Superficially, the movie has much in common with its neverending horde of imitators: a blade-wielding killer in a mask, a group of silly and attractive teenagers who are slaughtered one by one, a "final girl" who outlives her friends. But similarities end there. Take the masked killer--this isn't some mute cipher gussied up in weakly supernatural trappings to make him some sort of dark-side Superman with a machete, like Jason Vorhees or Michael Myers; this is a lunatic with roots. He seems to be mentally retarded, and given what we see of his environment he may well be the product of inbreeding. He gibbers like a baby, squeals like a pig, reacts with grotesque obesiance when scolded and capers like a dervish when thwarted. He even sports different skin masks for different occasions--a motherly one when cooking, a made-up glamour-face when entertaining a guest--in a horrific parody of normal human etiquette. Gunnar Hansen, the actor who plays him, didn't just conjure some bogeyman out of the ether to guide his performance--he studied mental patients and the severely retarded. There's a there there in Leatherface--and that the there is this disgusting abscess of humanity is what makes him so frightening a figure.

Then there are the kids who get killed. First of all, they're vaguely hippie-ish; what with the fact that they get torn to pieces in an all-American state like Texas, the Vietnam metaphor is inescapable, and in this case actually appropriate. (The spectre of Vietnam loomed large over the horror films of the late 60s and early 70s, and was, I think, much more interestingly explored there than in many films explicitly about the subject. I suppose this goes without saying, but I for one feel I learned a lot more about the era from Night of the Living Dead than I did from Forrest Gump.) Moreover, they're not dead-obvious targets--there's no pot-smoking, no sex, no drinking going on. Hell, they went to go make sure their grandpa's grave was okay, and then went on to revisit the place they spent many happy childhood hours. You can't get more innocuous than that; you can't find less of a reason to be killed than that either.

And yes, 4 out of the 5 kids are attractive, the girls in particular--but even what appear to be T&A shots end up being little more than set-ups for later horrors. Take, for example, the memorable low-angle tracking shot that follows Pam as she walks toward Leatherface's house: At first we think this is just an excuse to gaze longingly at the seeming miles of skin on display outside the almost nonexistent confines of her skimpy clothing, but we learn within minutes that this was really intended to impress upon us the fact that her shirt has no back. (How we learn this I'll just leave to the movie, but it may be the most shocking scene in a film that's full of them.) And Sally, our "final girl," is undoubtedly beautiful, but those secondary sex characteristics filmmakers seem so enamored so often of are of no avail to her: Her long, lovely blonde hair catches in the brambles and branches of the woods she flees through; her wretched, unmistakably and pathetically sexual pleas for mercy to Leatherface's family--"I'll do anything you want"--fall on deaf ears. Sexuality isn't being punished here, because sexuality is a non-issue. These kids are nothing but meat.