When the Saw is Family: A Texan Perspective on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2

by Steve Roberts

I was born and raised in Dallas, Texas, the countrypolitan, poor/rich home of pointy-toed boots and oil money. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 begins not far from here, with a couple of preppy pricks driving to Dallas to watch the yearly UT/OU match, the Red River Rivalry at the Cotton Bowl. Though it’s stated that Buzz and Rick are high school seniors, they very much feel like silver spoon Austinites who go to UT, driving too fast down a two-lane highway in a Merc Coupe, drinking Shiner Bock and shooting at road signs. In the original Chainsaw Massacre, hippies were the culture everyone was sick of. In the sequel, it’s yuppies.

The plot gets going when the Sawyers (Leatherface and his brothers Drayton “Cook” and Chop-Top, played by Bill Johnson, Jim Siedow, and Bill Moseley) kill the two preps, then track down the small radio station they called into while being murdered. The two station workers, LG Peters and Vanita “Stretch” Brock (god, the Texan accuracy of these names) both end up at the Sawyers’ underground hideout beneath an abandoned amusement park. This is also where they make their renowned chili out of their victims. The uncle of some of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s victims, played by Dennis Hopper, is an obsessed Texas Ranger who hunts down the Sawyers and has a chainsaw duel with Leatherface before he and the Sawyer clan are blown up and buried underground. Stretch is chased by the surviving Chop-Top, who she finally kills with a chainsaw. Afterwards she spins around manically, blood-covered and victorious, in homage to Leatherface’s famous bloodlust twirl. 

TCM2 has always been more of a black comedy than a horror film, which probably explains why the kill count is a paltry 8 and most of those are members of the Sawyer family who sort of kill themselves. The bloodiest scene was cut for time, where the Sawyers kill a parking garage full of rioting football fans. In it, Cook Sawyer calls out to the gullible group, “Any of you little weasels want a croissant?” It’s like you need Texan to English subtitles for this film, and the lost in translation parts are to me by far the funniest. Tobe Hooper had already made what was considered a terrifying, unsettling slasher the first time around and had no interest in simple repetition. 

As I have rewatched this movie over the years it’s become clear to me that Leatherface is not the villain of the picture. Instead it’s his brother Chop-Top, the gleefully murderous Vietnam vet with a metal plate in his skull. Everything Chop-Top does is menacing and accompanied by a shit-eating grin. At one point he heats up a coat hanger with a lighter to scratch his scalp along the plate, then eats the dead skin. This act of auto-cannibalism is the grossest and most profoundly upsetting moment in the movie, and this is a movie where a man is skinned alive. Maybe it’s because his portrayal of a toxic hippie (predating our nationwide hatred of Austin hipsters) is miles over the top, yet his leering towards Stretch at her place of business is a common and understandable horror for many women. It always makes my flesh crawl when he beams with his twisted, toothy smile, flashes the peace sign and groans “Music is my life!”

Leatherface is depicted here more so than in any of the other Chainsaw movies as a simple-minded guy driven to murder by his psychotic family. In the original, as well as most sequels, the hulking disfigured Leatherface is more willful, and delights in violence as much as the rest of his kin. In TCM2, he actively avoids violence, only chasing and attacking when bidden to by Chop-Top and his older brother Cook (who may instead be his father; this franchise has the most confusing family tree ever written). Rather than vicious, Leatherface is more like a tiger: dangerous, but not evil. A tiger kills because it is innate to its being. You can’t blame a tiger for killing, and it’s tough to feel malice towards Leatherface in this picture.

Adding to the “gentle giant” portrayal of Leatherface is the implied subplot of his crush on Stretch. First of all, who can blame him? Caroline Williams is a quintessential example of a “scream queen”: She’s a talented actress with a good sense of humor, cool costuming, a tough disposition, an amazing voice for screaming, and, sorry to be this way, a great pair of legs. They happen to be a plot point in the infamous ice scene, in which Leatherface, wildly gesticulating with his chainsaw, stabs it again and again into a cooler full of ice in between Stretch’s spread, wet legs. She prevents Leatherface from slicing her by asking him if he’s “good,” while he nervously caresses her thigh with the turned-off blade. As a Youtube commenter states, she saves her own life by appealing to Leatherface’s praise kink. He then hides her from harm at the abandoned amusement park by giving her a mask made out of LG’s face. What a charmer.

Even though people are hacked and flayed and partially decapitated, I have never felt so at home in the world of a movie, and I want to just soak up all the barbecue smoke and stay here forever. It is somewhat embarrassing to admit that this film is like home to me, a lived-in space that I can feel and remember. The heavily decorated radio station looks like East Dallas record stores that are still around today, and the amusement park reminds me of Six Flags Over Texas, my childhood amusement park. You can’t control where you’re from, after all, and this is where I’m from. 

There’s a photo of my family three generations back standing outside their farm in East Texas. All are in their Sunday best, the men in three piece suits, the ladies in prairie skirts and blouses. But the amazing thing about the photo is everyone is standing in bare feet because of the deep mud around them. Fancy and barefoot—the very image of a Texan in general. No matter how rich or refined you are, your accent, sun-baked skin, and the wild glint in your eye will always tip off others to your hick origin. This special ingredient, this Texan-ness, is what makes the Sawyer family transfixing, whereas other monstrous movie killers are like Friday the 13th’s Jason, no fun, or Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy, not threatening enough. The Sawyer line, the Texan line, has always been somewhere in the middle.

The critic Leonard Maltin once contrasted Tobe Hooper with legendary director Alfred Hitchcock. With Hitchcock, he said, you were scared because the director was a master puppeteer, making you feel, see, hear exactly what he wanted when he wanted it. With Hooper, it was like the director himself was a maniac; the audience was scared because they had no idea what would happen next. In the original Massacre, there’s often no suspense whatsoever. One moment you’re standing there and the next a chainsaw is bursting through the wall. 

In many ways Hooper’s “maniac” approach in the first film was wholly unique in contemporary cinema of the day. It could be argued that 1974’s Massacre was also perhaps the first film to be called a “slasher.” And in ’86, Hooper was one of the first to create the other standard of the slasher genre: the sequel. TCM2 was meant to be Hooper’s satirization of the popular John Hughes teen romances of the time. The only remnant of this idea, unless you want to do a perverse reading of Leatherface’s awkward, appalling romantic gestures toward Stretch, is the amazing movie poster copying the iconic poses of The Breakfast Club.

So yes, this movie is highly unusual, as we have come to expect from Hooper, who’s always been more interested in uncharted waters than conventional storytelling. And why shouldn’t he be? He’s a Texan director, and as with Wes Anderson or Richard Linklater, that comes with a naturally quirky way of seeing the world. Come to think of it, my favorite films of theirs, Bottle Rocket and Slacker, are also deeply drenched in Texan patina. And because TCM2 was written by Texans, acted mostly by Texans, and designed in glorious fashion by Texans, the film is full of spitting on the ground, finding human teeth in chili, and other brutal, artful nonsense. It’s also got a killer soundtrack by Oingo Boingo, Lords of the New Church, the Cramps, Concrete Blonde, and Roky Erickson from the 13th Floor Elevators. Almost every shot is lightly tinged red, like the movie is under a heat lamp at a Whataburger.

Near the end of the film Drayton, upon realizing Leatherface is sweet on Stretch, tells him, “You have one choice, boy: sex or the saw. Sex is, well, nobody knows. But the saw, the saw is family!” Leatherface chooses the saw, perhaps begrudgingly, and dies by it. The Sawyers from TCM2 don’t for one minute hide from what they truly are. They revel in it, and there’s honor to that. To quote a popular saying down here, you dance with the girl that brung ya. Even if that girl is wearing somebody else’s face.

“I gotta say, I love this town. This town loves prime meat!” 
—Drayton Sawyer, on the residents of Dallas, Texas

I like that being a Texan is associated with barbecue. There’s something so immediate and overpowering about the first bite of a smoked brisket or a rib dripping with thick sauce—the flavor is so heady and tangy and overall rich. It is one of the most pleasing flavors and yet, eventually it becomes too much, too sweet or too pungent to continue eating. It’s a decent metaphor; for better or worse, Texans are just more than other people. Hence the big hats, the turquoise belt buckles, the “bigger the hair, the closer to God” attitude. A Texan offends more prudish sensibilities because they’ll grab you in a big handshake and yell in your ear. A Texan of any type, from a West Texas dust farmer to an Austinite influencer to a Laredo Tejano fanatic, is above all else determined to have a good time.

Maybe that’s why, rather than seeing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 as simply a twisted masterpiece about demented hillbilly cannibals who make award winning chili (two years in a row!), it will always be a warm pot of gooey red nostalgia for me.

Steve Roberts is a writer and poet living in East Dallas. He works as a mediator for a teacher's union in Texas. His most recent poems have been published in Voicemail Poems and Neurological Magazine.