APOCALYPTIC THEMES

            According to the book Projected Fears by Kendall Phillips “apocalyptic visions need not express a literal end of the world but may entail a sense of the inevitable decay and demise of broad social structures and order.”(111) Phillips says, and I agree, that horror movies of the 70s started to grow darker and darker and for him movies like The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre can be considered a horror movie with apocalyptic undertones with subject matters dealing with the devil coming to Earth through a little girl and a mentally deranged family living in a decomposing society where there is no order or visual hope for escape. He claims these tones that movies like these have, have a somewhat pessimistic world view and in the movies with the apocalyptic theme or undertones came about a critique of the modern culture of the 1970s which had America’s general public living in an age of paranoia with the ongoing war in Vietnam.

            The Vietnam War, which many Americans were against, led people to turn against our country and government by means of protests and it made our country’s attitude turn sour and it “eroded American faith in the presidency and the federal government.” (Phillips, 107) This change in the outlook on our establishments came in full force with the Watergate scandal and Nixon resigning in 1974. This is when the people of America starting getting paranoid and became a world living in fear. Along with the general distrust for the government another breakdown was happening which was the average American family, which almost every household followed into, was not so ordinary anymore with divorce rates growing and growing and the now grown up “flower children” had so much distrust for traditional standards that they feared having kids themselves. All of these mood changes and culture swings helped led to the creations of many horror films with “apocalyptic narratives”.

George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead which was released in 1968 is an obvious film that has an apocalyptic narrative and its movies like The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, released in 1973 and 1974 respectively; that Phillips thinks only suggest an apocalyptic narrative. The Exorcist can be considered to be suggesting it more so than Texas Chainsaw because of its literal dealings with the devil and revelations. Exorcist still has that presence of a diminishing social structure with the movies main focus being on a family with a single parent or the fact that the cop in the movie can do nothing to save Regan so there is no order on a that level. On the religious level of order there is a constant battle throughout the whole movie. The battle between good and evil which the evil devil seems to be winning throughout the movie until the very end which can even be interpreted as not being a true victory over evil with Father Karras meeting his demise in the process of trying to save Regan. Films that have the apocalyptic tones attached to it have very little scenes of hope and films in this sub-genre usually build up fear to an ending climatic scene where you will most likely survive but not with out physical and/or mental scars.

For instance in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre the film builds up tension with the characters in the film getting nervous and confused when the hitchhiker they pick up turns out to be extremely weird and crazy and the anxieties never really pull up on them or us till the very end when Sally gets away in the back of a pick up truck at the last second. She just laughs while speeding away covered in blood and even though she gets away you know she will be traumatized immensely so the apocalyptic tone of diminishing minds is evident here and the crazy family is a flat out pessimistic critique of the decline of that standard American family. The family in Chainsaw is still a family though, they sit down and eat dinner together; their meals are just made with people as ingredients. They don’t have a mother figure besides that one side of Leatherface. These themes of degradation and inevitable destruction stem from those fears of annihilation that was apparent in that current culture. Texas Chainsaw, in comparison to The Exorcist, has less of a happy outlook with no clear resolution to the madness other than the fact that Sally has escaped but not with her sanity in tact. The way The Exorcist ends can leave you optimistic, pessimistic or just undecided the way you look at it (or which version you have chosen to watch) because even though Regan was saved, Father Karras dies.

I’ve always watched Texas Chainsaw thinking it was just a classic slasher film from the 1970s; I never looked at it as an apocalyptic movie until I read Phillips arguments. He makes a hard point to counter because the movie is extremely gloomy and you have to be very optimistic to think the world that the Director Tobe Hooper created is not cynical and filled with themes of diminishing societies. Sally did get away so of course we can find some type of “good” or upbeat notion of an ending but she lost family and friends and now has to live with these memories and I find it hard to believe that Sally would believe that the world is good or not falling apart around her. Texas Chainsaw is one of my all time favorite horror films and it seems like one of the darker films because of how it ends. I wonder what that says about me. Why do I take pleasure in watching something as extremely scary as someone chasing you with a chainsaw?

When thinking about these types of movies and how popular they are, some of the mind begins to wonder why I, or we as a society, enjoy movies that have a poor world outlook and pessimistic happenings. Boutwell talks about this phenomenon in his writing on the Grindhouse Cinema Database titled “The Appeal of Murder in Style: Aestheticization of Violence, Catharsis, Theory, and the Paradox of Horror in Cinema”. He dives mainly into the aspects of the gore in films and the glorification of horrific themes and how it is a sort of “release” for us to watch horror films. He also goes into Greek philosophy stating that Aristotle ideology of comedy VS tragedy is: “a way for people to purge their negative emotions.” I think this a good theory that Boutwell/Aristotle endorses because people do need to take in awful things sometimes to unwrap the negative feelings they have sometimes. Watching violent horror movies is one to do it and it might even be a subconscious act when watching it but there are many other ways people handle their negativity. I know of people that just like to smash things or destroy things to get out their anger. Some people go to shooting ranges and fire off a few rounds to relieve stress. I know that playing the drums is a great way to get my head back into neutral. It’s that sense of beating something that lets out some built up rage or in terms of watching a gory movie, it’s that viewing pleasure of watching people in danger while not literally being in danger myself. It’s this idea of Catharsis that Boutwell goes into and how that people just need that release sometimes to relieve them of what ever woes they might have.

            I agree that movies can be an escape from the real world that can help you enjoy yourself or others more with this Catharsis theory but I think that a big reason as to why these apocalyptic movies are popular is because it’s a great fantasy story. You fantasize how you would react in these situations of dealing with the devil or how well you’d survive in a house of crazy cannibals wielding chainsaws. Perhaps I see it more as an occupier than a release from negative energy. I know I don’t want to ever be in that situation and I know I don’t want the world to end but for some reason its kind of fun to think about a zombie take over and how the world would react and how yourself would react in the time of the apocalypse or dark times in general. 

-Douglas Mellon
Film 301/319

Bibliography
Phillips, Kendal. Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture. Connecticut: Prager. 2005

Boutwell, Shaun. “The Deuce: Grindhouse Cinema Database”.  The Appeal of Murder in Style: Aestheticization of Violence, Catharsis, Theory, and the Paradox of Horror in Cinema. 2012

The Exorcist. William Friedkin & William Peter Blatty. 1973
The Texas Chainsaw Masscre. Tobe Hooper & Kim Henkel. 1974

Night of the Living Dead. George A. Romero. 1968