Texas Chainsaw Massacre

According to Williams, heavy and gratuitous sex, violence, and emotion are elements of the excessiveness that pornography, melodrama and horror share. She defines the “body genre” to be films that are based on excessive or “gross” display of the human body. Williams points out features of the body genre: there has to be a spectacle body (more often than not a female body) with intense sensation or emotion, which gives a bodily ecstasy where women bodies are often represented as embodiment of pleasure, fear, and pain. There’s also a lack of proper aesthetic distance, which as Williams argues makes the audience feel manipulated by the sensation and emotion, like the “tear-jerker” in melodramas and “fear-jerker” in horrors, while all the sensations and emotions are rooted in / bring the audience back to different psychoanalytical fantasies (211). She also discusses the different temporalities in the three genres, where the fantasy of horror, corresponding to the fear of castration, is “too early” and unprepared.

Really every horror film can be a direct example of this concept. Just thinking about the first appearance of Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Pam breaks into the unlocked house which is covered by dust and bone, and the chicken; the music and the fast shifting camera angle are all setting up for this one moment, but when Leatherface storms out from the room to capture Pam, I still jumped. The image of a helpless women or man victim, and the existence of a monstrous almost inhuman figure who is capable of using all kinds of phallic weapons to torture and make women scream, together triggers the two layers of the fear for castration.

Clover focuses on gender representation and female bodies in relation with identification in slasher films. Interesting enough, she states that the relationship between the victim and the killer represents that of the director and the audience, male and female. In slasher films, the killer is usually male, while the victim is usually beautiful, sexually active woman. As Hitchcock says, “Torture the women!”, the torture of female body is the most essential to this sub-genre, while the male victims are always eliminated much more quickly. De Palma states that started from Perils of Pauline, women in danger work better for the suspense genre, which is probably connected to the element of Final Girl in the end of every slasher film, who manages to survive and lives to tell the tale. The existence of a developed female main character is something unique about slasher film, and overthrows Mulvey’s formula of gender-based identification in traditional cinema. Clover argues that “masculinity and femininity are more states of mind than body” (513). Because there is no identifiable male character, cross-gender identification is made possible for male character to identify with the Final Girl, who is the only developed character that lives to the end. Identification is enabled by the usage of I-camera and stabilized by hand-held camera, which usually signifies authentication. In many films, such as Friday the 13^th, the audience first identify/sympathize with the killer by learning his histories through his I-camera. The identification shift to the Final Girl as the POV changes to her side when she encounters the monster. Of course, the monsters as the Other cannot be constructed as traditionally masculine but has to be portrayed as feminine or inhuman under the masculine/feminine binary to be able to threaten normal masculinity, while the final girl is naturally masculinized to enhance possible identification. Unlike conventional Hollywood female characters, the Final Girl bares an active gaze to look for the monster and to look at him, then finally to kill him. She uses the weapons that are usually phallic symbols, which allows her to share the masculinity (and gender oppression) with the killer. Such development of the Final Girl’s character is then in its core a masculinizing process, because the sole purpose of such process is to eliminate the fear of castration by giving the female character a weapon, bared with masculine power, to kill the monster who is the Other and the embodiment of castration fear. Besides the masculinized nature of the Final Girl, Clover also points out that the male audience can identify with the Final Girl’s pain and fear based on his own masochistic experience (and fear of castration). 

In Texas Chainsaw Massacre, structure of the Final Girl falls under “ending A” as Clover categorizes since the monster is not killed in the end. Sally barely escapes with the help of other male character and without hurting Leatherface at all. That is only reasonable as she is not as active as other Final Girls like Nancy of Nightmare on Elm Street or Sidney in the Scream series; through the end of the film, all she does is trying to run away from Leatherface and hitchhiker, being reactive instead of proactive.