Research

Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Great Texas Dynamite Chase, Jackson County Jail

"The meat hook mama, the nice girl, 

and Butch Cassidy in drag" by Mary Mackey

(Jump Cut, no. 14, 1977)

This article sets out to answer the following questions:

• Why are violent films so popular?
• Why are films that contain violence towards women the most popular of all?

"-although every member of the party meets with violence, the nature of the violence is not equally distributed. Two of the men in the film—Kurt and Jerry—are given simple, quick deaths. Leatherface simply steps out from behind a door, and knocks them on the head with a meat mallet before they know what’s happened. Although Franklin (the most effeminate of the male characters) is sawed up alive, his death takes place in the dark and, for the most part, off screen. Something far worse and far more graphic is reserved for the women, Pam and Sally." (Mary Mackey on Texas Chainsaw Massacre)

The article discusses valid points relating to the violence towards women in films, and how the women are displayed as having "the most brutal deaths" in the horror film, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It is true that there is great significance in the fact that the male characters are given the "simple quick deaths" whereas the audience does not to begin to question why when the woman is brutally tortured. 

 "-CHAINSAW MASSACRE shifts from being a film about violence in the United States in general to a film which, for the most part, concerns itself with the varieties of violence men perpetrate against women."

I think that the way Mackey discusses how the film portrays violence is also valid as it is clear that the way "Leatherface hangs Pam alive on a meat hook, Women have often complained that films... have treated them like hunks of meat. But rarely has sexual objectification... been so blatant." This shows that there could also be a connection between violence towards women and sexual objectification.