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?”
