Brian Fanelli
In the years following the 9/11 attacks, a slew of horror remakes dominated the genre, including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), The Hills Have Eyes (2006), Friday the 13th (2009), A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), among others. Of the group, two stand out for their vastly different depictions of a country still reeling from the attacks. Director Marcus Nispel’s remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the first film produced by Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes company. It’s a slick film that creates a Final Girl more akin to an American superhero, willing and able to fight off evil, whereas director Alexandre Aja’s The Hill Have Eyes is far more critical of the military-industrial complex and nuclear family, just as support for the Iraq War plummeted to an all-time low. While the films’ depictions of America may differ, both have a level of gore and violence not seen in the originals but reflective of a shift that happened in the genre post-9/11.
Nispel’s film begins in a similar fashion to Tobe Hooper’s original 1974 work. Images of a crime scene are shown along with autopsy reports as John Larroquette provides the narration, detailing the grisly events. Larroquette also provided the narration to Hooper’s film. In these opening minutes, the violence is simply implied, to the point that Leatherface’s chainsaw is tagged and depicted as evidence in center frame.
The scene then cuts to sun-drenched fields and a group of friends with toned, sweaty bodies, a symbol of Americanism and beautiful youth. The friends are on their way to see Lynyrd Skynyrd. It is here that we’re introduced to Final Girl Erin (Jessica Biel), who rides shotgun as her boyfriend, Kemper (Eric Balfour), drives. Erin is the quintessential all-American girl, an important distinction from Hooper’s Final Girl Sally (Marilyn Burns). Erin is first shown singing the words to “Sweet Home Alabama,” while wearing a large cowgirl hat. Is there any band or song that screams Americanism more than Skynyrd? That said, Erin does maintain some of the Final Girl tropes defined by Carol Clover in Men, Women, and Chainsaws. When another friend, Morgan (Jonathan Tucker), passes a joint around in the van, Erin declines, and when Andy (Mike Vogel) makes out in the backseat with Pepper (Erica Leerhsen), Erin denies affection from her boyfriend and implies he’s not getting any until marriage.
Perhaps more importantly, Erin contrasts to Sally and Final Girls of the past. She already possesses the skills necessary to survive the encounter with Leatherface (Andrew Bryniarski) and his crazed family. She can hotwire cars, pick locks with her pocketknife, and fight her way out of situations. This contrast was noted by several film critics.
In his review for Offscreen, Donato Totaro writes about the stark differences between Erin and Sally, specifically the ending and their fates. He writes, “While the original Final Girl Sally sits in the back of the pickup truck, unable to do anything other than laugh hysterically, Erin has the mettle to save a baby, hot wire a car while under great pressure, drive over the bad guy Sheriff Hoyt not once but three times, and then drive off to safety. We identify with Erin because we would like to think we would behave like her.”
In the wake of the terrorist attacks, Erin represents American strength, the drive to conquer evil at any cost, just as America launched a war in Afghanistan and another in Iraq. Further, Totaro notes that Erin differs from other Final Girls because her sexuality is played up instead of subdued. He adds, “Director Nispel and DP Daniel Pearl always accentuate her physical beauty…Erin, in tight jeans and tank top, is always lit for beauty with a sculpted light that chisels her from her ugly environment.”Even if she denies sex to her boyfriend, she’s still presented sexually on screen. This seems emblematic of the Michael Bay-type films that were so ubiquitous during the 2000s. While these female heroes were self-sufficient, they were still sexualized. Additionally, Erin’s maternal instincts are played up. She saves the baby and will likely care for it. That role seems as second nature to her as picking a lock. She’s a woman expected to do it all.
There is another major distinction between Hooper’s film and Nispel’s remake, and that is the level of on-screen violence depicted, representative of the shift in the genre that occurred post-9/11. This is most evident when the friends pick up a victim desperate to escape Leatherface and his clan. The teenage girl (Lauren German) is mentally and physically broken. When the friends let her into the van, the camera zooms in on her thighs, smeared with blood. She cries about “going back there” and “the bad man.” Suddenly, she shoots herself in the head, before declaring, “You’re all gonna die soon.”
This scene is given close analysis by Craig Frost in his article “Erasing the B Out of Bad Cinema: Remaking Identity in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” More specifically, Frost notes how Nispel draws a clear distinction between his film and Hooper’s, including the level of on-screen violence. In this scene, for instance, when the victim shoots herself in the head, Nispel uses a tracking shot, showing the characters’ reactions, but then he dollies back through the gunshot hole in the victim’s head, “taking the audience inside the cavity and out the rear window of the van” (67).
This scene and the subsequent deaths that follow illustrate a major difference in tonality between Hooper and Nispel’s work, which Frost analyzes, too. He writes, “Nispel unmistakably develops a tonality which erodes any sense of historical replication alluded to during the film’s opening sequence. Instead, he retracts all allusion to Hooper’s film, and aligns the film with the tonality of those made by the remake’s producer Michael Bay” (65).
What Frost doesn’t mention, however, is that Nispel’s grim tone mirrors the genre’s shift post-9/11, when critic David Edelstein coined the term “torture porn” while writing about movies like Saw (2004) and Hostel (2006) for New York Magazine. Because the country was so rattled by the 9/11 attacks, and since that violence played out live on television, it’s no surprise that horror films would turn bleaker and meaner. Though Texas Chainsaw predates Hostel and Saw, any of the kills could have been featured in those movies. Leatherface’s basement looks like a torture chamber, with dim, swinging lights and water dripping on the floor, and unlike Hooper’s film, the camera doesn’t cut away when someone is impaled on a meat hook or strung up to slowly bleed to death.
In Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema, Kevin J. Wetmore states that these remakes lose the “camp, humor, and playfulness of the killers” (196), and the terrorist attacks marked a return to the “serious supernatural killer,” a turning away from the likes of the joke-cracking Chucky and Freddy (195).
The entire premise of Wetmore’s book is that the horror film became more nihilistic and showed more violence following the attacks. Pre-9/11 films allowed for hope, while post-911 genre films did not. “After 9/11, nihilism, despair, random violence, and death, combined with tropes and images generated by the terrorist attacks began to assume far greater prominence in horror cinema” (2-3).
This is reflected in Chainsaw when the victim shoots herself in the head. The act seems so random, and the friends’ reactions to it are reminiscent of Americans’ response to terrorism. Kemper says, “I’ve never seen anyone die before,” while Pepper screams, “Why did she have to do it? Why did she have to pick us?” Pepper’s dialogue is especially chilling because it mirrors post-9/11 fears so well. Further, Leatherface is rarely shown in full on-screen. Instead, he’s a hulking, shadowy figure. He strikes randomly and then retreats.
Despite Wetmore’s premise, the remake doesn’t end on quite a grim note. Again, showing classic Final Girl traits, Erin picks up a butcher knife and stabs Leatherface in a meat factory. Unlike Sally, it’s not sheer luck that she survives, but her strength, will, and determination. In the closing minutes, she hotwires a car and flees with a baby. Unlike Sally, she’s the one driving the getaway vehicle, while Leatherface is shown on the road, his chainsaw roaring. Like Hooper’s film, evil is not defeated, but the Final Girl escapes, a symbol of American grit and determination to beat evil, in whatever form it takes. Be it Erin’s cowgirl hat, fondness for Lynyrd Skynyrd, or her skills that help her survive, she’s depicted as an American superhero, what the country needed after 9/11. It’s no surprise then that the film earned big bucks at the box office, grossing $107 million total during its run, according to Box Office Mojo, thus kicking off a wave of remakes.
Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes is much more critical of the military-industrial complex and the American nuclear family than the Chainsaw remake. Even its opening doesn’t shy from an overt political message. It features text that states between 1945 and 1962, the U.S. conducted 331 atmospheric nuclear tests, and the government still denies the genetic effects of the radioactive fallout. Then it cuts to sweeping shots of the New Mexico desert, which could resemble Iraq or Afghanistan, before men in radioactive suits are brutally killed by the cannibal mutant clan and dragged off in chains via a pickup truck.
The opening also features Aja’s explicit critique of the nuclear family. A commercial is shown with a twirling 1950s housewife showing off her cake, before it’s disrupted by images of a nuclear cloud rising and flashes of genetic mutations. We’re then introduced to the Carter family, as the camera zooms in on an American flag on patriarch Big Bob’s (Ted Levine) pickup truck. Like the original film, the Carter family gets trapped in the desert and terrorized by the cannibal clan. Yet, in Aja’s remake, the family’s tensions represent the red/blue state divide that was so prevalent during the Bush era and is even more so now.
More specifically, the divide exists among the men. Big Bob is a proud, gun-wielding Republican, and so is his son, Bobby (Dan Byrd). Son-in-law Doug (Aaron Stanford) is a liberal who won’t touch a gun and is overly reliant on technology. When we’re first introduced to him, he fails to fix the RV’s broken AC, while Bobby fixes it quickly a few scenes later. In Lorena Russell’s “Ideological Formations of the Nuclear Family in The Hills Have Eyes,” she offers an apt analysis of Doug, noting that his initial clumsiness and effeminacy are associated with his technological dependence that “fatefully intersects with a mechanical ineptitude” (112). Big Bob and Bobby represent the voices and portrayals of masculinity that dominated post-9/11 discourse. Think of George W. Bush strutting out on an aircraft carrier under a ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner, or even the rise of Sean Hannity at Fox News. Hannity made a name for himself by dunking on his co-host, the liberal Alan Colmes, who always appeared weaker, especially physically.
However, as the film progresses, Doug changes. This turning point occurs when the clan attacks the RV, stealing Doug and Lynn’s (Vinessa Shaw) baby, raping younger sister Brenda (Emilie de Ravin), and ultimately shooting the mother (Kathleen Quinlan) and Lynn in the process. The clan’s attack on the RV is an attack on the concept of the American family itself. They lure the family outside by stringing Big Bob, the patriarch, to a tree and lighting him on fire. Prior to that, they stalk and taunt him, growling “Daddy.”
After all that transpires, Doug seizes a gun to hunt down the cannibals to save his baby and avenge his wife. Russell notes the change, writing, “He strikes the very image of a manly man, striding along the hillside with his German Shepard and weapon, exuding a macho strength and manly determination he decidedly lacked at the film’s start” (112). Doug transforms from someone who can’t use a screwdriver to an all-out American action hero like Biel’s Erin in the Chainsaw remake.
The critique of the nuclear family becomes more pronounced when Doug tracks the clan down to a testing site, where houses are set up, complete with mannequins representative of a family. There are kids on swings, families posed in front of TVs, and parents seated outside. Here, the nuclear family is presented as a construct, while the cannibals are an inversion of that, grotesque because of the military-industrial complex. When Doug tracks some of them down, one sings “The National Anthem,” while an American flag hangs in the home, the very flag that Doug uses to impale Pluto (Michael Bailey Smith), the strongest member. When Doug does this, triumphant music plays, as if he’s suddenly an Avenger, ready and willing to defeat any baddies.
Of the Carter family, only Doug, Brenda, and younger Bob survive, along with one of their dogs, Beast. Yet, we shouldn’t read this as a happy ending. Doug’s dress shirt, pants, and face are covered in blood. Brenda is traumatized by the rape and loss of her family, as is Bobby. The family is a wreck, and Russell states as much, writing, “The future that the Carters are left with is ambivalent at best, and the audience is left pondering less about individual human nature and more about the possibilities of family” (112). Further, the final shot is from the view of the mutants, so the threat still lingers.
Both The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes remakes are reflective of American fears post-911, that evil can strike anywhere at any time. Both films are nastier, bleaker, and more violent than the originals, representative of the genre’s overall shift in tone the years after the attacks. Chainsaw’s Final Girl, meanwhile, represents American strength and might, while Aja’s film is much more critical of the military-industrial complex. Released in 2006, at a time when support for the Iraq War was at an all-time low, it already showed the country’s exhaustion with the War on Terror and the construct of the American dream and family. By that fall, the Democrats would win back the House and Senate, effectively ending the Bush era, but not the War on Terror. After 20 years, the U.S. fully withdrew from Afghanistan, but as Aja’s film reminds us, past military actions tend to have long-term ramifications. Like the cannibals at the end of The Hills Have Eyes, the ghosts of 9/11 linger. We don’t yet know the personal and political ramifications of the war in Afghanistan’s recent conclusion, for instance, but we do know that the horror genre will continue to evolve to mirror collective anxieties, just as it did post-9/11.
Works Cited
Edelstein, David. “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn.” New York Magazine, 26 Jan. 2006.
Frost, Craig. “Erasing the B out of Ba Cinema: Remaking Identity in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” Colloquy, no. 18, 2009, pp. 61-75.
The Hills Have Eyes. Directed by Alexandre Aja, performances by Aaron Stanford, Ted Levine, Vinessa Shaw, Dan Byrd, Emilie de Ravin, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2006.
Russell, Lorena. “Ideological Formations of the Nuclear Family in The Hills Have Eyes.” The Philosophy of Horror, edited by Thomas Fahy, The University Press of Kentucky, 2010, pp. 102-120.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Directed by Tobe Hooper, performances by Marilyn Burns, Edwin Neal, Gunnar Hansen, Allen Danziger, Paul A. Partain, Jim Siedow, Lionsgate, 1974.
–. Directed by Marcus Nispel, performances by Jessica Biel, Jonathan Tucker, Andrew Bryniarski, Erica Leerhsen, Mike Vogel, Eric Balfour, R. Lee Ermey, Lionsgate, 2003.
Totaro, Donato. “Texas Chainsaw Massacre Redux.” Off/Screen, vol. 7, no. 11, Nov. 2003, Proquest, doi: 2064799591.
Wetmore, Kevin J. Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema. Continuum Books, 2012.
