Good morning 🐣

Hello, my ghoulies. I’m writing to you while listening to some spooky beats on Lofi Girl’s YouTube radio channel. These absolute bops are helping me get through an otherwise gruesome entry in Cinescape x October.

In fact if you need a little extra BOOst, I found all of the above via puzzle-maker Laura E. Hall’s 10th annual 31 Days of Halloween, a daily newsletter that only runs in October and gathers the fun, spooky, cozy side of the season from across the Internet.

A brief intermission 🍿

The Last of Us, Yellowjackets, Santa Clarita Diet, Bones and All: Lots of shows and movies are touching on cannibalism these days. Author Carmen Maria Machado breaks it down into two storytelling formats for Bon Appétit of all places:

1. “hunger for human flesh as a metaphor for moneyed excess” and

2. “stories of desperation and survival, the breaching of an unthinkable taboo in the face of certain death.”

Machado writes:

These narratives question the ethics of consumption. Meat becomes a literal metaphor: who’s at the top of the food chain and who’s at the bottom; who gets to eat whom. It’s played across gender, class, and appetites of all kinds—men eating women, the rich eating the poor. (Let’s not forget the phrase, “Eat the rich,” either.)

[…] Cannibalism stories ask us to wrestle with thorny questions about what it means to eat the things we eat, or what it means to unmake something just like us in service of ourselves. It is a subject impossible to untangle from our human desire to consume, or the vulnerabilities that make us easy to be consumed. In her essay on cannibalism as metaphor for capitalism and feminism, Chelsea G. Summers—author of her own brilliant cannibal novel, A Certain Hunger—writes on the way the idea has infected our very language: “We don’t just win; we devour. We don’t just vanquish; we roast our rivals, and we eat them for breakfast. We go to bars described as meat markets in search of a piece of ass, and if we find a lover, we nibble, we ravish, we swallow them whole.”

Now watch this 👀

It’s October 1974 and you’re walking by your local cinema. A poster catches your eye: a woman’s head tilted to the heavens, screaming in vain, and a man standing in front of her, hunched over, starting up a chainsaw. But it’s the words on that poster that really sink their teeth into you: “Who will survive and what will be left of them?”

As we continue our Swiftian tour (of the Taylor variety, not Jonathan) through four distinct eras of horror and the legacies they’ve left behind, we travel back 50 years to celebrate the release of an unparalleled classic. Much like The Blair Witch Project, last week’s pick, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre also plays with audience’s perceptions of reality. The opening text crawl, narrated by John Larroquette, presents the film as a reenactment of a real-life crime. This could happen to you; it already happened to others.

Scott Tobias writes that it “hit theaters like a grisly piece of outsider art:”

“The film you are about to see is true,” lied the tagline for Tobe Hooper’s 1974 horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a piece of misinformation that Hooper claimed mirrored the lies being pushed by the United States government at the time. But the line also establishes the film’s distinct aesthetic: Roughly inspired by the Ed Gein case, Hooper’s low-budget shocker isn’t a stylized, escapist piece of horror filmmaking, but one that emphasizes real terror through a plain, matter-of-fact brutality that’s infinitely more disturbing. Hooper removes all the varnish from the genre and shows how human beings suffer and die at the hands of other human beings—the film’s literal slaughterhouse functions as a stand-in for the metaphoric slaughterhouse of the Vietnam War.

In Fangoria, editor-in-chief Phil Nobile Jr. writes:

Death’s bleak inevitability is sitting right there in the title of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. There’s no ambiguous “haunting” or “legend” in that title. Right there on your admission ticket, it’s printed in black and white: Death is coming. With that one title, you’ve been told the what, the where, and the how. (An opening dateline provides the when; you will never really get the why.) The film that follows is not an escapist, spooky funhouse ride. It’s a funeral dirge.

[…] Its hellish soundscape never became dated, because it is singular in the history of the genre; nothing has sounded like it before or since. The sound design is near-flawless, impregnating even the quiet moments with a droning sense of doom. It’s the heavy silence of a funeral director’s office, or an oncologist’s waiting room. It’s the noisy quiet of blood pounding in your ears during a panic attack.

[…] Part of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s enduring power is its juxtaposition of obliviousness and a kind of horrible omniscience, and in that clarity is revealed a universe prodding us down the cattle chute from day one.

For such ugly subject matter, the film has gorgeous, iconic cinematography and shot composition. I mean just look at this, sort of like an inverted Pietà:

Not to mention:

Until next time! 👻