Every Texas Chainsaw Massacre film is psychoanalyzing the original

polygon.com:

Tobe Hooper’s 1974 horror movieThe Texas Chain Saw Massacre is beautiful in its singularity. While it’s often lumped among its grindhouse peers and slasher brethren, very little of it is actually comparable to the rest of its genre. To this day, it remains sun-scorched madness: A few young adults fall into a rabbit hole to hell, where they discover a face-wearing behemoth and his deranged family in a dilapidated farmhouse.

The movie doesn’t have much plot structure, and you can divide it into the half where the lead, Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns), isn’t screaming a lot, and the half where she is. The cackling cannibals who commit the titular slayings complain about gas prices, gentrification, and their own displacement in a society that’s leaving them behind, rendering them as ultimately human, but nonetheless ghoulish. And by the end of it, audiences are left thinking exactly what Sally does as she laughs hysterically in the back of a fleeing truck while Leatherface, stymied, swings his chainsaw in the middle of the road: “What the hell just happened?”

Because the original film is so singular, making a sequel seems like an inherently misguided idea. Any look into not just the film, but its behind-the-scenes chaos, seems to indicate that no one can replicate it, even though duplication and returns to form are often horror’s gory ethos. That hasn’t stopped filmmakers from trying, with the most recent attempt, Netflix’s direct sequel Texas Chainsaw Massacre, serving as the latest example. But unlike the usual horror sequels, which usually just ratchet up the body count and confuse the canon, 1974’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre is special. The sequels to this horror standout don’t just feel like attempts to copy the