ttto

i didn't expect it to be this funny.

act I:
extremely normal horror. teens in a van. they go out to visit the homestead that some of them grew up in. one by one they knock on the door of a nearby house and get murdered. my favorite horror question "why do these guys stick around when it's scary?" doesn't even come into play. they show up to the door and are immediately killed in a shower of violence.

two things about this violence:

first, it is very practical. this murder family delights in doing it, definitely, but it is not torturous. second, the exact action of violence is never on screen.

[descriptions of violence in whitetext]
you see a woman lifted onto a meathook, but you never see it enter her back.
you see the back of one of the kids as an enormous man stands over him. the man brings his hammer across and the kid twists around, like a theater slap.
from behind, you see the chainsaw lower past someone's shoulder; his chest obscures most of the blade. you see a shower of blood.

i hear the film was cut with the director expecting a PG rating from the MPAA, which is, uh, insane? a PG rating? they didn't even go for PG-13.

that the violence is practical does not make it easier to watch. that the violence is never precisely shown does nothing to soften it. in fact it might even make it worse. there's nothing "icky," very little viscera to make you feel other feelings. it's simply whatever feeling it is that intense violence engenders. it is deeply horrifying.

interlude:
one girl escapes and gets re-caught by a guy you didn't realize was part of the murder family. they chain her up at the end of their dinner table and the best part of the movie happens.

act II:
this is now a tiny family drama about the most minute family politics and power dynamics these murderers have going on.

keith johnstone writes how he went out to see a play, and everyone had chosen the strongest possible motives for their acting choices. he hated it. he came back and instructed all his drama students to find the most slight differences in status, the tiniest inflections, to motivate their actions, and found it was great. "hysterically funny, but at the same time very alarming," he wrote.

this is doing exactly that, and it does it so well. each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and this family is no different! they just happen to be about bones and meat and murder.

and it's so funny! johnstone's adjective "hysterical" is accurate in all its meanings. seeing the family cook chase around leatherface with a broken broom handle? this guy has just been murdering people with the chainsaw that's on the wall right there! but this family is this family—it wouldn't be different if he had the chainsaw in his hands.

you find that this family used to work in the nearby industrial slaughterhouse—the people who wielded the sledge hammers to stun cattle before exsanguination. the grandfather, a near-immobile desiccated corpse (a man in a mask so clearly plastic that it took me out of the movie for a second) was the last of this fine trade.

this murder family seems to have so completely conflated killing animals with work (with pay with life with purpose) and rightness that, when industrial captive bolt pistol slaughtering (the thing anton uses in no country for old men) cut out all those middle words, they continue on trying to get back to the worthy life of killing cattle. killing people via meat instruments is still a thing they call "work" in their dinner conversation. i'm pretty sure they consider it noble. certainly they're compelled to do it.

horror is a genre of dream-logic, and this dream-logic works so well for me. it's such a ken kesey plot, but with the drama turned down to its smallest and the effect turned up to being its most awful and least universal. this murder family will have no effect on the greater world, ever. that doesn't make this any easier to watch.

in what i think is the climax of the movie, the youngest of the murder family presses a hammer into his grandfather's hand, urging him to kill the last teen to re-live his glory days as a slaughterer. he lifts it, but grandpa's too weak to hold the hammer—it falls into the bloodcatching bucket. the youngest picks it up again. grandpa drops it again. it's a shockingly funny scene. it just keeps going, grandpa dropping the hammer and the youngest putting it back in his hands. it goes on long enough that it stops being funny and then long enough again that it gets funny again. it's a full minute long. they can't stop.

finally our last teen gets free, runs into the road, and gets once again caught. the murder youth that caught her is pancaked by a truck, reprising its role from almost hitting the van in the beginning of the film. again: comedy, slapstick-style. AND it's maybe the most overt piece of violence in the film, holy shit? you see him get run over.

leatherface, the older murder sibling, almost gets the teen with the chainsaw, but the driver of the truck comes (badly, unwisely) to her rescue. the teen waves down a pickup and climbs into its truckbed. she's screaming so hard she's laughing, which is, yep! that's how i feel. it was funny. i'm don't think i'm watching this ever again