Editorials
Breaking the ‘Chain’: It’s Time for a Female Leatherface
Recently I had the audacity to suggest on the Twitter dot-coms – since we’re getting yet another Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot – the new Leatherface should be female. The pushback was immediate and predictable, the reasoning behind it specious at best and sexist at actually.
All the greatest hits were played, which is an overly generous way of saying the band trotted out the same tired songs we’ve heard a thousand times before. ‘False Equivalencies’ still has a beat you can tap your foot to, but if I have to hear ‘Enter Strawman’ ever again it’ll be too soon.
The word ‘continuity’ was casually dropped at one point. Continuity. In reference to the Texas Chainsaw movies.
The Chucky series has continuity. It has a storyline spanning seven movies that is impressively cogent, given the franchise’s ability to adapt and evolve with the zeitgeist. Friday the 13th hung in there for eight movies before finally cutting itself loose and stumbling into Hell. But Leatherface doesn’t even have the same name from movie to movie. As John Squires has pointed out, the Chainsaw films have always been a slideshow of alternate universes where anything goes depending on who’s writing, who’s directing and who currently owns the rights. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but to suggest audiences would suddenly be put off by the lack of respect for some non-existent canon is laughable on its (leather) face. And if you’re going to cite Texas Chainsaw 3D as an attempt at re-establishing a timeline, I first demand you tell me exactly how old Alexandra Daddario was supposed to be.
Lest you think otherwise, someone did invoke Ghostbusters 2016 as evidence gender-swapping fictional characters can’t work, as though that movie’s problems didn’t have more to do with the man behind the camera than the women in front of it. This concern over whether a female Leatherface would ‘work’ is disingenuous. Depending on who you ask, a male Leatherface hasn’t worked in a decade or three.
The overtly second-grade-level insistence that “Leatherface can’t be girl” aside, the most galling of these arguments was an underlying implication the Texas Chainsaw series is some sort of sacred cow. Maybe the first one is, but Tobe Hooper took the cow to slaughter in 1986. Don’t read this the wrong way; I absolutely love Part 2, but that movie wasn’t about building a franchise, it was about bringing one down. That’s a good subject for a deep dive another day, but one big tip-off is the scene where Dennis Hopper repeatedly screams “I’m bringing it all down.” Even if the series was a sacred cow – the selection of the next Leatherface announced via smokestack – that shouldn’t preclude an honest conversation about seriously changing things up.
Nostalgia is great. Familiarity is fine. But Horror is at its best when it’s showing us something we’ve never seen before. Previously unexplored angles and aspects of human suffering, both psychological and physiological. New images, new ideas… New icons. The Texas Chainsaw series has struggled to bring anything new or truly noteworthy to the table for a while now, and none of this is to say making Leatherface a woman would be an instant fix. It wouldn’t. But it would provide a much-needed new opportunity to explore a truly different version of the character.
Some of the perception around ‘gender-swapping’ a character like Leatherface is mired in the misconception they would be the exact same, “but a woman now.” This is a lazy and narrow field of vision. In truth, changing Leatherface’s gender would fundamentally alter the character’s perspective and motives from the jump because the experience of a girl growing up in the environment and circumstances that created such a maniac would be vastly different than that of a boy. This is a person disfigured and damaged to the point where wearing human skin as a mask seems like the proper thing to do. While previous iterations of Leatherface likely benefitted from being raised in a family consistently depicted as highly patriarchal in nature, a female member of the Sawyer clan would have to be twice as vicious and half as vulnerable as her male counterpart to earn the acceptance of her cannibalistic kin.
What kind of person would that perfect storm of deformity, desperation and depravity create, and what would be left of whoever encountered her? This very concept is fresher and more interesting than anything these movies have done in a generation, and Kim Henkel once brought the Illuminati onboard.
Truthfully, there has been exactly one unifying theme throughout the Chainsaw series’ constant cycle of reinvention. They’re all about the horrifying concept of venturing down America’s long forgotten back roads, hidden far from public view, only to be righteously devoured by a segment of society with an axe to grind. That’s why the real question isn’t “why should Leatherface be a woman,” so much as “why isn’t Leatherface a woman?”
Photo Credit: Jason R. Sheppard @ Truehorror.net
Comics
‘Spider-Noir’ Comic Changes Explained: How the TV Series Reinvents Marvel’s Darkest Spider-Man
A little while back, I wrote an article chronicling the Hellraiser franchise’s affinity for Film Noir and touched on how that genre has, historically, always been connected to horror.
This connection can be observed in everything from the cannibalistic serial killers of Frank Miller’s Sin City to the disturbing criminal plots fueling neo-noir thrillers like Stuart Gordon’s underrated King of the Ants. That’s why it came as no surprise when I finally sat down to watch all eight episodes of Prime Video’s recently released Spider-Noir series and was confronted with plenty of classic horror tropes.
What did come as a surprise, however, was how showrunners Oren Uziel and Steve Lightfoot approached these horror elements when compared to the 2009 comic book that the show is based on. From the heavily altered rogue’s gallery to an equally terrifying yet completely different origin story for Nicolas Cage’s take on the webslinger, there are plenty of changes here that I feel might be of interest to genre fans.
With that in mind, I’d like to invite readers to take a closer look at all the adjustments that Spider-Noir made to the story in order to bring this incarnation of Spider-Man to life in all of its monochromatic glory (unless you watched the True-Hue color version of the show, in which case you’ll be treated to a surprisingly comic-booky palette that you don’t usually see on television).
The Dark Origins of Marvel’s Spider-Man Noir
Our first order of business should be to examine the origins of the Noir comics themselves. Originally published as part of the Marvel Noir alternate universe that reimagined several characters as hard-boiled crime-fighters, Spider-Man Noir became the most successful book in the entire run. This highly politicized story about Peter Parker coming to terms with the capitalist evils of the Great Depression seemed to have struck a nerve with audiences looking for a darker take on the wall-crawler, which is likely why we’d soon see several sequel stories as well as a video game adaptation of the character in 2010’s underrated Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions.
Of course, it wasn’t just Spider-Man’s darker disposition that made this version of the character a hit, as 1930s New York City was depicted as being much more hostile than what we generally see in the standard Marvel Universe. From Peter’s powers coming from an Eldritch Spider God that spawns man-eating arachnids to Vulture being an ex-Freak-Show Gimp with a taste for human flesh, you can definitely understand why this Web-Head isn’t pulling his punches.
Unfortunately, this alternate universe was a little too popular for its own good, with each subsequent sequel/adaptation further diluting the political anger and classic horror influences that fueled the original comic-book run in order to appeal to a wider audience. Spider-Man Noir was nearly unrecognizable once we got to the Spider-Verse crossover that turned the character into a household name, though this would at least lead to an interesting adaptation in 2018.
The Classic Horror Influences Hidden Throughout Spider-Noir
Jack Huston as Sandman in ‘Spider-Noir’
When Phil Lord and Chris Miller finally translated Spider-Man Noir to the big screen, with Nicolas Cage bringing the character to life in an unexpected case of pitch-perfect casting, he was still mostly relegated to comic relief as his nazi-punching antics and over-the-top edginess were played for laughs. However, while this version of the character had little to do with the comics that spawned him, Spider-Noir’s newfound popularity eventually resulted in the announcement of a darker live-action spin-off – a spin-off that I was cautiously optimistic about.
While the showrunners ultimately decided to go in a completely different direction than the 2009 comic, the new team of writers appeared to understand Noir as a genre in ways that even the folks at Marvel Noir couldn’t quite grasp. That’s likely why 2026’s Spider-Noir boasts plenty of horror elements, just not in ways we’ve seen them before.
The series is obviously borrowing tropes and aesthetics from period-accurate monster movies, with Universal’s 1930s output being a particularly big influence. From the re-imagining of Sandman and Tombstone as tragic figures to The Spider even being operated on by a mad scientist with hilariously antiquated techniques, this bizarre collection of super-powered freaks could have easily shown up in a classic creature feature.
The scares aren’t all retro, however, as the showrunners also injected plenty of body-horror into the mix during their attempt at unifying the origin stories for all these larger-than-life characters. Hell, the Spider himself is now revealed to have gained his powers after being bitten by a half-mutated Man-Spider during World War I, and the aforementioned mad scientist keeps a disturbing collection of failed experiments in her basement, proving that not all of her patients were lucky enough to simply gain superpowers after being experimented on.
Nicolas Cage Reinvents Spider-Man Noir for Television
Ben Reilly/Spiderman (Nicolas Cage) in SPIDER-NOIR
Photo: Aaron Epstein/Prime
© Amazon Content Services LLC
I also really appreciate how Cage insists on depicting Ben Reilly as an arachnid trapped inside of a human body, with his uncanny physical performance and classic Hollywood impressions keeping your eyes glued to the screen while also providing some of the show’s funniest moments.
I still think it’s a shame that the character is no longer politically motivated, and I miss the detail about Uncle Ben having been cannibalized by Vulture after his social activism ruffled too many feathers, but at least this time our protagonist actually feels like someone who could have been written by Raymond Chandler if he were a fan of Superheroes.
In fact, the writers nailed the snappy back-and-forth that Noir authors like Dashiel Hammett used to refer to as the “riposte”, and it’s fun to see supervillains being depicted as horrific movie monsters instead of specialized henchmen – with The Spider feeling like just as much of a Freak Show attraction as the rest of them. Purists might be put off by the lack of reverence for the source material, but I think that’s a small price to pay when even the show’s most clichéd moments intentionally harken back to the golden age of Hollywood.
That’s why I’d argue that Amazon’s Spider-Noir isn’t really an adaptation, but rather an equally valid take on the same premise that inspired Marvel back in 2009. And in a world filled with recycled storylines that only serve to advertise future releases, I’d rather have two completely different visions of the same character than a straight-up retelling of the same handful of ideas.
At the end of the day, there’s enough space inside this comic fan’s heart for both man-eating Vultures and a Cronenberg-inspired Man-Spider. And if you’re also a fan of nostalgic creature features with comic book flair, I’d highly recommend this street-level superhero story with a spooky twist.
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