Chainsaws, Cattle, and Catholicism: What Leatherface Teaches Us About Being Human

Horror movies often get a bad rap in Catholic circles. Many in the Church believe that the genre glorifies evil and demeans human dignity, and for a lot of people, few films embody those problematic elements more than The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The name alone sounds like a sickening exercise in senseless violence, and when you sit down to watch the movie, it appears to live up to those gruesome expectations. To be fair, the film features very little on-screen blood or gore, but it so perfectly captures the essence of evil that it almost feels like it was made by the psychotic killers who inhabit the story.

However, despite that initial impression, I’d suggest that the movie actually holds a surprising amount of thematic depth behind its seemingly gratuitous brutality. This isn’t just evil for the sake of evil, so if we pay close attention to some key details, we’ll find that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has quite a bit more to say than your average slasher flick. In fact, we can even interpret it in a way that dovetails quite nicely with our Catholic faith, so let’s take a deep dive into this horror classic and see what important themes it hides just below the surface.

A Meat-Loving Family
To truly understand The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, we first have to understand something about Leatherface and his kin. Unlike most slasher villains, these psychos don’t just kill for the heck of it. Rather, they’re a family of slaughterhouse workers who’ve become a bit too obsessed with their chosen profession, so somewhere along the line, they started killing and eating people just like they kill and eat animals.

The first hint of this important fact comes in the opening scene, when the protagonists unknowingly pick up one of Leatherface’s brothers as a hitchhiker. The guy proudly tells his newfound friends that his family has “always been in meat,” and he giddily shows them some pictures he took at the slaughterhouse. It’s clear that he absolutely adores this line of work, and when we get to the third act, we learn that the rest of his family shares that odd fascination as well.

After Leatherface knocks off most of the main characters, only one of the original five is left: a young woman named Sally Hardesty. She manages to run away from the masked killer, but she can’t escape his family. Another one of Leatherface’s brothers kidnaps the woman and brings her back to their house, and when the siblings are all together, they decide to let their grandfather have this last kill.

They explain that the old man used to work in a slaughterhouse, and in his day, he was the best killer in the place. His grandsons seem to almost worship the guy, so of course they want to see him practice his craft one more time. Fortunately, the old timer is too weak to get much force behind his blow, so Sally is able to escape her cruel imprisonment and get away with her life.

Like I said before, that scene shows us that Leatherface’s entire family shares the hitchhiker’s love of slaughterhouse work, but it does more than just that. It literally puts Sally in the place of an animal, and that tells us in no uncertain terms that these maniacs see the poor woman (and, by extension, the rest of her friends) as nothing more than cattle. They apparently don’t think human beings have any more dignity than the cows they kill at the slaughterhouse, so since they love that place and that industry so much, they take their work one step further and revel in killing people as well.

Slaughterhouse Kills
Those two scenes bookend Leatherface’s murderous rampage, but they’re not the only times The Texas Chain Saw Massacre keys us into its deeper themes. If we take a closer look at the way our villain disposes of his other victims, we’ll see that the rest of the film also draws a parallel between these people and the animals killed every day to feed us.

Despite what the movie’s title might lead you to believe, Leatherface only kills one person with a chainsaw. He kills two of his other victims by bashing them over the head with a hammer, and he butchers the other one by hanging her on a meathook and stuffing her in a freezer. Those are all brutal ways to die, but more importantly, those non-chainsaw deaths are all tied to (you guessed it!) slaughterhouse work. The meathook and the freezer are pretty easy to understand, but the hammer might require a bit of explanation.

Earlier in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, when the five main characters are traveling in a van together, they have a conversation about slaughterhouses, and one of the friends explains how these places carry out their grisly work. He says they kill their animals with bolt guns, but in the old days, they used to just smash the animals over the head with a hammer.

They also talk about these various methods with the hitchhiker they soon pick up, and perhaps most importantly of all, when the grandfather tries to kill Sally later on, he also uses a hammer. Once again, this final scene is our smoking gun in more ways than one. It cements the fact that hammers are associated with slaughterhouses, and it hammers home (no pun intended!) the point that this brutal form of execution is supposed to evoke the family’s favorite line of work.

The Difference Humanity Makes
Once we understand the deeper meaning behind all this seemingly senseless violence, it’s not hard to see what a Catholic interpretation of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre would look like. When we watch the film, we shouldn’t enjoy seeing Leatherface mow these characters down the way we enjoy, say, a superhero defeating a villain or an underdog football team clawing their way to the top. In fact, in a very real sense, we shouldn’t enjoy these scenes at all.

Rather, we should be shocked and appalled by the cruel way this man demeans and dehumanizes his victims, and that visceral reaction contains an important lesson for us. It shows us that human beings possess a unique dignity far beyond that of any animal, so even though it’s permissible to use animals for things like food and medical experimentation (with certain limits, cf. CCC 2417), human beings have an inalienable right to life that can never be taken away.

But notice, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre doesn’t simply tell us about human dignity the way a textbook or an ivory-tower philosophical argument might. Instead, the movie brings us face to face with this reality by letting us see it so brutally violated, and that hits us much harder than mere words ever could. It reaches into the depths of our souls and makes the sacredness of human life just about impossible to deny no matter what mental gymnastics we may try to employ, and that deeply emotional messaging elevates the film far beyond its shallow slasher peers.