Tobe Hooper's horror classic Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released in 1974 and was filmed in Austin, Texas. Three sequels and a remake of the original in 2003 continued the story, building upon the horrors of Leatherface, his family and their shocking deeds. I hear there's even going to be a pre-quel. The cast is composed of people no one ever heard of until that moment they read the credits in the theater. Leatherface is played by Gunnar Hansen. The creepy hitchhiker is Edwin Neal. Sally, the heroine of the story is played by Marilyn Burns, who also appears in the second sequel as a corpse on a gurney. The story itself is said to be based on the crimes of Ed Gein, who actually lived in Wisconsin. Many people believe this, but Tobe Hooper has said repeatedly that it is just not so. Ed Gein did inspire Robert Bloch's novel Psycho (later made into an Alfred Hitchcock movie, 1960), as well as the character Buffalo Bill in Thomas Harris' novel and the movie Silence of the Lambs (1991). There are only a few elements of Ed Gein's story that relate to what occurs or is implied in this movie -- most notably the mask or masks of skin that he wore, and the fact that Gein did rob graves. They both lived in farmhouses far off the beaten track, as well.

The most artful moments of the film is the opening, which uses a series of camera flashes of mouldering body parts and skinned heads. We are walking in a dungeon of death, catching glimpses of what is to come. The movie begins with a disturbing announcement that the graves in the Muerto County graveyard near the town of Butte have been desecrated and robbed. We are privy to the sight of a grotesque sculpture of at least two decaying bodies wired together and spindled on a monument as the radio announcer describes it. The families of those buried in this graveyard are coming, the announcer says, to ascertain if their loved ones were buried in some of the graves that were desecrated. This is were we meet our five ill-fated teens, two of whom have come to see if their grandfather's grave has been disturbed.

Once they've found out that all is right with grandpa, Sally Hardesty and her wheel-chair bound brother Franklin continue on their way with Sally's boyfriend Jerry and their friends Kirk and Pam. They soon pick up a very strange hitchhiker, who is clearly not all there and goes on at some length about the slaughterhouse, where his uncle works. He even shows them pictures of dead cattle that he carries around in a furry pouch hung on a thong around his neck. He then steals Franklins pocket knife and cuts his own hand with it, grinning insanely as the blood flows. Soon afterward, he does the same to Franklin's arm. The kids manage to get the weirdo out of the van and he leaves a mark on their van with his bloodied hand. A mark that looks more like an ankh than anything else...the symbol of eternal life.

They continue on, coming to a gas station that has no gas run by a couple of real inbred looking local types. Since they have no gas, the proprietor offers to sell them some barbeque. The boys end up buying some, after asking directions to the old Franklin place -- which Sally and Franklin's father owns. They grew up there. The proprietor attempts to convince them that it's dangerous and they don't really want to go, but they do anyway. Later, Franklin sits in his wheelchair staring at the hitchhikers bloody smear on the side of the van with a piece of barbeque sticking out of his mouth, which looks rather like something human and not animal.

After reaching the house, Kirk and Pam decide to go down to the pond and take a swim. Only the pond isn't there any more. This leads them to go wandering. They hear a motor running -- a gasoline motor, and Kirk leads the way to a farmhouse. He goes to the door to ask if they can get some gas, but no one answers. Kirk goes inside and becomes the first victim of Leatherface, who bludgeons him with a sledge hammer and drags him into the 'meat room'

After Kirk doesn't come back, Pam goes to the door. Again, there is no answer and she goes inside nosing around. Walking into the kitchen, Pam slips on the carpet of bone shards, whole bones and other grey nameless things that litter the kitchen floor. Looking around, she sees bones and skulls piled in totemic arrangements, furniture decorated with bones and mobiles of skulls and more bones. There is a white chicken stuffed into a birdcage (as if it grew up in the cage) watching her as she struggles to not to throw-up at the horror around her and get the hell out of there. Pam makes it to the door, but Leatherface grabs her and takes her into the meat room, too, hanging her on a meat hook. It is Pam's screams of pain and horror as Leatherface starts up the chainsaw to cut up Kirk that we hear at the end of the song Dawnrazor.

Jerry is the next victim, as he goes off to look for Kirk and Pam. As night falls, Sally and Franklin are left alone wondering what they should do. Franklin whines and becomes really obnoxious, wanting to leave. Sally swears that she won't leave without Jerry and she's going looking for him. Franklin makes her take him with her and she ends up pushing his wheelchair through the tangled woods. They both cry out Jerry's name...foolishly...for Leatherface hears them and comes after them. The chase through the woods doesn't really heat up until Sally is the last one left. Losing all sense of direction as she runs away from the chainsaw weilding madman, Sally eventually finds her way to the gas station and is taken by the proprietor back to the house of horrors. While the hitchhiker gags her and ties her to the chair, she's told they'll be serving dinner soon. I'm not certain if it's still Pam we hear at the beginning of The Sequel or if it is actually Sally, who is crying/groaning/screaming under her gag as 'dinner' unfolds and Grandpa arrives

The hitchhiker and the proprietor of the gas station are also guests at this party. They go upstairs to carry Grandpa down in his chair. Sally saw Grandpa and Grandma earlier as she was running through the house trying to escape. They appeared to be corpses dressed up and sat facing each other in a macabre tableau. But Grandpa is not dead...well not quite. The hitcherhiker holds Sally with a knife to her throat as Leatherface slices open one of her fingers. Grossly, Grandpa nurses the blood and this re-animates him somewhat. Sally writhes in horror, wide-eyed and screaming until she passes out. When she comes to, screaming in terror at the scene before her, they tell her that Grandpa is going to do the honors of killing her and that he's the best. "You won't feel a thing," they tell her. But Grandpa doesn't have the strength and keeps dropping the sledge. Sally manages to escape once more with the hitchhiker and Leatherface chasing her.

All of this happens under the gaze of the full moon.

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As I said earlier, Ed Gein's story inspired Robert Bloch's horror story Psycho, for Ed's mother Augusta was a stern, overbearing woman who tried to keep Ed and his older brother Henry from the sins of the world. Their father George was an alcoholic no-good, who couldn't keep a job and Augusta despised him. But divorce was not an option, in her fanatically religious mind. George had no part in their upbringing. She read to them from the bible every afternoon, and raised up the boys to believe that all women were whores -- except her, and discouraged them soundly from making friends. Ed grew up his mama's good boy and an effeminate social misfit. Augusta nurtured the Oedipal devotion she'd instilled in Ed, and when she died, he lost his only friend and love.

Norman Bates comes far closer to the psychotic mentality of the bereft and socially inept mama's boy than Leatherface. Buffalo Bill, the serial killer in Thomas Harris' Silence of the Lambs is more representative of Gein's psychotic fascination with women and their flesh. But Buffalo Bill hadn't come along at the time Dawnrazor was recorded. I once wrote that the line in Dawnrazor "cutting razor sounding violins..." reminded me of the stabbing, shrieking violins in Psycho from the shower scene. I still think that's true, for there never has been a sound like that in movies before or since. So maybe there's a little more relevance to both the song and album Dawnrazor from this story. It seems significant that Pam's screams appear at the end of the song Dawnrazor for this reason. Whether it is Pam or Sally who are screaming at the beginning of The Sequel, it might be that McCoy was foreseeing the sequels this movie would continue to spawn. But that is only a guess.

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Why Texas Chainsaw Massacre? people have asked. While it is easy to see the allure of the spaghetti-western favorites at the time and how Evil Dead, The Omen and The Name of the Rose fit into all of this Nephilim thing, Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a head-scratcher to be sure. I've come to a lot of conclusions about why this movie might figure so prominently in the Dawnrazor songs and Preacher Man video in writing this piece, but I think I've hit upon the real connections. This movie is about cannibals -- people who eat people. There is an element of vampirism, with Grandpa's 'liquid diet' and the idea of a living dead man. We also have the ankh bloodsmear of the hitchhiker on the side of the van...a further intimation of eternal life through blood and sacrifice. The Book of Giants -- a highly fragmented text writen around the same time as the Books of Enoch -- makes reference to the giant sons of the Watchers seeking to devour many and the corruption of the earth with its blood. The text is in fact so fragmented that we only get an idea of what the author was trying to say:

4Q531 Frag. 2 [...] they defiled [...] [...they begot] giants and monsters [...] [...] they begot, and, behold, all [the earth was corrupted...] [...] with its blood and by the hand of [...] [giants] which did not suffice for them and [...] [...] and they were seeking to devour many [...] [...] [...] the monsters attacked it.

Another reference to the the Watchers and their offspring is from Jubilees:

And they begat sons the Naphidim, and they were all unlike, and they devoured one another: and the Giants slew the Naphil, and the Naphil slew the Eljo, and the Eljo mankind, and one man another. And every one sold himself to work iniquity and to shed much blood, and the earth was filled with iniquity. And after this they sinned against the beasts and birds, and all that moves and walks on the earth: and much blood was shed on the earth, and every imagination and desire of men imagined vanity and evil continually.

There is also a heavy connection to the Rephaim, who were one of the tribes of giants in Caanan, and vampirism. The Anakim, the Emim and Rephaim are thought to be the models of the giant offspring of the angels, villified in a fiction by the authors of these ancient books. According to the Bible, the Israelites were 'as grasshoppers' compared to the sons of Anak. The reference to vampirism is heard in the song Blue Water..."we feed at nightfall". Vampires have eternal life. They live as long as there is blood for them to drink, and more often than not, their victims are human. All gods, even the one in the Bible, live and thrive by sacrifice and throughout history, these sacrifices have been both human and animal. In the Book of the Patriarchs, the consumption of blood is forbidden after the flood -- as it is in Genesis. For there to be a prohibition, there must first be an act to be prohibited.

It is possible that McCoy saw Ed Gein and the fictional characters he resembled or inspired as modern day representations of the sons of the Watchers -- Gein, a being horribly perverted by the fanatical religiosity of his mother and her view of the world and women, to where women and their flesh became a morbid and decidedly unhealthy fascination that led to crimes that bore the stamp of the things writen in the ancient texts. As the story goes, the Watchers themselves were also fascinated with women and their flesh...just not quite in the same way.

There are more strange associations that could go on awhile longer, but I think now you might see how Texas Chainsaw Massacre does indeed fit into the Nephilim mythos as conceived by McCoy.