From 23 to 25 September 2024, thanks to Midnight Factoryone of the founders of the horror genre returns to theaters – for the first time in 4K. Fifty years have passed since its release, but Don’t open that door (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre1974) of Tobe Hooper remains one of the films slasher most challenging ever.
If the most gruesome sequences continue to test the viewer’s eyes, everything that precedes them fuels the film’s horrific charge. A group of five students is crossing the streets of Texas on an August day to reach the house, now abandoned, of the grandfather of two of them. There, in that sunny place but made labyrinthine by nature, the horror will begin. The shots in which the protagonists walk uncertainly through the arid and unkempt landscape of the Texan suburbs present a dimension far from the big centers. Far from being narratives outside of contemporaneity, however, horror films have often been able to tell of the hardships, injustices and contradictions of societies considered more civilized. From the possibility that monsters could be born in places that the American dream has only grazed, comes the threat of films like Don’t open that door.
The United States of the Seventies and the “Backwoods” films
Don’t open that door established the tropes of a horror subgenre that has never faded. The “Backwoods Brutality” strand includes the slasher set in rural contexts, where the protagonists almost always lose their lives due to brutal crimes. Despite its versatility, a few elements are enough to outline a film of this genre: carefree young people traveling to desolate lands where life seems to have stopped; service stations as a last stop before theescalation; an evil that is not supernatural but disturbingly human. The favorite settings are often the southern United States, whose suburbs look like faded Edward Hopper paintings, emptier and quieter. In those places, the promises of prosperity of the post-war period have left only a few traces, making the margin a place permeated by resentment. If the war in Vietnam, the presidency of Nixon and the Watergate scandal constitute the photograph of the United States in the Seventies, the crimes committed by ordinary people in the most forgotten areas are its negative image.
One world, two faces
In Don’t open that door the encounter between the five young protagonists and the Sawyer family is the clash of two realities. On one side, city kids who have only a picturesque childhood memory of the suburbs. On the other, a father and his two sons whose growth in the countryside meant being locked in a cage made of bones that swallows anyone who comes near. Starting from this opposition, Hooper deconstructs every illusion: the sunlight is not comforting, but confusing and blinding; the white farmhouse is not a comfortable domestic hearth, but the degeneration of the much-desired suburban life. Sally (Marilyn Burns), the only survivor of the group, is not a final girl who rejoices in her escape, because she will be forever marked by what she has seen. The violence of the film comes from what remains of a segment of society left to rot under a scorching sun that was not intended to illuminate it.
Another margin
Another trip, another gas station, another place that would have been better left untouched. Unlike Don’t open that doorwe are in Nevada. The large Carter family is the protagonist of The hills have eyes (The Hills Have Eyes1977) of Wes Craven: no longer a farmhouse, but a trailer; no longer the arid Texan prairies, but a desert and its hills. The one who attempts to kill the Carters is a family of cannibals who live right among the desert reliefs. If the Sawyers’ bodies were already deformed, those of Papa Jupiter (James Whitworth) and his children are carriers of an even wider trauma. The cannibals, in fact, are deformed because of the nuclear tests that the government has conducted in the places they inhabit. The hills have eyes the violence of savages is not the result of chance, but of a system that transforms victims into executioners.
When Little Red Riding Hood Brings the Wolf Home
The case of The Woman (Lucky McKee2011) is, in some respects, the reverse of those considered above, because this time the stranger is brought, against her will, into the civilized world. During a hunting trip, successful lawyer Chris Cleek (Sean Bridgers) comes across the last survivor of a tribe of cannibals (Pollyanna McIntosh). Chris chains her up and takes her to his house, located in a green neighborhood inhabited by wealthy families. With the intent of “civilizing” her, the man keeps the woman locked in the cellar, but, with an “other” and female body at his disposal, he and his son Brian (Zach Rand) begin to perpetrate all sorts of abuses. The Womanhowever, is the sequel to Offspring (2009), in which it was the cannibal who was the danger. In a scheme from revenge moviethe torturer-victim axis will overturn, calling into question every rigid dualism.
Behind the scenes
The stories behind the making of cult films, especially horror films, are often extremely interesting. X: A Sexy Horror Story (X, You West2022) is perhaps the most peculiar of the recent examples of “Backwoods Brutality”. The reason why the young people of the moment set out on a journey, in fact, is precisely the making of a film. Where? In the Texan countryside of the late Seventies. The charm of Xwhich pays great homage to the genre, lies in its ability to place familiar stylistic devices in a narrative that, at the same time, surpasses them. The decaying farmhouse is, once again, the center towards which the protagonists converge before being swallowed up. It is inhabited by an elderly couple, Howard (Stephen Ure) e Pearl (Mia Goth). Although the appearance reveals a certain degradation, it is not in two similar figures that one would expect to find murderous ferocity. The inexplicable violence is here observed closely through the symmetry between Pearl and Lorraine, the young protagonist played, not by chance, by Mia Goth. Two women from different generations but driven by the same desire for growth. The difference is that only one of them can still achieve it.
The reasons behind the old woman’s actions are explored further by West in the prequel Pearl (2022). During the Great War, the young woman lives in the same place where she is met, now aged, in X. The appearance, however, is very different: in the dreamy aesthetics of the Hollywood Golden Age, the farmhouse is sparkling, the lawn lush and the sky blue. Pearl’s home appears as the “before” of all those places of rural horror that, in the present of a changed society, are now obsolete. Despite this small Garden of Eden, her life is anything but peaceful. While Howard is at the front, Pearl lives with her paralyzed father and her very strict mother, but it is the world of entertainment that she dreams of. The girl’s desires for advancement will collide with reality, leading her to develop a psychosis that will make her a murderer.
Horror to the present
Don’t open that doorin addition to having set a precedent, has started an entire franchiseas well as other cult titles. If this confirms the timelessness of certain conventions, it is also true that the originals are not replicable. It is not a question of the lack of an innovative genius, but of a specific cultural and political climate that has now changed. If this film returns to the cinema after half a century, it means that it still has something to say. Violence against the female body and mind and the relationship between man and nature and his fellow men are just some of the ideas that make the “Backwoods Brutality” genre strongly political. In the face of complex current events, such lucid films – even if masked by the genre – can still teach us to look with suspicion at easy readings of contemporary reality.