*NB: I will be using he/him pronouns for Leatherface because even though most of the movies clearly make him trans/non-binary, this is never explicitly stated, explained, or defined. I'm not the kind of person to intentionally misgender someone because they do bad things. We simply don't know what the preferred pronouns are, and even most people who dive deep into this aspect of the franchise use he/him pronouns.
As there are many movies, and the later ones get more complex in their ableism, I’m going to split this into two reviews. Overall, the series goes out of their way to make a very high proportion of their villains disabled with only one protagonist in one movie being disabled. There's no way to argue that they aren't using disability (including the pathologization of queerness) to increase fear: they, consciously or subconsciously, associate disability with evil.
I will begin with an outline of the movies and years. As they have such similar (and the same) names, I will refer to them as their number in the franchise.
1: The Texas Chain Saw [sic] Massacre (1974).
2: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986).
3: Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990).
4: Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995).
5: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003).
6: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006).
7: Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013).
8: Leatherface (2017).
9: Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022).
The first movie did a pretty good job at showing the ableism and exclusion that wheelchair users face, but I wish they wouldn’t have made him The Annoying One. As for Leatherface, he changed into women's clothing and put makeup on the mask later in the movie. Some fans and some later movies interpret this as Leatherface being a "split personality," while others believe this means the character is queer. Either way, the villain of the entire franchise is rooted in ableism. Some portray Leatherface as being violent due to having DID (dangerously ableist), while others explicitly pathologize his queerness as being a symptom of mental illness and thus something that should be eradicated (aka, ableist eugenics).
In the second movie, Leatherface’s brother is nicknamed Chop Top. This is because he had a TBI in Vietnam, resulting in a metal implant which is repeatedly used for comedic effect. To be clear, this is not an attack on the Nam Land setting as I realise this is part of the director's black comedy/political satire themes. The character is also clearly coded as having PTSD and is portrayed as the stereotypical “nut job,” bouncing around and screaming unpredictably and nonsensically throughout the film. An overarching theme of this movie is the sexualisation of violence, which is extremely harmful with a queer-coded antagonist.
The third movie introduces a new villain named Tinker, who has a limb difference. This movies shows mama is a wheelchair user with a voice box. Leatherface was originally designed in this movie to have facial deformities, but this was cut out. Overall, this movie came to imply that Leatherface has DID, saying that (with incorrect terminology) the alter that fronts correlates to the mask he's wearing. I have a fundamental understanding of the condition, but find someone who has DID, and read their explanation. Anything I write would be an unjust oversimplification. That being said, this movie does such a horrible job at portraying DID that I honestly wonder if they even knew the condition was a condition. Unfortunately, such horrifically violent portrayals are the standard. The stereotype of people with DID is that they are extremely dangerous, and this franchise couldn't exaggerate that more. Combine that with the fact that they are using this to pathologize the queerness of the villain, this movie couldn't exist without bigotry.
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