphere as opposed to on-screen gore, a simple but very effective production that required a lot of blood, sweat and tears from the people who made it. The nine other movies in the series to date have delivered an incredible range of scares, tones and styles, and one of the most frequently criticized if not completely forgotten is the prequel to the 2004 remake, titled The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning.
What Is 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning' About?
The struggle of the everyman is made central from the opening scene: in 1939, a young woman goes into a traumatic labor in the stinking humid Texas slaughterhouse she works at. So limited are her rights that all she can think to do is plead to her boss for a bathroom break. She does not survive the delivery, and the boss leaves her deformed baby in the slaughterhouse dumpster, where it is found by a local woman scavenging for meat scraps. This scene sets out a lot of harsh truths about this place and time: people are working literally to death, bosses are savage, and some are dumpster diving just to avoid starvation.
Flash forward to 1969, where two brothers are at a motel, preparing to enlist for the Vietnam War. Eric (Matt Bomer) is about to return for his second tour, and is playing soldiers in the communal pool, exhilarated at the thought of going back to war, much to the exasperation of his hippie girlfriend Chrissie (Jordana Brewster). His younger brother Dean (Taylor Handley) is in his room, desperately trying to relax enough to enjoy the amorous attention of his girlfriend Bailey (Diora Baird). In private, the couple discuss their plans to skip the country in order for Dean to dodge the draft. Problem is that the poor kid can’t bear to admit this to his patriotic older brother, and the anxiety is eating him up.
Politics Divides a Family
On their road trip to enlistment, the youngsters bump heads with the customary rednecks at a diner, where a biker chick decides that she will follow and threaten them, as movie-bikers do. While she is catching up with them, Dean is in the backseat cracking, and sets fire to his draft card. His brother catches him in the act, and is infuriated at the idea of his kid brother being a coward who hates America. Dean - clearly the sensitive kid of the family - argues back, that he has seen the trauma his brother faces as a result of war, that he has heard him screaming in the night, and challenges Eric, “how could you want that for me?” At this young age, politics is already dividing a family, and both men have good reasons for feeling the ways they do.
Meanwhile, in the dusty stretches of Texan nothingness lives the Hewitt family, a humble bunch of folks with little education, few teeth and a taste for human flesh. And naturally, they are the type to inflict brutal torture on their fellow man, and declare it God’s will. They are the folks who adopted the slaughterhouse baby thirty years earlier, and today, the abattoir is being condemned, but Thomas, aka Leatherface, although he is never addressed as such (Andrew Bryniarski), is a simple fellow whose focus doesn’t extend beyond brute force. And if he has no more meat to butcher, he will just have to find a new outlet for his physical potency. When Tommy murders the slaughterhouse boss, and the single remaining police officer in this fastly crumbling town visits his Pop about it, it turns out that Hewitts don’t take too kindly to outside interference. The old man (R. Lee Ermey) murders the sheriff and assumes his identity, becoming the supposed figurehead of authority in a ghost town.
Authority Becomes a Key Issue Here - But Is It Used For Good or Bad?
But don’t be fooled; Sheriff is a man of principles. He happens upon the kids, whose car has been wrecked and are being held at gunpoint by the biker chick, he shoots her dead without hesitation. Now ensues a compelling power play that explores the impacts of authority. At first things seem strangely too good to be true for the kids: they were being violently threatened, and law enforcement intervened, but in a way that was clearly excessive force. How do they feel about it? What do they do now? The youngsters are injured, Bailey seriously so, and yet the Sheriff orders them out of the wreck at gunpoint.
Being a soldier and therefore too trusting in authority figures, Eric does his best to reason with Sheriff, using his words delicately and calling him “Sir” a lot, sure that this must be some misunderstanding. But unsurprisingly, this blind obedience is exactly the effect Sheriff is hoping to achieve, and it only opens Eric up to much more torment. Torment that is exacerbated when he does the heroic thing and claims to be the card-burner, to divert the maniac’s attention away from his younger brother. Bailey and the boys are herded into the cop car and driven back to the Hewitt residence, while Chrissie looks on from the roadside, and is faced with the desperate prospect of finding help, on foot, in the middle of rural Texas.
The Vietnam War and Its Role in the Lives of Youngsters
The war in Vietnam was integral to the lives young people carved out for themselves in the sixties. Their parents had lived during war and many had fought too, and the generation was marked by an attitude that life was about hard graft, doing your duty and swallowing down any sense of individuality. So when the baby boomers had their very own war with which to prove their fortitude and dedication to the flag, parents and society in general expected youngsters to recognize this obligation and rise to the occasion, just as they had years earlier. However, these young people were living during an era of counterculture, of spirituality and exploration and a distinct sense of self, and when Timothy Leary declared that the youth should “turn on, tune in, drop out,” and “question authority,” it seemed all hope of good old American integrity was lost.
So it makes sense that a humble Southern fellow like the Sheriff would have very firm views on allegiance to one’s country. When he finds the burned remains of Dean’s draft card, he is incensed, and decides to take this opportunity, and his newly assumed position of power, to show these kids what happens to those who betray their country. To dodge the draft is an insult of the highest order, a betrayal of the Americanism that is supposed to define and unify them all. These people are barely even people to him, so far removed from who he is as a person that they may as well be animals. This makes them much easier to kill.
Both Young Men are Incapable of Helping Until it Is Too Late
Bailey musters the strength to challenge the Sheriff’s tactics, something the more foolhardy young people of the time often did, much to their own detriment. Dean keeps his head down, reminding everyone, especially his brother, just how unsuited he is to the ravages of war. For now, his pacifistic nature prevents his escape. Eric’s blind loyalty to authority figures, meanwhile, means he can’t bring himself to question an obviously dodgy situation. In their own ways, both the young men are incapable of helping themselves until it is too late. Sheriff has a power over everybody he comes across: it is he who encourages Tommy’s violence, he who forces an excruciating amputation on a family member. This same family member comes across Bailey, bound and begging for help, only to skulk off unperturbed, insisting he doesn’t get involved in Sheriff’s business.
The fallout of war really lends an additional dimension to the horror of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. Before they ever encounter the Hewitt family, the kids have a lot on their mind. Eric is jazzing himself up for another tour of duty, while Dean is busy making plans to run away, and the girls helplessly watch on. They are being told they owe a debt to society, one that the men should accept and the women should encourage. As they battle these existing societal pressures, the danger they find themselves in is contingent on the war too. Had both the boys been gung-ho American soldiers, would Sheriff still treat them the way he does, or would he have deemed them more worthy of survival? Would things turn out differently if Eric didn’t bow to authority in the way that he does? Had all sense of etiquette and manners gone out the window, would they survive through sheer determination?
The Remake and its Prequel Took the Violence to the Next Level
The TCM remake signaled a big stylistic diversion from the original, in that gore was now front-and-center, rather than being masked by strategic camera angles and frenetic editing. A particularly stunning sequence from the 2004 remake is a long shot of the young friends’ horrified reaction to the hitchhiker putting a gun in her mouth; the camera pulls back, through the gunshot wound, and out the back of the van, in one smooth motion. This early scene underpins a newfound focus on the violence, one that the prequel takes and runs with. It graphically details such horrors as a spontaneous double-leg amputation via chainsaw, and Leatherface’s acquisition of a new face to wear. It is definitely geared towards the millennial generation of horror, where its forefather took a somewhat Hitchcockean approach to its visuals.
The Beginning carries over from the original that sweltering, sun-bleached feeling of the suffocatingly spacious Texan outback, a look the makers wanted to evoke “the decay of the American dream.” This is an idea that the movie explores in both its visuals and in its narrative themes. You can practically smell the rotting flesh and chewing tobacco. Like the original, it manages to make the daytime scary - in Texas, no one can hear you scream. The shining star in this dingy world is R. Lee Ermey as Sheriff. He is absolutely splendid as the casually cruel patriarch whose personal moral contradictions cause him no loss of sleep. Ermey’s performance often tilts the material into black comedy, which from a lesser actor could ruin the atmosphere of the film, but here emphasizes the character’s taunting contempt for his victims.
This film cannot be discussed without mention of the ending, which bucks the prominent Final Girl trend that the 1974 movie facilitated. Chrissie has escaped the Hewitt house in a stolen car, and as she drives for her life, she sees a police car making a traffic stop on the road ahead. Salvation is near. Then, out of nowhere - and in an admittedly illogical twist - Leatherface appears on the backseat, thrusting his whirring saw through the driver seat and into Chrissie, and in the panic, they wipe out the police officer and civilian on the road. In one fell swoop, every witness to the Hewitt crimes has been killed. Leatherface lurches from the wreck of the car and starts to wander back home, oblivious to the surrounding carnage. Done. No victorious escape, no survivors. To some, this may hit as a cheap twist ending that will catch the audience off guard and make for a memorable conclusion (which it certainly does), but this ending arguably hammers home the hopelessness that the entire movie has been exploring. Late ‘60s America for young people was, in many ways, as desolate a wasteland as the scene of that final car crash: devastation all around, and no glimpse of hope on the horizon.
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