And they just wanted some gas….:(
“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is a film about a family of killers who kill people and eat them. This film follows a group of friends who travel down to Texas. They end up going into an abandoned house and hang out there for a while. The first couple to get killed go up to a house because they hear a generator running and they need gas for their van. They knock on the door, but no one answers. So the guy goes into the house and starts poking around. He encounters Leatherface, and is bludgeoned to death and taken into a back room. After a while his girlfriend enters the house looking for him and also runs into Leatherface, who hangs her up on a meat hook while he is cutting up her boyfriend with a chainsaw. Eventually, through a tale of twisted bloody events, Leatherface ends up chasing one final girl.
This theme of the final girl is what makes this film so interesting. She has almost no qualifications to be the sole-survivor of this horrid event. She is not that fast, she isn’t that smart (or at least it is not apparent in this film), and she just screams really loud. And she screams A LOT! There is probably about five solid minutes of her screaming. But this is because she is literally the only one left. This notion of the final girl is that the sole survivor of the killings is a woman. The guys always get killed because they have to be all macho and protect everyone and the other girls just get preyed on by the killer. What makes this one girl in particular so special? Is she better than all these other people? Not really. She is just attractive. That is her one saving grace. She is the blonde girl who the director just wants to keep on screen for as long as possible. This will draw in more of the audience. If the only survivor was a fat gamer guy, no one would care and they would not be as enthralled with the film. The final girl is a creation solely to sell tickets and make money. More people will go to a movie with a hot chick in the cast. In a horror film, no one wants to see the guy make it out. They always have the best deaths! They are the ones who get ripped apart onscreen. The women are just killed while they are screaming their heads off. The final girl is not a plus for feminism. She is not the only one left because she is the most capable but because she is the prettiest. Her beauty is her sole defense against the monsters.
