Horror films reflect societal fears, often in a very literal sense. Rosemary's Baby (1968) deals with contemporary societal fears of a loss of bodily autonomy and John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) reflects the "eerie discomfort" of suburban life. Some of the most strikingly violent of these societal fears seems to manifest in the conflict between rural and urban.
The most famous example of this phenomenon is Tobe Hooper's underground slasher The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). The film follows a group of Austin hippies who get massacred on a road trip through the countryside after encountering the Sawyers, a monstrous family of cannibals (though notably only one actually gets killed with a chainsaw). It illustrates the archetype of "backwoods horror" where urban people encounter rural spaces as a horrific underworld filled with backwards cannibalistic murderers.
The Sawyers' backstory has echoes of modern discussions of rural decline. They find themselves in their current condition of poverty and decay because their family slaughterhouse was shuttered. The Sawyers kill their victims with these slaughterhouse implements, using meat hooks and placing one of them in a large chest freezer typically used for animal meat. Their association with slaughterhouses indicates that the film perceives the inherent violence of that rural industry as a corrupting force, and with the slaughterhouse gone, those violent tendencies are turned towards instead wayward urbanites.
The Sawyers and other backwoods murderers also represent an antithesis of modernity in a way that is meant to horrify the (primarily urban or suburban) audience. In The Rural Gothic in American Culture, Bernice Murphy describes the chaotic clutter of the Sawyers home as an example of how they:
"like nothing better than to hoard junk that will then be strategically placed around their home in order to create an atmosphere of maximum creepiness…This focus upon the pack-rat sensibilities of the backwoods aggressor emphasizes the fact that mainstream American culture appears to find something inherently suspicious about the self-sufficiency of those who make their own belongings rather than buy mass-produced products in a store like ‘normal’ folks. The ‘make do and mend’ philosophy of those who recycle or salvage what others would throw out, though seen as admirable in narratives which emphasize ‘positive rurality’ (such as The Hunger Games trilogy and Walden) are here further markers of deviants."
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The Domain, Round Rock, Texas, where parts of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre were filmed. Image Source: creativecommons.org |
The Sawyers are so monstrous as to appear almost inhuman, with heavy makeup and costuming otherizing them from the rest of the cast. And their characterization does not reflect rural Texans in any real sense. In contrast, John Boorman's Deliverance (1972) at least treats its Appalachian villains as recognizably human. One of the most famous scenes in the film even involves a kind of cultural exchange, with one of the city dwellers engaging a local in a banjo contest.
Still, as a Guardian 50 year retrospective highlights, Boorman portrays the rural subjects as "ghoulish caricatures" who commit heinous acts of physical and sexual violence arbitrarily. The film treats them as part of the wild and untamed natural landscape. The urban dwellers, intending to conquer canoe down the wild Chattooga River, find themselves in over their heads because they fail to recognize the savagery of the area's rural occupants as a part of the landscape they intend to conquer.
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The Chattooga River, where Deliverance (1972) takes place. Image Source: creativecommons.org |
Both films tap into the urban/suburban audience's fear of rural spaces and people. Tobe Hooper emphasizes an inherent violence in rural industry redirected due to economic misfortune. Boorman portrays his rural subjects as wild and untamed as the Appalachian mountains they inhabit. And both films associate the divide between rural and urban with viscerally portrayed acts of violence. That they were both so financially successful and culturally significant speaks to a cultural perceptions of rural spaces as fundamentally apart from polite society.
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