Horror Madness: Alice Sweet Alice vs. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

See the introduction and full slate here.

We return to Horror Madness with a showdown between two slasher forebears: Alfred Sole’s Alice Sweet Alice and Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Listen: this is another easy one. Alice Sweet Alice is not a very good movie; to the extent that it has visual or narrative flair it comes from ripping off other, better movies. It was clearly made cheaply, the performances are pretty bad, and it commits the worst crime a horror movie can, that of being boring. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a masterpiece, the greatest film made by a true auteur of the genre. Just as cheaply made, it is visually arresting and compelling, its storytelling clever and economical, its performances subtle when they need to be and overpowering when they need to be. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre might, when I finish this series in my retirement home, end up taking the final crown. Alice Sweet Alice will not make it past this round.

But the two films, so different in some ways and so alike in others, are worth looking at side by side. I want to use this as an opportunity to think about politics in horror.

I didn’t put either of these films in the category for political or socially conscious horror, though when rewatching them I wondered whether I could have. What does it mean for horror to be political? Is political horror didactic? Does it have to be agit-prop, advocating for a specific action by the audience? If so, very little qualifies, including the films I did place in that category. If you were to ask me, I’d say that art is always political, as is any result of a human chain of production under capitalism, but a political analysis of art is most fruitful when you can look beyond the superstructure to the base, as it were.

When the anxieties provoked illuminate problems that are structural or social rather than personal, that’s political horror. It exists not in individual psyches but in relations between people and their social positions, and between people and the material forces acting upon them.

Both of these films are about the same thing: people being killed in mysterious ways, ultimately revealing a killer or set of killers that confound our expectations of the natural order of things. But that is not all they are about. Alice Sweet Alice is about families breaking down; it is about the fear that a new cohort of single mothers are creating a generation of uncontrollable children, in particular uncontrollable girls. It is about the fear that girls who grow up without fathers or women who lose their children will turn into monsters, preying on the men around them. Listen to the way girls are spoken of in the trailer, as predatory women in waiting. Alice is barely granted a childhood; her position as a girl uncared for by a father makes her both obvious prey, available to anyone, and a potential predator.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is about what happens when an industry that kept a town alive, that made it a community in the first place, suddenly leaves. It is about the fear of what workers do when there is no work left, about what they (we) could become when capital decides they’re no longer useful. It is the alienation of labor made most brutal - people who are so subsumed into their jobs that they become their jobs, and when the jobs are gone they have no choice but to keep a cannibalistic parody of the work going, all humanity and concern for their neighbors stripped away from them as survival becomes all that matters. It’s a story about how capitalism eats us up, and forces us to eat each other.

Both of these films are about families. ASA is about the family breaking down, and all of the wretched, fearful things that result from it. TTCSM is about the rot of the nuclear family as the site of both social and material production, and what happens to it when the structure outside of it breaks down. Sole and company believe, I think, that the family could save us if it were allowed to flourish like it should. Hooper knows that families are where horror lives.

It should be obvious, I suppose, which film aligns with my politics. TTCSM is a bloodier, sicker film, but oddly less ugly and cynical - there is a real beauty to its images and a love for even its most depraved characters that ASA does not have. The different ways the film deals with bodies is illustrative. Mr. Alphonso, the predatory, overweight landlord in ASA, seems to be fat for no reason other than to make him more disgusting to the audience; his physical appearance is clearly meant to signify his inner depravity and no more. By contrast, the bodies in TTCSM are visceral and alive; their conditions and states matter. A character is not incidentally in a wheelchair. His vulnerability informs his character but does not replace it. Injuries slow people down. Bodies are vehicles for action, part of human life, and the loss of them is sad and terrifying. Bodies in ASA are remote and distasteful.

The winner is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, it has to be.