>>97452188You're reading it all wrong. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a dramatization of a real serial killer's spree, it reflects a social fascination with the insane and, especially in america, a desire to understand the mindset of someone who wholly rejects civilization while in its midst. It speaks to the ingrained revolutionary mindset of the US, the twisted nobility of a hopeless, bloody struggle against the impossible.
Horror in general speaks to anxieties and is reflective of culture and context. Zombie movies in the 70s were about heading out from civilization into the countryside and being beset in an isolated rural town where the locals are weird and suspicious. It reflected a social tension between rural and urban culture at the height of America's rural decay and 20th century urban centralization. Zombie movies in the 2000s resurgence were about social epidemiology, the way that urban centers become dangerous and unfamiliar in a catastrophe, how crowding can make a space alien and hostile, how sharing space with other people becomes a liability when a contagion is spreading, about surviving in the midst of urban collapse or fleeing the city to the wilderness and countryside and learning how to live without grocery stores and running water. They carry an inherent misanthropy from the context of feeling trapped, isolated and stressed in a big city, growing contempt for the crowds and individuals and anxiety about food stability--driven almost entirely by images of downtown New York after the towers fell.
Look at any horror movie and you'll see a snapshot of a culture and context in a particular moment of time.
