Chainsaws and Chiasmus: Affect, Form, and Generic Horror (12/12)

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Chainsaws and Chiasmus: Affect, Form, and Generic Horror

Carl Joseph Swanson Saint Louis University

Brooks Maxwell, lanky and reserved, is a horror buff. At twenty-two years old he is

intimately familiar with each scene and sequence from many, many of the monster flicks and thrillers

of the last few decades. From Hammer horror to Rob Zombie’s Halloween, blood and gore are his

bread and butter. Yet for years he had neglected Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Over

the course of his first viewing, alone in his apartment, Brooks found himself thinking repeatedly

“This isn’t that scary.” He’d seen countless suspenseful stalkings and gratuitous mutilations by

psychopaths, aliens, and revenants, and Brooks was not impressed with Hooper’s film. As the end

credits rolled Brooks casually got up to remove the DVD from his Xbox360. It was only then that

he realized that his hands were shaking.

Brooks’ anecdote illustrates a problem of viewer response that has characterized this film’s

reception since its release—i.e., an asymmetry between the cognitive experience of the film and the

emotional response to it. Casual and critical audiences have indicated such contradictory responses

to Texas Chain Saw Massacre by frequent references to its supposedly high degree of explicit gore. The

word “gore” or some variation thereof appears in both scholarly and popular treatments, and there

does seem be a shared, common-sense conception of what the word means across audiences. To

describe a film as “gory” suggests direct, excessive representation of bodily trauma, including, but

not limited to, blood-spray or splatter, evisceration, dismemberment, and/or graphically mutilated

corpses, organs, limbs, etc. This description does not suit The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, yet,

puzzlingly, it persists in the popular imagination of the film.

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Popular-press reviews and scholarly articles alike have commented upon Chain Saw’s explicit

content. Upon its premiere, Variety described the film as portraying “heavy doses of gore” and

Roger Ebert described it as “blood-soaked”. More recently, scholars have themselves associated the

film with gore. Morris Dickstein uses the word contemptuously four times in reference to Chain Saw

in one article (66, 70, 77). Rick Worland relates the film to excessive gore twice (20, 223). Carol

Clover, Cristina Isabel Pinedo, and Joanne Cantor and Mary Beth Oliver all fail to distinguish Chain

Saw from much bloodier films in their respective classificatory schemata. Casual fans, too, have

commented on the film’s graphic depictions. On the audio commentary to the 2006 DVD, Gunnar

Hansen (Leatherface) and Tobe Hooper each recall arguing with fans who insisted that they had

seen the character Pam’s back gored by the meat hook and/or her friend Franklin cut in half by a

chainsaw. If such sophisticated effects had been available at the time, Hooper insists that they’d still

have been well beyond the production’s budget. This is not to say that everyone who has seen this

film has had the same impressions, nor to suggest that these viewers haven’t paid attention.

However, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is simply not an explicitly bloody film. Chain Saw appears

virtually blood-free when compared to some of the films that preceded it—e.g. Herschell Gordon

Lewis’ Blood Feast from ten years earlier, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead from five years

earlier, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist from one year earlier—or the many splatter films that have

followed,.

It seems the common factor between the repulsed critics and tentatively disappointed gore-

hounds like Brooks is a shared correlation between “scariness” and “goriness”. On one hand,

Brooks, seeking gore, found little and concluded prematurely that the film must not be that scary.

On the other hand, the critics, scared, shaken, or otherwise disturbed by the film, may incorrectly

recall moments of suggested gore to explain the film’s powerful effect. In both cases, gore is

misattributed an explanatory power and, when this explanation is denied, one is still left with an

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undeniably harrowing, horrifying film. That is to say, the example audiences all experienced

significant horror without satisfactory explanation, though Brooks knew he was not seeing explicit

gore and the critics simply imagined they were.

Despite its lack of gore, Chain Saw nevertheless achieves a horrific efficacy rare in its genre

and I suggest that it does so by exploiting audience expectation vis-à-vis genre and narrative in order

to employ subtle stylistic techniques that are identifiable by close analysis. A specific, problem-based

analysis informed by affect theory can help to resolve the contradictions of reception outlined

above. I suggest that the film’s formal characteristics achieve an affect that is pre-emotional and that

can account for audiences’ frequent impressions that the film shows them more than it actually does.

In the essay that follows I will sketch out and respond to Stephen Jay Schneider’s call for an

aesthetic theory of horror. I will then briefly describe the version of affect theory I find useful to the

critical task at hand. Finally I will demonstrate through a close analysis of camera movement, editing,

and sound, that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s exposition establishes a linear, cognitively-oriented,

narrative and stylistic continuity in order to disrupt it by means of extra-narrative images and

recursive associations. These disruptions affect the viewer at a physiological level and gradually

accrete into a persistent, increasingly unsettled feeling. This feeling in turn primes the viewer for the

narrative collapse and chiasmic reversals that characterize the film’s drawn-out climax and

denouement. While casual viewers may believe it is the superficial trappings of the backwoods

abattoir that is responsible for the film’s effects, or critics the deeper archetypal, fairytale structure, I

argue that it is the stylistic manipulation of affect that prompts audience misattributions and makes

this horror film a truly horrifying one.

Horror Theory and Aesthetics

Much ink has been spilled in theorizing the modern horror film (Brottman 169-70;

Schneider 131) and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in particular has been a focal point

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of critical attention since the publishing of Robin Wood’s landmark study in 1979. Both as a

celebrated and notorious work in its own right and for its influence on future films of the genre,

Chain Saw has prompted tremendous scholarly treatment. Critics have identified rich layers of the

film’s sociocultural and psychological thematic content, but none has dealt with its innovative formal

approaches. Instead, much critical work seems to take experiential valences for granted and focuses

on interpretive models.

Though critics have rightly contextualized Chain Saw in generic and sub-generic analyses that

address the horror genre in a more or less broad way—notably Clover, Worland, Pinedo, and Wood

himself—I would argue that their interpretive approaches miss or elide the significant formal

achievements that set the film apart from the bulk of the genre. That is, by focusing on what a

horror film means, they may neglect to consider what makes it actually scary or not; even if they

propose to explain why it is scary, they may not be able to explain how. If critics like Wood are correct

then Chain Saw would already be a significant film regardless of whether or not it is indeed a scary

one. While it is certainly unfair to criticize social theorists for not treating aesthetic questions, it does

seem that to commend the film for its thematic representations of surplus repression in post-

Vietnam America (Wood) or its exposure of multi-gendered subject positions in archetypal

narratives (Clover) is to damn with faint praise. One could argue that an analysis that neglects the

power of aesthetic form risks overstating the emotional effects of psycho-social thematic content. A

weaker claim would be that critics’ interpretive readings of the film are at least beside the point,

aesthetically speaking. In any case, if one can provisionally accept the intuitive proposition that

horror cinema’s raison d’être is to horrify, then to take for granted a given film’s efficacy of purpose is

to diminish or ignore what a rare and remarkable achievement that truly is. This essay answers

Stephen Jay Schneider’s recent call for “an in-depth investigation into the aesthetics of cinematic

horror” (146), a project he suggests may be “of far more interest to fans than to scholars—even to

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scholars who claim to be fans” (135). Schneider’s acerbic suspicions notwithstanding, I believe that a

close investigation can demonstrate that an affective reading can account for and elucidate the

specific ways in which The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a distinctly horrifying film.

The horror film has presented unique challenges to the study of aesthetics, not the least of

which has been defining and delineating its subject matter. One way into conceiving horror as affect

is through an intuitive distinction drawn from Schneider between a horror film and a horrifying film.

Many would agree with Schneider that not all horror films are horrifying (139), but what is the

difference that allows him to claim that “relatively few films released since around 1960 […] actually

succeed in horrifying a significant number of those who watch them” (135)?1 While common usage

of the term “horror” is too broad a base upon which to build an analytic model, current specialized

definitions neither adequately accommodate intuitive cases nor capture the phenomenological

experience of horror.

Schneider’s distinction between fear and horror is as good a starting point as any. Fear,

Schneider argues,

is not the same thing as, or even a less intense or complex form of, horror. They are related emotional states, insofar as they both involve discomfort (though fear seems capable of stimulating various forms of pleasure as well, while horror is only negative in affect) [….] [F]ear has an action-orienting quality that horror, as a “spectator emotion,” is lacking. For horror, unlike fear, is not simply a response to a perceived danger; “[Robert C. Solomon writes] in horror, there is no inherent urge to flee; in fact, the ‘gawking’ impulse would suggest the very opposite” (140).

Fear and horror are distinct responses: fear triggers a flight reaction to some threat, but can be

manipulated to elicit pleasure as well. Horror, on the other hand, involves a state of being

unpleasantly transfixed by some image or sensation. Schneider argues that horror films in general

1 His list includes Psycho (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), Carnival of Souls (dir. Herk Harvey, 1962), The Haunting (dir. Robert Wise, 1963), Night of the Living Dead (dir. George Romero, 1968), Don’t Look Now (dir. Nicholas Roeg, 1973), The Exorcist (dir. William Friedkin, 1973), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Carrie (dir. Brian De Palma, 1976), The Tenant (dir. Roman Polanski, 1976), Eraserhead (dir. David Lynch, 1977), The Brood (dir. David Cronenberg, 1979), The Shining (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1980), Poltergeist (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1982), Pet Sematary (dir. Mary Lambert, 1989), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (dir. David Lynch, 1992), and The Blair Witch Project (dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999) (149n.).

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can be said to horrify only if the term “is taken in a fairly arbitrary, catch-all sense which includes

such related emotions and reflexes as disgust, startle, shock, anxiety, dread, (pleasurable) fear, and

(recreational) terror—and more often than not some convenient combination of the bunch” (140).

“Recreational terror” is a pleasurable form of fear, a “bounded experience of fear” that Pinedo twice

likens to rollercoaster ride (106, 109) in which the element of control allows stress and flight

responses to convert into pleasurable sensations (106). This concept may explain the pleasure of

most horror films, but still fails to meet Schneider’s criteria for a horrifying experience.2

Schneider’s distinction, despite its intuitive appeal, lacks a positive account of what horror is;

that is, if it is not fear or terror, what is it? In order to move toward a positive definition, I propose a

distinction between the terms generic horror, to describe those films Schneider designates as “horror

films,” and affective horror for those he describes as “horrifying”. I must note that these are conceptual

distinctions and that not everyone will agree with the categorizations, just as they may not agree on

those specific movies he discusses. Moreover, as I will be using “affect” in a different way than

those critics discussed thus far, I hope to add to the conversation by this new terminology. These

provisional terms may get at the spirit of those distinctions around which Schneider builds his

article.

The term generic horror is meant to reflect two senses of the term. In the first, “horror”

qualifies “genre”. Generic horror cinema is defined by its relationship to the history and

conventional structural, thematic, narrative, characterological, and tonal tropes of the horror genre.

Common usage is sufficient, even productive in this case. Following Clover’s lead, I use common,

video-store genre delineation because it both reflects and in some way regulates popular conceptions

of what constitutes the genre (5n.). In the second sense, “generic” qualifies “horror” in the broad

2 Or, for that matter, Clover’s: “People do always say that [Halloween is] like a rollercoaster ride, as if that’s an answer to the question. And I say ‘What’s a rollercoaster ride for?’” (The American Nightmare). While Pinedo’s explanation, published two years after the documentary The American Nightmare was released, goes a long way toward clarifying the sentiment, it still falls short of explaining the experience of being horrified in Schneider’s sense.

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sense of being a broad sense. That is, recalling Schneider, “horror” here is precisely an arbitrary catch-

all; it is an umbrella term that can include “disgust” and/or “startle” and/or “shock” and/or

“anxiety” and so forth. Thus, generic horror is both the generic category as conventionally defined

and the constellation of general responses with which it is popularly associated.

In contrast to the generic horror, affective horror is a much more complicated concept and one

much closer to what Schneider has in mind. This invocation of affect provides the crucial

distinction between emotion and affect that can frame Schneider’s “horrifying” films in positive

terms. Schneider does not interrogate Noël Carroll’s stated assumption that the affective aim of

horror cinema is an emotional state (Schneider 140). By identifying affect with emotion one risks

losing affect in the shuffle of quasi-synonymous umbrella terms above, which all designate

conscious, recognizable, and socio-semiotically defined categories. I take the failure of the “horror-

as-emotion” definition as an opportunity to reconsider horror provisionally as affect, a proto-emotion

or perhaps a place-holder for emotion. In the context of a specific engagement of an audience with a

work of generic horror, affective horror is an opening, not yet filled by some combination of

repulsion, dread, anxiety, or other recognizable, consciously reconcilable emotional responses. I

would suggest that to be horrified, in Schneider’s sense, is to experience the pre- or extracognitive

effects of the horrific, rooted in physiological responses, which may or may not be significantly

operative in a given film. While generic horror can be thought of in terms of the conventional

emotions associated with genre conventions, affective horror describes the very state of

indefinability both of affect and of horror.

Affect and Emotion

Brian Massumi defines affect in terms of unconscious physical responses to an image and

emotions as the conscious categories by which we qualify those responses. Drawing on laboratory

studies of physiological and cognitive responses to visual stimuli, Massumi identifies affect as the

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intensity (the strength or duration) of physiological effects (heart rate, breathing, and galvanic skin

responses) that an image produces in a viewer (27). The content of an image, its relation to

conventional sociolinguistic meaning, “fixes the determinate qualities of the image,” but does not

correspond or conform to the intensity of an image—its affect—in any logically straightforward way

(24). Rather, affect and quality operate on different levels and according to different logics. Whereas

quality orders effects semantically/semiotically—producing emotion—affect “is characterized by a

crossing of semantic wires: on it, sadness is pleasant [….] It does not fix distinctions. Instead it

vaguely but insistently connects what is normally indexed as separate” (ibid.). Put another way, affect

is a pre-emotional, pre-cognitive response to visual stimuli that is marked by contradictory and

paradoxical feelings. It is prior to cognitive functions of recognition, linguistic signification, and

causal ordering, and is thus prior to such categories of recognizable emotional response as terror,

fear, anxiety, or shock.

An image-event produces emotion when its form or content conforms to conventional modes

of signification. Emotion is qualified intensity, or affect that is cognitively reconciled with content in

such a manner as to frame the intensity of an image’s effects into “semantically and semiotically

formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning” (28). So

while any image as such registers an affective response at the physical level, the production of

emotion requires the viewer to establish conscious semiotic relationships by virtue of the image’s

content and form. Such connections entail the reconciliation of affect with form, then with emotion

and language, and then with such patterns of association as causality, linear progression, and

narrative form.

Affect’s primacy does not obviate the role of content or of emotion. Rather, they operate as

parallel and complementary systems. An image’s content and form are distinct from affect, but they

are all immediately physically registered. Affect registers through skin reactions, and form and

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content register through depth reactions such as heart rate and breathing. The form/content pair

can create a conscious-autonomic feedback circuit when awareness of depth reactions perpetuates

physiological effects; e.g., awareness of one’s increased heart rate perpetuates the response and thus

becomes a loop. Massumi suggests that semi-cognizance of this feedback circuit may have to do

with narrative expectation. Affect itself, however, is “narratively delocalized”; it is parallel to the

conscious-autonomic feedback loop, but is “a non-conscious, never-to-be-conscious autonomic

remainder. It is outside expectation and adaptation [,] disconnected from meaningful sequencing,

from narrative” (25). So while affect operates physically and non-consciously outside of and parallel

to the conscious and semi-conscious effects of signification and emotion, it is subject to those

effects. As viewers experience the effects of an image, the qualification of its form and/or content

through language, music, narrative linearity, or other conventional means can impact the intensity of

those effects.

Massumi notes that emotion and language can serve resonate with or interfere with the

intensity of an image’s effects; that is, they can amplify or dampen affect. Whereas straightforward

narration can dampen affect by framing it in terms of external structures of signification, emotional

qualification can amplify affect by interrupting “narrative continuity for a moment to register a

state—actually to re-register an already felt state” (25). When language defines clear expectations for

a linear sequence of image-events, then it tends to work counter to affect. Non-linguistic emotional

qualification, such as music, has its place among linear narrative elements; to the extent that it

furthers conventional lines of actions and events it fails to resonate with and may actually dampen

affect. However, crucially, emotional qualification “resonates to the exact degree to which it is in excess of any

narrative or functional line” (26, my italics). In other words, a film can weaken its images’ intensity to the

extent that it non-linguistically qualifies their effects by appeal to emotional categories in service of

the narrative. It can also amplify the intensity of its effects to the extent that it non-linguistically

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qualifies the emotional states associated with its images beyond or against what is necessary for narrative

functioning. Emotion, then, is something of a wild card and can be successfully or unsuccessfully

employed to affective ends, depending on the extent to which it acts in service of a narrative.

To recap, affect is simply the intensity of non-conscious physiological responses to an image.

The image creates emotion when its content or form qualifies those responses in terms of a

conventional system of meaning, such as when it signifies an image as “sad” or “scary”. Prior to this

emotional qualification, the viewer experiences an uneasiness that arises from feeling all potential

emotions simultaneously. Once a system of signification qualifies the image and selects for an

emotion, the affect can be dampened or intensified. If the emotion is easily integrated into a

conventional causal or narrative pattern, the affect is dampened because it has been reconciled with

cognitive awareness and external structures of meaning. If the emotion resists integration into

conventional causal or narrative patterns, then the affect is intensified because it, too, resists

subordination to external structures of meaning and maintains the experience of the moment. Such

elements as plot or narrative, dialogue, characterization, foreshadowing, intertextual reference,

generic tropes, allegory, or conspicuous style can dampen affect to the extent that a qualified image-

event is put in service of its development or expression by, say, carrying the plot forward,

developing character, or otherwise drawing cognitive attention. Any such consideration that takes

the viewer out of the experience of the image-event by indexing a convention of communication or

storytelling will dampen affect by engaging cognition, assimilating the image-event into prior

external structures of thought, and thus dissipating its intensity. If, however, an image-event’s

qualification exceeds the necessity of its function, or if it works against an economical functioning of

narrative, then it will amplify affect to the precise degree of its superfluity or resistance.

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Affect and Horror Aesthetics

While this framework presents tantalizing ways to rethink the experience of being horrified,

its practical application is not without its difficulties. Rachel Greenwald Smith notes the trouble an

audience may have with attempting to recognize an effect that is by definition prior to recognition

and signification, but offers some indications of affective response.

The inability to place aesthetically produced affects in an emotional vocabulary […] inevitably generates its own feelings: feelings of dissonance, of uneasiness, of being unsettled and not knowing precisely why […] Sianne Ngai defines this sense of being unsettled as an “ugly feeling” [….] Uneasiness, in this sense, is the epitome of an ugly feeling, insofar as it is “a meta-feeling in which one feels confused about what one is feeling…the dysphoric affect of affective disorientation” (163).

Smith suggests that, when engaging a literary work, this sense of unease may be a result of formal

experimentation and innovation. This “ugly feeling” or sense of dissonance and unease characterizes

the bulk of the films Schneider considers horrifying, particularly those by such experimental and

innovative directors as Hitchcock, Polanski, Lynch, and Kubrick (see footnote 1). Because affect is

so nebulous a feeling, it does not compel flight like fear does. Moreover, an affective image’s

inscrutability may well elicit the “gawking impulse” Solomon describes above.

By contrast, those formal conventions directed toward eliciting emotional responses are the

least affective. Recognizable narrative structures, determinate signification, and conventional

emotional cues can trigger the linearization of affect/emotion/language into an assimilable structure

and cause an image’s effects to jump the semi-cognitive feedback circuit into a strictly cognitive

apprehension.

This is one way to understand the superficiality of the affective consequences of easy sentiment in narrative art: sadness that is too readily available, too easily recognizable, is likely to register mentally (as in the thought, “I understand that this is sad”) and not physically (as in bodily reactions like stomach clenching and sweaty palms) (162).

Essentially, cognition and recognition are the enemies of affect. Conventions of narrative art

announce themselves as such to an experienced audience and thus truncate the affective potential of

the work by engaging the mind and (thus) not the sweat glands. The problem with generic horror is

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that it, too, engages the mind. The very conventional means by which generic horror elicits

conventional emotions are also readily available, easily recognizable, and likely to register mentally.

This is not to say that generic horror is roundly ineffective at making us jump or feel anxious

or repulsed. But if these conventional reactions are all a film aims at, then it is likely to fail to horrify

(in Schneider’s sense) precisely because we expect to be startled or repulsed; we can recognize the

reaction after the fact and some of us may even know how the effect has been achieved. Consider,

for example, the “jump scare” technique, as defined by the wiki (user-generated-content) website tv

tropes:

Everyone knows what a jump scare is. It's the overused horror technique of having a sudden image pop up on screen with an equally sudden, loud noise […] emphasizing it. This is considered a cheap shot as far as scares go, because really, the image could be anything and it will still give viewers a rush. But hey, it is guaranteed to work and it's easy, which means this gets used to death and beyond. In a way, jump scares are a close relative of Gorn because both tend to be used as substitutes for actual suspense. Unfortunately, even jump scares can be handled poorly. Films often have obvious "safe scenes" where the audience knows nothing interesting will actually happen, and very few horror movies use this predisposition to their advantage, however if they did so regularly, they wouldn't be considered "safe scenes" in the first place. Using too many jump scares will also make them more of a nuisance than a genuine scare [sic].3

That a wiki is not a scholarly source is exactly the point of citing it in this case. This technique is a

clear instance of a generic convention all too familiar to audiences. There is no denying that a jump

scare is startling, but the image in itself is not necessarily frightening and the scare by itself does not

maintain any lasting sense of unease, particularly if the film telegraphs the jump by adhering to

conventional pacing, narrative, tone, and so forth. The effect of the jump scare is easily assimilable

into a generic experience and creates expectation of further jump scares, an expectation that the sub-

trope “cat scare,” or false jump scare, exploits.4

3 “Gorn” is defined as “[e]xtreme and sadistic violence, to the point of prurience. A portmanteau of ‘gore’ and ‘porn’. The term can refer to just an extremely graphic scene of bloodshed, or the entire sub-genre of torture films in the spirit of Saw” (tv tropes). 4 Incidentally, though tv tropes usually indexes films, television shows, novels, comic books, and other texts that employ a given trope or idiom, the site’s administrators determined the jump scare to be so ubiquitous a cliché in and out of the horror genre that they have deemed examples unnecessary. See Halloween II for a literal, predictable “cat scare”.

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The jump scare is just an extreme example of generic horror conventions that fulfill

expectations at the cost of lasting affect. Any given convention of generic horror as such is

counterproductive to an affective aim. Whether the conventions are superficial or structural—the

jump scare on one hand, the “final girl” archetype on the other—their recognition, anticipation, and

assimilation foreclose achievement of affective horror by those means alone. They may well produce

jumps, disgust, fear, and/or recreational terror, but they will not horrify.

The constraints on affect are not limited to horror buffs who can play “spot the cliché.” If

Massumi’s conception of affect is correct, then no viewer will experience significant affect if the film

is too strictly narrativized, too linear, and too economical in its presentation. Familiarity with generic

conventions and clichés is not a prerequisite for assimilation. Once an image-event is ordered into

structures of narrative, causal, characterological, and/or linguistic coherence, its affect has already

been dampened. One needn’t ever to have watched a single (generic, non-affective) horror film to be

denied affect; one needs only to be able to recognize and order an image in a linear, temporal, causal

system constituted by semiotic structures external to the text and the viewer.

Now, it may be that a stylistic or narrative technique that was at one point novel for viewers,

was difficult to assimilate, and thus would have achieved affective horror for a while. However, to

the extent that the technique may be imitated over time—to the extent that it would become a

convention—it would lose its affective force. From film to film the technique would dissipate its

affect until it became an easily recognizable, easily assimilable convention in its own right. One such

device may be found in the final scare at the end of Carrie. As Carrie’s classmate bends over to place

flowers on the burned rubble of Carrie’s house, gentle, vaguely mournful music and a soft focus

suggest a sad relief and narrative closure. However, these effects are abruptly cut short by a

musically and tonally discordant, sustained jump scare that both startles the viewer and disrupts

narrative continuity, as Carrie’s bloody arm suddenly reaches out of the ruins to grab her classmate.

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Friday the 13th (dir. Sean S. Cunningham, 1980) mimics this final scare technique much to the same

effect—if not to the same affect—and the final scare has since become an expected convention of

generic horror, particularly as the denial of narrative closure leaves the door conveniently open for

sequels. Today, either state, final scare or no final scare is assimilable; the final scare has become a

tired cliché and the absence of a final scare—or of open-endedness generally—remains conventional

in narrative structures beyond the horror genre. Thus, contemporary audiences may be unable judge

or experience the affective power of this particular technique in Carrie or Friday the 13th because

narrative expectations are already determined by the conventions of which the technique has

become a part.

It appears from this example that the potential aesthetic affect of an image-event is 1) rooted

in form and 2) subject to dissipation through reproduction and imitation. If these preliminary

conclusions are true, they suggest a weak support for Smith’s hypothesis that affect is achieved

through formal innovation. The support is weak for two reasons. The first is that the formal origin

of affect is already a part of her proposition, and the examples simply affirm her premise. The

second reason is that noting a technique’s diminishing returns is hardly a positive claim. However, a

close analysis can produce positive claims about affective techniques in horror cinema as I will

demonstrate presently by turning to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Affect and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Before jumping into a full analysis it might be worthwhile to revisit Schneider’s challenge.

Recall that his main concerns are an examination and reconceptualization of what we mean by horror

and the proposition that horror films are not necessarily horrifying. He proposes that a careful analysis

of the shared formal qualities of a given set of horrifying films may identify an aesthetics of horror

that goes beyond insufficient generic classification and concerns itself more with an “‘historical

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poetics’ of modern horror cinema” than critical interpretive exegesis (134). By means of comparative

analyses of the films Schneider finds horrifying—Chain Saw being among his canon—one might

produce “substantive findings” that could illuminate critical discussion on the aesthetics of horror

(144). He offers two devices as examples, one stylistic, the other narrative/characterological that

appears in a number of the films on his list. While he does not list Chain Saw as among the films that

employ these devices, the techniques are nonetheless present in the film.

The first device is an approach-from-behind that leads to a shocking reveal, which he notes

in Psycho, Don’t Look Now, and The Blair Witch Project (145). Strictly speaking, Chain Saw doesn’t

employ this device in the way Schneider suggests, because the context of the approach-and-reveal is

not a carefully balanced moment of suspense and surprise, as he suggests, but is one of terror and

desperation that gives way to simultaneous horror and continued hopelessness. In Chain Saw, Sally’s

approach and revelation of the family’s grandmother’s corpse is one of the more obvious allusions

to Psycho.5 Yet, because the pacing is not suspenseful but manic, I would suggest that Chain Saw’s

version of the approach-and-reveal manages a similar effect because, like Psycho, “the forewarning

given the viewer is too brief and/or unspecific to prepare one adequately” (ibid.). Any more

forewarning would have signaled the allusion to an experienced viewer and obviated the efficacy of

the device. Thus, rather than conforming strictly to this device, Chain Saw modifies it by means of

frantic tone and pacing, as well as the addition of the grotesque grandfather to complete a macabre

visual parody of American Gothic.

Schneider identifies the second, narrative/characterological device in Shivers (dir. David

Cronenberg, 1975), The Tenant, Eraserhead, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. This technique involves

5 Another allusion is Kirk and Pam’s discovery of several rusted cars on the killers’ property, hidden by camouflage netting, indices of the killers’ former victims. This reference may seem oblique, but Hooper’s original intent was to have the cars partially buried, a much more obvious allusion to Norman Bates' disposal of multiple vehicles in the swamp behind the motel. Budgetary restrictions prevented Hooper from burying the cars (audio commentary, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre).

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a scenic rupture of logical coherence of behavior and events within the narrative. His specific

examples are the bewildering dinner scene in Eraserhead and the demented behavior of the infected

in Shivers. These films succeed in horrifying in part by confronting the protagonists with

what appears to be wholly unmotivated or nonsensical […] behavior on the parts of others within the diegesis [….] Particularly noteworthy here is the “associational” component of these and comparable scenes: because the behavior in question gets situated within a more or less coherent context, viewers are encouraged to seek out the connections with earlier actions and events. The impossibility of satisfactorily discovering such connections is arguably a key component in the horror here (146).

An early example of this device from Chain Saw involves the Hitchhiker’s bizarre behavior and

abrupt mutilation of his own hand and of Franklin’s arm in the first few minutes of the film. His

actions cannot be reconciled with earlier events 1) because this is the first appearance of any of his

clan and 2) because there are virtually no earlier events in the narrative. The Hitchhiker first appears

about ten minutes and thirty seconds into the film, a mere five minutes after the introduction of the

protagonists. The interim five minutes are filled for the most part with largely banal if vaguely

morbid dialogue and punctuated by the odd eerie shot. However, the fact that all of Leatherface’s

actions appear unmotivated does suggest a motivating characteristic of the killers: they are insane.

This second device is insufficient in itself to account for the affective horror of the film because it is

too easily assimilable into a linear, narrative logic; the killers are crazy, so they behave crazily. Be that

as it may, Schneider has struck on something that may well move us in the right direction.

Schneider’s examples, along with the Hitchhiker’s behavior in Chain Saw and the final scare

in Carrie, all involve disruption of an expectation of coherence and linearity that is itself rooted in

narrative convention. I propose that an affective horror film neither flouts nor conforms to generic

conventions entirely; rather, it integrates but does not assimilate incoherent, extra-narrative image-events

into a conventional diegesis. A horrifying film conserves a functioning, affective feedback circuit by

using narrative, character, and linguistic tropes as a matrix for disruption, a release valve for

cognitive energies and activity, and a generic camouflage for affective style. Narrative and/as

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convention functions as a formal diversion that allows affective technique to operate below the

conscious radar while the mind is occupied by the cognitive/conventional matter of plot, narrative,

dialogue, character, symbolism, allusion, style, and so forth. Affective horror functions by

unpredictably permeating these structures and periodically suspending or disrupting them, only to

disappear from conscious apprehension once the conventional narrative resumes and regains

cognitive attention.

This aesthetic approach would seem to be a rather delicate balancing act. Recall Massumi’s

point that emotional qualification “resonates to the exact degree to which it is in excess of any

narrative or functional line” (26). On one hand, a film that is too consistent and economical in its

pacing, tone, sound, mise-en-scène, or cinematography would lose the affective resonance that

careful and disciplined excess might facilitate. On the other hand, a film that eschews convention

altogether—if such a feat were possible—would lack a narrative matrix to disrupt. There could be

no excess because there would be nothing to exceed. Emotional qualification without narrative

would become a functional line in itself. Suspense—not knowing what to expect—would become a

circular, self-defeating meta-suspense—expecting not to know what to expect—and the film would thus

already have drawn cognitive attention and probably dampened its affect. At the very least a horror

film that eschewed generic conventions altogether would not be recognizable as a horror film, even

if it were horrifying. However, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre achieves such precise balances between

predictable narrative continuity and unpredictable disruption, qualified and unqualified affect, and

integration and assimilation of image-events, and these balances are responsible for the film’s

horrifying efficacy.

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Analysis

Broadly, the film begins its affective work before the credits and carries on through the

exposition, which I suggest lasts roughly until Franklin’s death and Sally’s designation as the final

girl. Clover’s deep-structural narrative mapping is useful here:

A standard horror format calls for a variety of positions and character sympathies in the early phases of the story, but, as the plot goes on, a consolidation at both levels (story and cinematography), and in the final phase a fairly tight organization around the functions of victim and hero (which may be collapsed into one figure or, alternately, split into many) (8).

Clover’s schema is appealing for a variety of reasons. 1) She is drawing on a generic tradition that

Chain Saw helped found; 2) the deaths of Sally’s companions allow the character functions to center

around her and her tormentors; 3) the collapse of protagonist functions into Sally enable a

dissemination of monster functions from Leatherface to the rest of his family; and 4) the film begins

decisively consolidating narrative and style—or “merging objective detail with subjective terror,” as

Worland puts it—with Pam’s stumble into the bone room (220). Pam’s encounter with the macabre

artifacts is the first of only two instances of potential viewer sympathy with a character’s horror; that

is, it is the first of two instances in which a character has any time to express more than fleeting

terror before Leatherface immediately murders her/him. Sally’s extended terror is the second

instance and comprises the remainder of the film. After Franklin’s death Chain Saw demolishes its

pretenses to narrative coherence by bending progression into circularity, truncating meaningful

linguistic expression, and chiasmically linking inverted characters and motifs. It is, however, the

gradual accretion and intensification of affects prior to this point that makes the final phase

horrifying and not simply befuddling. The slow consolidation narrative and style through the

exposition enables an efficacious collapse of narrative into style in the final phase.

A subtle combination of formal and stylistic techniques—involving cinematography, editing,

and sound most prominently—delineate moments in the narrative reserved for affective image-

events. The camerawork follows a general trend through the exposition of alternating between

Swanson 19

mobile and fixed-frame shots. Mobile shots are vehicles for narrative ordering and are associated

with story, plot, and the protagonists. The camera is constantly moving with and around the

protagonists, moving (with) them from plot point to plot point in conspicuous style. Both Worland

(213) and Christopher Sharrett (257) have commented on the efficacy of Chain Saw’s documentary

realism. This characterization is somewhat puzzling, as the film takes nearly every opportunity to

stylize its cinematography. As the protagonists move the camera tracks and pans with them. When

they stand still or don’t move very far, they are usually shot from an obvious high or low angle;

they’re most often shot in some combination of movement and non-flat angle.

In contrast to the showy, fluid camerawork of narrative and character, the fixed-frame shots

are most clearly image-events, generally unsettling images, and are associated with the killers and

with narrative suspension. The film frequently uses static, flat-angle shots that do not draw attention

from the object in the frame to the presence of a camera. In a sense the camera is gawking, but in

doing so it is also suspending narrative progression to focus the viewer’s attention on an image to

allow its affect to register. The shots’ very fixity suggests a temporal and spatial existence apart from

but parallel to the diegesis. Lack of camera movement segregates these shots from the narrative and

necessitates the use of cutaways to return to narrative progression.

The film quickly establishes its opposition between narrative mobile shots and narratively-

excessive static shots. However, because ostentatious angles, zooms, dolly shots, tilts, pans, etc. are

so common in the beginning of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, it would be simpler and more

productive for the purposes of illustration to note when the film uses fixed-frame shots. The film

begins with a series of image-events, extreme-close-up flashes of rotting corpses. The first fixed-

frame, flat angle shot after the credits is an extreme close-up of the dead armadillo; the next is of

Kirk in the foreground and the oncoming semi in the background; the next is of a sweltering,

wretched stockyard heifer; then a wide-angle long shot in which they pull over for the Hitchhiker.

Swanson 20

Each of these instances introduces some narratively-excessive image before returning to the more

fluid business of story progression. The introduction of the Hitchhiker begins the association of the

killers with static shots.

Whereas prior to the Hitchhiker’s entrance the camera had constantly panned and tilted

around the van’s interior from character to character, his presence seems to calm it down. The entire

sequence of the Hitchhiker in the van consists of a series of edited static shots. The camera directs

attention to his bizarre mannerisms and to the protagonists’ reactions as a group in a series of

shot/reverse-shot exchanges that keep him apart from the other characters. The Hitchhiker breaks

out of his static frame just long enough to slice Franklin’s arm with a straight razor, an action that

both defies clear explanation and indicates the danger that the static-framed characters will pose to

the protagonists. The Hitchhiker’s exit is captured by an exterior dolly that moves with the

protagonists as they flee. The very next flat, fixed-frame shot is a medium-long shot of the

mysterious window washer at the gas station staring at the sun, which then cuts to fixed-frame shot

of the sun. The cut back to the window washer, however, leads to a zoom out and pan-right as the

van pulls up to the station and into frame. The film cuts to a low-angle dolly shot of the van pulling

up and then to a fluid track and pan of the van coming to a stop and the protagonists getting out, as

if the van has brought narrative to the station.

The Cook is introduced in a series of medium-long and close-up fixed-frame, flat-angle

shots, which might operate as subtle stylistic foreshadowing if there were any indication whatsoever

at this point as to where the story will lead. As soon as the Cook reenters the building the

camerawork becomes much livelier. The sequence of the gas station exterior consists of hand-held

shots of Franklin, pans of Jerry and Kirk, a tracking shot and gratuitously low-angle rear close-ups of

Pam and Sally, and finally a long take that begins with a brisk pan of Jerry exiting the station that

draws the camera to center on Sally. As she closes the sliding door she notices the blood smear that

Swanson 21

the Hitchhiker left on the van. Before the van moves the camera begins to dolly right, moving the

smear to the left of the frame. Sally lingers briefly to examine the blood smear, but as the camera

continues right—and as everyone impatiently bids her to get in the van to go—she is pulled

reluctantly by the center of the tracking frame toward the open passenger-side front door. She does

not turn her head away from the smear until it has passed out of frame. The camera continues to

track, passing the window washer sitting motionless in the foreground, but curves toward the van as

it pulls away from the station, capturing every frame of its departure and only coming to rest as it

pulls out of sight.

My observations here are meant to show that after the credits (and the gratuitous, lingering

images that precede them) but before the more disturbing shots from in and around the farmhouses,

the cinematography is already establishing patterns by which it distinguishes the protagonists and

narrative from affective image-events. The images immediately register physically and so their affect

has already been produced and will be periodically compounded and amplified by additional weird

shots, such as the heifer, the nest of daddy longlegs, or the pocket watch with a nail through it that

hangs from the tree. None of these images has any narrative significance whatsoever but may attract

attention along symbolic or thematic lines. Consequently, the film lingers on the images just long

enough to register affect before moving briskly back to a more conventional narrative line. It is as

crucial that viewers be distracted from registering the images’ intensity cognitively as it is that they

see the images in the first place. Hence, the narrative sequences are marked by incessant dialogue

and heavily stylized, conspicuous camerawork, both of which register cognitively as conventional

means of signification and narrative ordering and both of which begin almost immediately so as to

provide a context in and against which affect and qualification can resonate.

While integration of periodic narrative suspension begins almost immediately in Chain Saw,

as images pop up now and again to interrupt and defy the narrative, producing affective uneasiness,

Swanson 22

the film also works to qualify some of its images. It uses non-narrative, non-linguistic means to

select from the surplus of contradictory potential emotions present in any experience of affect. The

primary agent of qualification here is sound. The film’s nondiegetic score is an amelodic, arrhythmic

presence that comes and goes, alternately as discordant rumbling or as atonal, metallic shrieking. Yet

the score cannot be said to set a cinematic tone by itself. The film deploys nondiegetic sound

judiciously, qualifying images in such a manner as to facilitate narrative suspension and linear

disruption by complementarity or by juxtaposition.

For example, nondiegetic sound complements the all-important first images of the film: the

extreme close-up snapshots of the corpses. Each snapshot is synced to a single, processed,

discordant violin shriek. There is not yet a narrative in place in which to ground these images and

their qualifications, and so the qualified images are not functioning as narrative elements. Brief

flashes of single-point lighting and tight frames defy the functions of establishing shots. The

unsettling music—combined with the matter-of-fact diegetic sounds of shovels, grunts, and

flashbulbs—resists signaling sadness, suspense, or any other narratively-assimilable tone or mood.

The film anticipates audience expectations regarding the establishment of tone, setting, and/or

narrative in the first few images and it actively works to defy each of them visually and aurally.

Alternately, nondiegetic sound also amplifies affect through juxtaposition. The opening

credits roll over processed shots of sunspots and flares. The images are qualified by a rumbling,

percussive score that gives the sequence a vague but ominous tone. However, importantly, the

cryptic image-score paring in this sequence is also mixed with the voice of a radio newscaster that

acts as a linguistic, determinate counterpoint to the abstract images and score. The sound editing

places the newscaster’s voice far back in the mix and the viewer has to struggle to make out clearly

what he is saying. The credit sequence counterpoises speech to music and abstract image to narrative

Swanson 23

within one sequence, just as the film had done between sequences when it juxtaposes the

fragmented corpse imagery to the linearized narration and title crawl that had preceded it.

The portentous score by itself does not produce affect. While music that lacks conventional

melody, harmony, or rhythm may be somewhat unsettling in itself, its relationship to other filmic

elements is what determines to what extent it amplifies or dampens affect. For example, if the non-

diegetic music that accompanied the credits had played while the Hitchhiker was in the van, it would

have constituted too easily recognizable an emotional cue. The ominous score—if accompanied by

the gawking frame and the Hitchhiker’s strange speech and behavior—would have warned viewers

of a concrete danger. In this counterfactual case the Hitchhiker’s unmotivated self-mutilation and

attack on Franklin would have been more easily assimilable within the terms of the expectation that

the music would have generated. Instead, tinny, upbeat, diegetic bluegrass filters through the van’s

radio and provides a tonally (in a narrative sense) discordant atmosphere that resonates with the

Hitchhiker’s bizarre and inexplicably violent behavior.

Beyond the conventional use of even unconventional sounds for mood and tone, sound in

Chain Saw further disrupts linearity by making associational connections between non-causal image-

events. For instance, the moment that the Hitchhiker slices Franklin’s arm in the van is the one

instance of non-diegetic sound of that scene. The same metallic violin screech from the pre-credit

sequence plays once, synced to the blade’s deep, moderately slow incision. It could be argued that

this association is simply a clue that it was the Hitchhiker who had been desecrating the graves.

However, the grave desecration is written out of plot significance the moment Sally discovers that

her family’s grave was untouched. For the brief period that the desecration was a concern, it never

did become a question of “who” because it stopped at the answer to “whether”. But even if the

sound is interpreted as some kind of clue, I would argue that attempts to linearize through

retrospective association play right into the narrative pattern of suspension and continuity. That is,

Swanson 24

such a sound association disrupts a linear narrative progression by calling-back to a non-causally

related event and thus distracting the viewer’s mind from image-events at hand.

Two subtler sonic associations prompt exactly this kind of retroactive ordering. The first

occurs when the van reaches the ruined family farmhouse. The house is framed in a fixed long shot

at a flat angle, similar to the first, exterior shot of the Hitchhiker, and just like in that shot the van

approaches from the left at the bottom of the frame and slows to a stop at the bottom right. Already

the cinematography associates the house with danger. As the van stops, one can hear its brakes

squeaking. The squeak is the same in both pitch and duration as the nondiegetic squeals from the

pre-credit sequence and Franklin’s razor cut and recalls those images. Skeptical readers should note

that in the three times prior the van is seen stopping—two from a distance, one in close-up—not

once did its brakes squeak. This phantom squeak functions as an associative call-back to the affects

of the image-events of the pre-credit and Hitchhiker-van sequences. In the shot immediately

preceding this one a nondiegetic, foreboding score trickles subtly in to mix with the diegetic radio

soul music playing in the van, and thus conventionally suggests a vague danger. However, the squeak

itself recalls concrete images and their affects in an associative, nonlinear manner.

The second example of sonic association occurs further on in the story and links the first

three deaths. As Kirk explores the old Hardesty place alone, he wanders upstairs and is framed first

by an overhead shot from the floor above him. He climbs the stairs as the camera gradually zooms

out as it tilts up, pans right, pans left, and pans right again as it follows him up the stairs and into the

hallway. As he enters the room, however, it cuts abruptly to a high-angle shot from his right that sets

up a static eyeline match with a nest of daddy longlegs that clicks arrhythmically and unnaturally

loudly. Kirk’s fluid camera coverage is cut short by a set of edited shots that recall the form of his

encounters both with the Hitchhiker and with the Cook. The film is recalling formal associations in

such a manner as to create new ones from nonlinear and extranarrative image-events. The next loud

Swanson 25

and arrhythmic sound comes about ten minutes later and is produced by Kirk clattering his boots on

the floorboards in a seizure, having been brained by Leatherface. Leatherface’s famous first

appearance is already prefigured in the associative logic of the film. Like the spiders, Leatherface is

first framed in a surprise eyeline match with Kirk just before he kills Kirk with a hammer. The

clatter of Kirk’s boots not only recalls the clicking spiders, but foreshadows —in a completely

unpredictable way—the frantic tapping from inside the deep freeze that leads Jerry to discover the

near-dead Pam, just before Leatherface bludgeons him, about ten minutes after Kirk’s death.6 These

nonlinear associations carry with them the rapidly accreting affects of unassimilable image-events.

That is, even as the framing confronts viewers with cryptic and unpleasant images, it qualifies many

of those images sonically through amelodic non-diegetic music, as in the approach to the Hardesty

place, and through tonally discordant diegetic music, as in the Hitchhiker’s van scene. Furthermore,

both diegetic and non-diegetic sound set up non-causal associations between concrete events that

complement one another’s affect while defying conventional narrative ordering.

Such associative call-backs begin to function like visual and aural leitmotifs and signal that

the conventional, linear narrative structures are integrating with and gradually collapsing into the

unmotivated, associative excess of the film’s affective style. What had begun as a juxtaposition of

discrete images and dynamic camerawork begins to take a chiasmic structure, where narrative

progression feeds into recursive association until the logics switch with the death of Franklin and the

beginnings of Sally’s nightmare. Her attempts to escape—and thus to resolve the narrative—only

lead her back to the house for further torment. The seemingly disconnected Hitchhiker, Cook, and

Leatherface turn out to be brothers whose own family drama inverts Sally and Franklin’s earlier

tensions and opens up an entirely new, yet associatively prefigured narrative. Ultimately all hope for

6 Other candidates for such aural associations include Pam and Sally’s obnoxious, echoing, peculiar laughter at the Hardesty place and the persistent metallic grinding of the gas generator that Pam and Kirk discover. The film repeats both of these pitches and timbres in Pam’s and Sally’s screams and in Leatherface’s chainsaw. Sally’s high-pitched voice and relentless gas motors become leitmotifs leading up to and during the last third of the movie

Swanson 26

meaningful narrativization collapses into circular, self-sustaining nightmare. Even Sally’s escape has

none of the triumph of later “final girl” figures. Rather than fight her way to safety, she is freed by

chance, as the ropes that bind her inexplicably come loose and she is able to jump through yet

another window to escape the house once again. But there is good reason to believe that the third

act’s combination of structural circularity, motivational unintelligibility, grotesque imagery, linguistic

incoherence, and assaultive visual and sonic style would not be as efficacious if the first two acts had

not introduced their narrative excesses with such care and restraint. The accumulating affects of the

film’s cinematic style produce an uneasiness in the audience that is gradually intensified by the slow

integration of narrative and theme with raw, inscrutable imagery and sound. By pitting youths

against monsters the filmmakers produced a horror film. By pitting cognitively reconcilable filmic

and generic elements against visceral images—and by doing so in such a sophisticated and

disciplined a manner—the filmmakers also produced a horrifying film.

Conclusion

This paper has aimed to respond to a challenge and to propose a solution to a problem. The

challenge is answering Schneider’s question: ‘what makes a horror film horrifying?’ Using The Texas

Chain Saw Massacre as a case-study, this paper has demonstrated that theories of affect can be

employed to describe how specific formal qualities in a text affect that text’s audience; to wit, how

strategic adherence to and disruption of convention can manipulate and intensify physiological

responses to a text as a stimulus. I would suggest that it is the affective aesthetics of The Texas Chain

Saw Massacre that both earn it a place among Schneider’s list of horrifying films and is responsible for

the problem of its paradoxical reception. Brooks Maxwell’s hand-trembling is the kind of response

that Schneider would probably consider indicative of having been horrified; it is certainly the kind of

response Smith would associate with affect. The film illustrates its affective potential through the

Swanson 27

“ugly feeling” it elicits in viewers.7 I suggest that because Chain Saw generates feelings “of being

unsettled and not knowing precisely why,” to borrow Smith’s phrase, those critics and fans return to

moments of suggested gore and fill in the blanks themselves.

The most infamous example of this creative misremembering is Pam’s goring on a meat

hook. Hooper notes that several sustained rear shots had featured Pam’s back in the frame and that

her costuming—an open-back top with no bra—had underscored the vulnerability of her bare flesh

(Chain Saw audio commentary). Whether viewers were aware or not, they had already been primed to

be particularly sensitive to the suggestion of violence to Pam’s back. Thus, when Leatherface carries

her toward a front- and center-framed meat hook, all that the effect requires is a match-on-action

suture of Pam and the meat hook, some dried blood-splatter on the wall behind her, and a crash tilt

from the (empty) drip-basin below Pam’s dangling feet up to her agonized, agape expression. These

most basic considerations of framing, editing, mise-en-scène, and camera movement combine with

Teri McMinn’s convincing screams-cum-gasps to provide the viewer with all s/he needs to complete

the illusion. The important question, though, is precisely what motivates the viewer to do so.

My solution to the problem of viewers’ contradictory responses is that affect creates anxiety

that is attributed to and explained in terms of narrative elements. While suggested violence—like the

instance described above—provides a context in which to imagine graphic gore, the affective “ugly

feeling” provides the impetus to imagine it in the first place. If, as I suspect, casual and critical

viewers were affectively horrified in the way Brooks was, then moments like Pam’s hanging, Kirk’s

butchering, or Franklin’s murder provide concrete instances to blame for the ugly feeling. In other

words, because affect is inherently non-conscious, but the ugly feeling is conscious or semi-

conscious, viewers look to conventionally horrific moments to explain their unsettled feelings.

7 I re-watched the film with a friend while researching for this paper. She had seen the film at least once before, remembered it well, and knew everything that was going to happen. Just a few minutes into the dinner scene she left the room anxious and in tears. The only explanation she could give was that she was “freaked out”.

Swanson 28

Generic conventions would lead them to attribute their anxiety to a discrete, explicit narrative event,

rather than a subtle pattern of narratively excessive images and sound. The more unsettled they feel,

the more unsettling the moment must have been, and what could be more unsettling than watching

the hook pierce Pam’s bare back? Again, generic conventions and the viewer expectations they

generate would suggest that seeing the violence and its gory effects would maximize the horror of the

moment. This is why Brooks, a genre-savvy, desensitized fan who enjoys gore, did not consciously

acknowledge his discomfort and did not attribute it afterwards to gore. Gore is not inherently

disturbing to him, as it is for other viewers, so he did not imagine it to be the cause of his distress.

Thus, narrative event and stylistic affect work in tandem to provide the suggestion of violence, the

motivation to imagine it explicitly, and the recalled context into which to project the imagined,

graphic event.

Ultimately, Chain Saw’s efficacy as a horrifying film derives from its innovative approach to

generic horror. While affect can be and is produced to some extent by works in any genre, Chain

Saw’s deliberate alignment with the horror genre provides the film with both a narrative matrix in

which affect can be cultivated and a slew of tropes to which affective responses can be attributed. Its

conventional elements ensure that the affect is qualified as horror, and the affect produces responses

that exceed the concrete instances of conventional tropes and narrative events. Moreover, because

the film defies linear causality in producing those effects, it encourages recursive associations that

constantly reorder and requalify past events in terms of the compounded horror of the present. In

other words, the further one gets into the film, the more disturbing past events become. Each call-

back amplifies the horrific effect of the event while blurring its concrete details. As the story

progresses the film recursively compounds its affects, gaining affective momentum with each cycle

and obscuring its determinate events until it reaches a critical affective and narrative climax. At this

point linear narrative progression has broken down, the past events have blurred into an

Swanson 29

impressionistic sequence of affects, and a precise recollection of concrete narrative events becomes

difficult to discern. Though such a recollection is possible, aesthetically it would be moot because

the audience’s affective and emotional responses exceeded the objective bounds of a given event

several cycles ago, if not at the time of the event itself. The film’s chiasmic cross-coupling of

protagonists and antagonists, narrative and style, and concrete image-events and vague but potent

affects produces a tortuous, mind-bending form in which the whole of the horrifying experience is

infinitely greater than the sum of its concrete, generic parts.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is doubtless a horrifying film. It is also an exemplary

demonstration of the mutual dependency of convention and innovation. As the film approaches its

fortieth anniversary, and as critics return to aesthetic form as worthy of attention, perhaps we can

take the occasion to explore further what affect can teach us about horror and what horror can

teach us about form. Robin Wood, the first major scholar to take Chain Saw seriously,

unintentionally slights the film when he says that “Hooper’s cinematic intelligence, indeed, becomes

more apparent on every viewing, as one gets over the initial traumatizing impact and learns to

respect the pervasive felicities of camera placement and movement” (211). I do not disagree that

Hooper has cinematic intelligence. However, I would suggest that, if we can bring anything from

affect theory to aesthetics, and if we can learn anything important about form and style from The

Texas Chain Saw Massacre, we should recognize first and foremost that a film’s “initial traumatizing

impact” is in fact an indication of cinematic intelligence.

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NJ: Princeton U. P. 1992. Print.

Dickstein, Morris. “The Aesthetics of Fright.” Grant 65-78.

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