The numbering of the movies:
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 fourth movie makes Leatherface queer, and the character is femme for most of the movie. Others have called this Leatherface emasculated, timid, and pathetic; at one point he becomes submissive when Jenny is yelling at him. Most of all, Leatherface isn't even the primary antagonist of this film. He spends most of the time whining and being scolded: being queer and femme makes him lesser. The movie poster is of Leatherface in stockings, heels, and a long-haired wig--they used this queerness and femininity as a way to say, "Leatherface is crazier than ever, you gotta watch it!" The co-writer of this movie also explicitly stated that Leatherface takes on the persona of the person whose face he is wearing, directly connecting the violence and the mental illness. The movie treats queerness and femininity as interchangeable with mental illness or intellectual disabilities. This pathologization is frequently used as an argument that trans and non-binary people are mentally ill and curable—meaning they should be eradicated for their own good, aka eugenics.
The fifth movie is a remake of the first, but without a wheelchair user. However, the same character is again The Annoying One. This movie adds nothing to the others except that it establishes Leatherface as having a severe skin condition that results in a lot of ableism. However, it does not imply that this ostracization led to his violence; it merely uses this as a reason for the masks.
The sixth movie shows that Leatherface has what is likely fetal alcohol syndrome and is repeatedly called the r-word. He worked at a meat packing plant, and when it closed down he didn't leave due to his intellectual disability. This annoyed the boss, and a member of staff called him an animal for liking it there. He comes back later and kills the boss with a sledgehammer. He takes a chainsaw on the way out, implying that this may be his first kill. This is framed as him being "crazy" and violent from birth, snapping when losing a job and being treated poorly at work. This could have easily been reframed as him becoming violent in reaction to abuse in the workplace--add in a montage of verbal and physical abuse due to traits of his intellectual disability such as not talking, misunderstanding social cues, having "weird" interests, etc. They could have changed the plot from being "disability begets evil" to "evil begets evil," but they continue to choose the former.
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