The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

This was originally written for my cinema class in college.

The victims of the Tobe Hooper's 1974 made horror film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are five young hippies with their mini-van, horoscope book and humanistic behaviors. This is not just a coincidence for this horror film, because while victimizing the hippies the film focuses on hippie culture as a threat to the middle-class American society traditional values and hippie culture's relationship with the country life and working class.

American horror films are considered to focus on the fears of the conservative middle-class American society. Therefore, the victimization of the people who belong to the hippie culture in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is significant. Hippies are thought as a threat to the traditional values in the conservative capitalist American society. Their lifestyle and the values they support are challenging for the conservative minds of any society. They are against any kind of violence, especially wars, so they acted against most of the actions that USA took in its foreign politics, like the Vietnam War, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre tells its story in a post-Vietnam American society. In this society hippies were the problematic kids of the society that had become known with their movements against the Vietnam War, hence against the USA government which the American middle-class, with its traditional values, put their trust on. Hippies also believe in free bonds in sexual relationships which is a very big controversy for the American middle-class conservative people. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre we see this representation of the sexuality in hippie culture especially through the female characters of the film. Overall, the film's victimization of the young hippies can be thought as legitimate for someone that believe in traditional American middle-class values because hippies are bad kids that do not behave appropriate and create problems in their secure capitalist society.

In his film Tobe Hooper presents a contradictory perspective about hippie culture's relationship with the country life and working class. Another important aspect of the hippie culture is that their denial of the capitalist lifestyle. They criticize the capitalist values of the American society, which glorifies mass consumption in an unnatural city life, and put emphasis on natural and simple ways of living like a working class country person. On the other hand, hippies generally do live in a city but not in country areas and they are not from the working class. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this contradiction about the hippie culture is presented successfully. We learn that the Leatherface and his family had been workers in the slaughter house that had been owned by Sally and Franklyn's family; so our victims, who belong to the middle-class society and are hippies coming from a city life, travel to a country area, which they are going to meet working class people, for their vacation. However, throughout the film we see that they are aliens to the country. They do not know how to live in a country area; they have several difficulties on their vacation like finding gas and being disturbed by the insane hitchhiker who belongs to the working class. In the end, they even become the victims of the country because they are defeated by the working class people, Leatherface and his family. Therefore, the film over-emphasizes that those hippies do not belong to the country and have no association with how the working class people live.

In conclusion, in his 1974 film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Tobe Hooper chooses hippies as the victims of his horror film. They are great as a victim choice for a horror film because they have clashing values with the traditional, conservative, capitalist American middle-class society. In addition, Tobe Hooper shows a conflicting issue about the hippie culture that actually has its roots from the cities and middle-class people but supporting a natural country-like lifestyle and working class which according to his representation they do not belong at all.