The Texas Chain Saw Massacre​​
Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, TCSM) is indisputably a cult classic. Critics have described it as “a key text of the 1970s post-studio period”, [1] “among the most effective horror films ever made”, [2] a film that stands out for its shrewd aesthetics. [3] Robin Wood, as one of the first critics to express admiration for Hooper’s film, concluded his Marxist-Freudian analysis by labelling horror films “the most important of all American film genres” of the 1970s [4] for their ability to express an America in crisis. Now often cited as a seminal text of American cinema, Hooper’s film has received a plethora of scholarly attention that has brought forth both the complexity of its cultural references and the ingenuity of the director’s filmmaking. Most critical work on the film draws on Wood’s early reading of it, and hence focuses on the political climate of the US in the 1970s, particularly such events as the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal or the Cambodia bombing. [5] Some scholars conflate these claims with remarks on Hooper’s ground-breaking visual style, which is said to disconcertingly confound viewers’ genre expectations. Others relate the political context of the film to its cosmic symbolism, either elaborating on the former’s “struggle between good and evil” [6], or viewing its fatal trajectory as a metaphor for life. [7] Avoiding such broad interpretations, Roche explores how the narrative of the film allegorises industrial capitalism in its late phase. [8]
 
Roche’s reading has much in common with Merritt and Jackson, who focus on the conditions of industrial production and how they replace human labour by mechanical labour. [9] This historical development is indeed represented in the film by its family of unemployed butchers trying to make ends meet by slaughtering people with a chain saw.
 
TCSM seems to allow a wide range of readings. From the wide range of interpretations available we can infer that the chain saw narrative not only constitutes an apocalyptic vision of the United States in the 1970s, [10] but serves as a transnational imagining of the decline of Western society under late capitalism. I would argue that the transnational implications of the chain saw narrative have received scant attention; similarly, there has thus far been little critical engagement with the influence and legacy of Hooper’s film beyond the context of the USA.

Texas in the Chain Saw Massacre
What has been explicitly identified is the specifically Texan location of Hooper’s films. The fact that the title of the film was initially to be Leatherface and was later changed – although some crew members strongly protested against the naming of Texas in the title – suggests that the film’s geographical specificity is significant. Brown and Rose, for instance, agree with Albright that TCSM is a milestone of regional horror. [11] According to Rose, the film’s particular regional context is part of its stylistic and thematic coherence. Rose points out that the title of the film evokes verisimilitude. Supported by the documentary style of the first few minutes of the film, the name Texas in the title consolidates the reality of the events that follow. [12] Furthermore, in the context of the early 1970s, Texas recalls traumatic events of the recent past, such as the murder of John F. Kennedy and “the Charles Whitman shooting spree at the University of Texas, alongside notions of small and insular farming communities, rednecks, racism, homophobia, inbreeding, and the constant, intense heat.” [13] For her part, Brown outlines the social conditions of 1970s Texas, which gave new life to the hillbilly trope. [14] Many scholars follow Brown in identifying the Sawyer family in TCSM as ‘hillbillies’, while locating these figures firmly in the film’s regional landscape. [15] Bell, for instance, analyzes how the function of the homegrown American monster is taken up in the film by Texan country folk. [16]
 
Even so, the epistemic value of the Texas location complements rather than undermines the transnational implications of the chain saw narrative, exemplifying how transnational codes are adapted at national level, and how national and regional specificity can be transliterated into different national contexts. Christoph Schlingensief’s The German Chain Saw Massacre (1990, GCSM) is an instructive example.

Landscapes in Christoph Schlingensief’s Films
Like Hooper’s film title invoking Texas, Schlingensief’s film explicitly names Germany as the location of its chain saw tale. And like Hooper for the Texas countryside, Schlingensief goes to great lengths to reference images associated with the German landscape. This was probably motivated less by a desire on Schlingensief’s part to emulate Hooper than by Schlingensief’s own understanding of filmmaking. Schlingensief’s style certainly has affinities with Hooper’s ‘guerrilla’ approach to filmmaking. For instance, as Hooper’s film crew was behind schedule, they were forced to shoot the film’s climax – the evening dinner with the Sawyer family – over 26 long hours. The Texas summer caused almost unbearable conditions. With 95° Fahrenheit plus and animal props, filled with formaldehyde, literally rotting under the lights [17] (Muir, 15), the shooting itself turned into an experience of gore and horror. The make-up artist Dorothy J. Pearl is remembered as having said: “At one point, […] I looked around and thought, we are truly living this thing. We aren’t making it any more. We’re living it.” [18]
 
Schlingensief, too, worked on a low budget, and most of his films were shot within a few days, under extreme working conditions. In interviews, he confirms that he did indeed aim for a gaining of momentum when shooting and that he therefore chose locations which could trigger uncontrollable and intense situations. With most of his films he sought isolation, opting to shoot in remote locations where crewmembers’ social contacts with the ‘outside world’ were severely reduced. As a result, group dynamics were intensified within this microcosm to the extent that interpersonal relations among the crew became tense and conflictual.

Egomania. Island without Hope: Extreme working conditions: bitterly cold shots of the North Sea island of Langeroog

Egomania. Island without Hope: more extreme working conditions: a shot of the body of the actor Volker Bertzky showing how the conditions make it into the film

Schlingensief’s films undoubtedly mirror the mood on set. One of the most impressive examples of this approach to filmmaking can be found in Schlingensief’s 100 Years of Adolf Hitler. The Last Hour in the Führerbunker (1988), made over a 16-hour period in an original World War II bunker: the most isolated location possible was found and the experience was intensified by the practice of shooting until everyone was totally exhausted, irrespective of whether the end of the script had been reached. The performative relevance of the shooting location was particularly important for Schlingensief’s early films, such as Tunguska. The Crates Are Here! (1983), shot in the space of just nine days in the apocalyptic setting of a quarry in Rauen, or the metaphysical melodrama Egomania – Island without Hope (1986), shot over 10 bitterly cold days on the North Sea island of Langeroog.
 
100 years of Adolf Hitler, followed by GCSM and Terror 2000. Intensive Care Unit Germany (1992), comprised Schlingensief’s Trilogy of Germany.  As the series title suggests, these films about Germany mark a shift in his work towards a more directly politicised engagement with history and place. As I argue below, the location of the films is now where Germany itself is happening, where the Germany of the late 1980s and early 1990s (as seen by Schlingensief) is simultaneously coming to the surface and where it is rooted.

The German Chain Saw Massacre
Written, shot and edited within three weeks in early October 1990, GCSM was a very early and immediate response to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the official reunification of Germany on 3 October 1990. Schlingensief once stated that the idea for the film came to him as he watched a TV broadcast about the fall of the Wall and the official celebrations at the Brandenburg Gate, showing women in Trabants (the iconic East German car) and men with bananas yelling “We are the people”. [19] But instead of joining the celebrations Schlingensief’s mind was full of the dreadful images of Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre I and II (1974 and 1986) that he had seen only a few weeks before.
 
As a result, Schlingensief sat down and wrote his screenplay. A viewer acquainted with the chain saw formula can predict most of the narrative events. East Germans leaving their former homeland of the GDR for West Germany are caught, slaughtered and minced into sausages by a cannibalistic family of West German butchers – a similar premise to that of TCSM. However, whereas the latter opens with images of an excavated corpse, with the black screen only sporadically illuminated by a camera flash, Schlingensief’s GCSM opens with the TV coverage of the state ceremony for the re-unification of Germany at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. While Hooper’s soundtrack for those pre-credit images takes the form of a radio report on recent grave robberies across the country, Schlingensief`s soundtrack comes from the TV coverage, consisting of moments from the speech by the then German president, Richard von Weizsäcker, accompanied by the national anthem and people cheering. We might say that death and decay characterise Hooper’s introduction, while a new beginning and a promising future is what concerns Schlingensief’s. Yet even as Schlingensief’s adaptation of Hooper’s original seems to contradict its model, the very contrast implies that Schlingensief’s opening is intended to be read as horror. That is to say, Schlingensief blended the positive and triumphalist images of cheerful, rejoicing Germans with the disturbing images from Hooper’s films, which were still fresh in his mind, and both have the same terrifying effects.  Anthony Coulson argues that Schlingensief’s film with its array of hegemonic images of reunification is a kind of critical manifesto about that specific historical moment and what lay behind it:

Schlingensief targets his onslaught, in drastic hyperbole, on the image-making itself, on the screen drama of national celebration. For him the depravity of these images, and of the society that apparently believes in them, consists in camouflaging the unsavoury realities of unification, realities which, with few inhibitions, his satire then proceeds to expose. [20]

Whereas TCSM responds to the pessimism of American youth in the late 1960s and early 1970s, [21] Schlingensief reacts viscerally to the optimism of the Germans in 1989 and 1990. That is, the euphoria around reunification was linked to the idea that the German nation had finally achieved its teleological end after a long and fraught journey. To elaborate on this: in the late 18th century, when there was as yet no political body called Germany, but an emerging longing for a unified Germany was beginning to make itself felt, the two most famous German poets – Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – coined a legendary aphorism: “Deutschland. Aber wo liegt es? Ich weiß das Land nicht zu finden, wo das gelehrte beginnt, hört das politische auf.” [22] – “Germany. But where is it? I cannot find this country. Where cultural Germany begins, there the Germany of politics ends.” The aphorism expresses a hegemonic discourse about the identity of the German nation that was to emerge in the succeeding two centuries. The idea of Germany as a nation that only finds its identity as a cultural entity (as the land of poets and thinkers) but lacks territorial and political unity became one of the most prominent and influential topoi in the German national narrative – encapsulated in the term “cultural nation” (“Kulturnation”), which the German historian Friedrich Meinecke coined at the end of the 19th century. [23] Almost 200 years after Schiller and Goethe and following two centuries of Germany struggling with its geopolitical frontiers, borders began to blur again, shaping a unified Germany and – as it were finally – successfully completing the national project. Schlingensief, however, is more than a little sceptical about this supposed new reality. In one of the early scenes, a Trabbi rattles along an unsurfaced road, until it hits a name sign saying GDR. Logically speaking, you have to assume that the car has just entered the GDR, since the sign is passed in the direction of travel. But if you follow the alternative logic of the narrative, then the car has just passed the border into West Germany. The same uncertainty is evoked when the East German heroine, Klara (the film’s equivalent of Hooper’s Sally) crosses the border into West Germany. Since this takes place at night, only the border crossing-point itself is illuminated; but it is surrounded by intense darkness. Both the GDR, soon to be left behind, and West Germany, which is about to be entered, lack any distinguishing features: the border might be anywhere and nowhere. Every aspect of these shots seems directly to challenge ideas of what and where Germany is, or will be in times to come. Schlingensief subverts the euphoria of German reunification, instead affirming Goethe’s and Schiller’s topos of an intangible German nation.
 
When Klara awakens in her car the morning after she has crossed the border, West Germany appears mysteriously out of the fog. Klara’s new life, the start of which is implied with her awakening in the new country, begins in a grim and off-putting manner. The lifting of the fog merely unveils an unappealing grey and isolated site dominated by brutal concrete blocks the function of which remains unclear. These blocks not only obstruct Klara’s view, but also evoke a claustrophobic mood which contradicts the promise of freedom that former East Germans associated with German reunification. However, we soon discover that Klara is not alone at this site, for it teems with characters, symbols and sounds from both highbrow and lowbrow German mythology, such as Fritz Haarmann (a German equivalent of Ed Gein), or the fact that one of the butcher family members wears a winged helmet (except that the wings are replaced by sausages). The following night, Klara is poisoned with a potion, and dreams a danse macabre: among the dancers is Adolf Hitler. This and other references to the German National Socialist past, for instance a torchlight procession by the male members of the family, unsettle any feelings of national pride in German reunification that the spectator might have experienced.

The German Chain Saw Massacre: A member of the butcher family with his winged helmet

A scarcely less ambiguous soundtrack accompanies these visual references. A scratchy gramophone plays various German folk songs. “Die Gedanken sind frei, wer kann sie erraten” (“Thoughts are free, who can guess them”) [24], for instance, is the iconic German song about freedom of thought that has served as a political protest song in the cause of liberation ever since the rise of the German national liberal movement in the early 19th century. Another is Roter Wedding [25], a political protest song of the Alliance of Red Front Fighters during the Weimar Republic. The text by Erich Weinert (melody by Hanns Eisler) tells the story of the so-called Bloody May of 1929, when the Berlin police brutally fought back against protesting workers and several protesters were killed. Another folk song is “Hoch auf dem gelben Wagen” (“High on the Yellow Wagon”). This song, originally from the late 19th century and long forgotten, regained popularity in 1973 when the then German Foreign Minister (and later German Federal President) Walter Scheel sang it on a well-known German television charity show. 300,000 copies of the resulting record were sold, and the song entered the music charts and stayed there for 15 weeks. The way these songs fill the scene of the chain saw massacre means the landscape is inscribed with their embedded references to German political history, which appears as a history of perpetual political struggle and warfare. This is suggested, for example, when the family of butchers, as it hunts for victims, intones the famous German nursery rhyme “Maikäfer flieg!” (a version of “Ladybird, Ladybird, Fly Away Home”):

Away Home”):
Maykäfer, flieg!
Der Vater ist im Krieg.
Die Mutter ist im Pommerland.
Und Pommerland ist abgebrandt. [26]
(Fly Ladybird!
Father’s at war.
Mother’s in Pomerania.
And Pomerania’s burnt down.)

GCSM appears to work quite similarly to TCSM in the way it employs elements of national narrative and culture to present a disturbing account of current national sensitivities. When he presents the members of the family of butchers singing German folk songs while they hunt for East Germans, Schlingensief links allegedly innocuous traditions of German romanticism with savagery. Schlingensief reads German history less as an eschatological trajectory than as a history of violence which haunts Germany´s presence and future.

Transposing Texan Rural Spaces into Industrial Germany
Brown reconstructs how the aesthetics of the European Gothic were transposed into the existential conditions of the American people. [27] In her account, the main difference between the latter and the European Gothic is to be found in the Gothic space. Whereas enclosed spaces are the loci of European horror, it is the Frontier with its vast and open spaces that haunts the American Gothic imagination. She further argues that it is not the European haunted house that we find in American horror films, but an abandoned farmhouse. As Hooper’s film demonstrate, Texas is emblematic of the spaces of the American Gothic. Its dry, brown vegetation stretches seemingly infinitely through a flat, open landscape. Hooper captures this vast openness in shots which Bridget Cherry has gone so far as to describe as sublime. The immensity of space dwarfs all the characters, rendering them victims of a hostile, deathly world. [28]
 
Schlingensief transforms the Texan rural context into a derelict German industrial site in what is apparently a rural area: deserted, muddy, chilly undergrowth some time in a late German autumn. Though this brownfield site with its monumental steel scaffolding and endless concrete walls and blocks has very little in common with the vast open spaces of Texas, it too may be described as sublime. The demiurgic power that once created and mastered this monstrous structure is absent, yet at the same time lingers as an anonymous, forceful power. The gigantic structure’s sublime effect recalls the enduring effect of ruins, as famously proposed by Hitler’s architect Albert Speer in his “theory of ruin value” (“Ruinenwerttheorie”). [29] Resisting any extreme long-distance shots, let alone panning shots of the set, Schlingensief avoids providing an overview, making it harder for the spectator to gain orientation and stability within the depicted space: the spectator feels as lost as the fictional characters.

The German Chain Saw Massacre: Schlingensief’s claustrophobic staging of the abandoned industrial site, and a lost Klara looking for help

The industrial site refers to both the East German and the West German national narrative. The progress of industrialization was an essential part of the East German socialist vision: the image of smoking chimneys, steel ladles and polluted water and soil evoked (whatever immediate unease it also gave rise to) the promise of a better future. Of course, the national bankruptcy of the GDR proved such hopes and efforts to have been baseless, and the derelict industrial site is a portent of the rundown of the GDR – a warning sign of times to come. At the same time, such a redundant site is also iconic for the landscape of the West German Ruhr region, where Schlingensief himself grew up.
 
In the post-war years, the Ruhr region was the engine and the emblem of the rebuilding of West Germany and later of its economic miracle. [30] The region mainly produced the coal and steel essential for the rapid recovery of West Germany. However, coal mining and steel production fell into decline again once the industrial reconstruction of the country was accomplished. [31] With the steel crisis of the mid 1970s it became increasingly apparent that the Ruhr region could barely compete in a globalised market. In 1975 the growth period in the steel sector came to an abrupt end. [32] As a result, the number of steel workers dropped from 204,000 to 150,000 between 1979 and 1985. Specifically in the region of Duisburg-Oberhausen, where GCSM was filmed, there was an employment cut of 30% in iron production. [33] And with the announcement of further job losses at the end of the 1980s, the unemployment rate reached almost 20% in the Ruhr region – whereas West Germany as a whole saw an economic jump between 1984 and 1986. [34] The industrial action which took place, most prominently in the Krupp-Stahl AG steelworks at Stahlwerk Duisburg-Rheinhausen, [35] was similar in character and public perception to the UK miners’ strike of 1984-85. The industrial site is therefore a locus of existential struggle, and of failure. The times when it was associated with the victorious post-war social market economy of West Germany are long past. And, moreover, the Ruhr was the first regional economy that faced the downsides of globalisation and market liberalisation, a process that was particularly encouraged by the German government from 1983 onwards, when Helmut Kohl became Chancellor of a conservative-liberal coalition. [36]
 
For a German viewer of 1990, the impression of the cold, muddy, derelict site of GCSM might invoke a famous promise made by Chancellor Helmut Kohl in a televised speech in July 1990, only three months before the filming of Schlingensief’s piece. In his speech, Kohl promised “flourishing pastures for the New Germany” (“blühenden Landschaften”), a Germany where it would be worth living and working. This metaphor, which was intended to show economic growth and social welfare as the guaranteed effects of the western capitalist free market, is, of course, undermined and negated by the industrial ruins of GCSM.
 
Now, in the film’s present, the industrial site is home to the cannibalistic and incestuous family of butchers who process East Germans crossing the border to West Germany into sausages. At this point, I would like to interject some remarks on the butchery theme which already works tremendously well in Hooper’s narrative, but which works even better in a German context: sausages (German: Wurst) are a cultural good in Germany. More than 1,500 different kinds of sausage are produced in the country, and in 2014 the pro capita German consumption of sausage was 29.5 kilogrammes (compared with 60.3 kilos per capita of total meat consumption). [37] The essentiality of sausage culture has its effect on German idioms, too. If Germans simply say “Wurst” or “Das ist Wurst!”, they are expressing complete indifference to something. At the same time, “Jetzt geht es um die Wurst!” (literally: “Now it’s about the sausage.”) means something like “It’s crunch time!” Referring to those notions, Johnny, a member of our butchering family, sings: “Alles hat ein Ende nur die Wurst hat keins” (“Everything has an end, only the sausage has none.”) in the final sequence of GCSM, ironically referring to the German idiom and indicating that the massacres will never cease. Yet the film’s family of butchers does not just represent a minor, perhaps marginalised group in the German nation, but is the German nation as a whole in the latter’s own self-understanding. Thus, sausages take their place in Schlingensief’s challenge to the dominant discourse on reunification.

This is Where the Free Market Begins
GCSM reflects the conflicting economic consequences of German reunification, for the western post-war promise of infinite progress and economic growth was arguably fulfilled only in the perverted productivity of self-consumption. [38] In the course of the film, the cannibalistic and incestuous family of butchers allegorises Germany as a production line of insatiable global capitalism. In this setting, capitalism shows its true Janus face. Clearly Schlingensief’s and Hooper’s chain saw massacres make similar connections between cannibalism and capitalism, and most scholarly work on Hooper’s film identifies capitalism as the main source of horror. [39] But Schlingensief’s adaptation focuses on unmasking the illusory ideology of progress, which he understands as the constitutive dynamic of capitalism.  Schlingensief addresses the social stasis and constriction of the Kohl era, which was especially pronounced in the federal state of North-Rhine Westphalia. It is no accident that this was where Schlingensief grew up and where GCSM was shot. Although West Germany faced several economic crises and social challenges at the time, the protective, insulating effect of West Germany’s post-war welfare state continued to characterise Germany even after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989: economic stability and welfare and contented self-absorption were dependent on economic growth and technical progress, and both of these therefore become important for post-war German identity. It is because of this that even the challenge of high rates of structural unemployment in the 1980s (ca. 8%) did not affect a fundamental social consensus in West German society, mostly thanks to widespread material prosperity. [40]
 
Schlingensief stages the industrial site as a prison, perverting the message of protection and security. The manner in which the camerawork reproduces the framing of each scene (see images 3 & 6) creates a kind of on-going liminality. The main effect of these marked borders within the shots is that the landscape appears claustrophobic, in contrast to the agoraphobia-inducing Texan landscape with its wide-open spaces and distant cinematographic horizons. Schlingensief’s great industrial structure does not turn out to be the promised land of democracy and freedom, but a huge prison. In most shots, concrete walls, columns, pillars and steel scaffolding or similar structures frame or block the characters. They are entrapped and seldom escape, and, if they do, this is merely in order to fail at another obstacle. Furthermore, most characters end up at exactly the same point at which they set out. Thus, the film performs a narrative loop: the first scene of the industrial site is also the last scene of the film: on a deserted roadway, the camera pans as it follows a pick-up truck controlled by the patriarch of the cannibalistic family. The screaming Klara is shown on the back of the truck, and then a woman who has been cut in two and is singing “Thoughts are free.” At the very end of the film, we see the same shot, but it remains rather longer with the singing woman, whom we now know to be a member of the family of butchers who has herself become a victim of the massacre. There is no escape – either for strangers or for family members.

The German Chain Saw Massacre: Horror and the site of no escape

The loop narrative also points us to another main difference between Hooper’s and Schlingensief’s Chain Saw films. In TCSM, as Jackson argues, vehicles play an ambivalent role and refer to the oil crisis of the early 1970s. The shortage of petrol immobilizes Sally and her friends, forcing them to stop at the Sawyer property. Their need for gasoline therefore plunges them into the catastrophe. But at the end, Sally escapes thanks to a car and a truck that are passing on the near-deserted road by the Sawyers’ house. [41] In GCSM, by contrast, cars do not promise escape. Even though there is no shortage of petrol, none of the vehicles will escort anyone to safety. Once again, Schlingensief adapts an iconic prop of the German context, since cars crossing borders – especially Trabbis – are the images that were so frequently to be seen on television and in the newspapers in 1989/90. Of course, these images were emeant to be read as a metonym for freedom. Indeed, throughout the film, Schlingensief meant to be read as a metonym for freedom. Indeed, throughout the film, Schlingensief strikingly incorporates many shots of cars crossing the screen. A closer look at these shots, however, reveals that the cars are framed by the industrial site or blocked by obstacles in it just as much as The camera seldom follows the cars into an open, infinite space. Although the vehicles manage to rupture the framed space (columns, pillars, walls) and to exit the shot, they have to do so over and over again. Thus, none of the breakthroughs or breakouts lead to the promised freedom outside the frame. Every single car shown in this film ends up back in the industrial site; none will ever get out of it again; and the culminating scene preceding the final credits of the film shows a car burning.

The German Chain Saw Massacre: Schlingensief’s claustrophobic staging of the abandoned industrial site / cars do not promise escape – but they are entrapped within bordered frames

All borders crossed in this film are inner borders, only leading deeper into an uncomfortably cocooned and self-consuming Germany. The violent repetition of the border crossings could at the same time be read as Schlingensief’s desperate criticism of capitalism in general, offering a transnational approach to his culturally specific transposition of the chain saw narrative. But considering the emphasis on the German context that Schlingensief apparently brings to his more global reading, the continuing crossing of borders is perhaps paradoxically linked to the stasis of the Kohl era. The rapid pace of GCSM does not produce any development: the film’s narrative circularity negates progress and exposes the speed of development as illusory, even though the actions within the loop are executed at high velocity.
 
It is on account of the general fast pace of the film and its aggressive soundtrack that one shot stands out for its slowness and its unexpected use of an instrumental version of the German folk song “Thoughts Free.” We see the family of butchers in harmony  – as never before or afterwards – as its members Alfred, Brigitte and Margit encircle a scene of slaughter, working on their recent victims and illuminated by the red evening sky.

The German Chain Saw Massacre: A romantic sunset covers the butchering feast in semi-darkness

This scenery refers of course to the final episode of Hooper’s TCSM, a scene that Rose calls “the most powerful in the history of horror cinema.” As he states:

Unrestrained and unchecked, Leatherface’s dance merges him with the sun, absorbing him into its intense orange glow. There, in this
consummation, he is finally aligned with the narrative’s prime motif of chaos, with the arcane movements of the solar system defining him as an unfathomable and uncontrollable power, one governed by forces beyond the reaches of Law and Order. [42]

But whereas Hooper’s final scene aligns with the apocalyptic motifs of his film to anticipate the coming slaughter, the equivalent scene in Schlingensief’s film is prominently set around the midpoint of the film assembling, several encoded references linked in each case to the German national narrative of unity and freedom that had begun to flourish again with German reunification in 1990.
 
Whereas the opening sequence of Schlingensief’s film presented the seemingly benign and peaceful German crowd celebrating in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, he counters that documentary footage with the apparently true face of the happily united German family. Once more, Schlingensief undermines the German self-adulation that came with reunification, pointing to the Janus face of Germany – reunited or not. The teleological fulfilment of the German national narrative as suggested by the events of 1990 is affirmed in this scene, but also cynically underpinned by a romantic sunset that covers the butchering feast in semi-darkness, associating it with pagan rituals. Even more ironically, German viewers detect an allusion to a central line of the national anthem of the GDR: “that the sun shines more beautifully than ever before over Germany”. Read in the context of the whole film, this scene seems to state the self-fulfilment of the German nation as a history of greed and violence.
 
In this regard, the setting of the scene also evokes the landscape of the industrial Ruhr region and its polluting steel production, which actually caused such impressive sunsets. The Ruhr with its coal mining and steel working was at the heart of the German economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s, as West Germany’s rapid economic growth created heavy demand for the region’s products; and this in turn was the basis of West German society’s fundamental assent to capitalism, to its constitutive idea of growth and progress and with it to the complacent, narrow-minded bourgeois mentality mentioned earlier.
 
The film’s ironically epiphanous central scene, begun by Alfred and completed by Brigitte and Margit is a reminiscence of that era and its value system: “In einer Zeit, in der alles möglich ist, ist es gleich, ob etwas gut ist oder schlecht” (“At a time when everything is possible, it does not matter if something is good or bad”). The staging of this epiphany incidentally evokes the German fairy tale Rumpelstilzchen (Rumpelstiltskin in English) and its imp or dwarf who hops around his fire, believing himself unobserved, and sings aloud the solution to his secret riddle. But in addition, the slogan “At a time [...], it does not matter [...]” also returns us to sausages, the phrase being a more or less elaborated version of the familiar idiomatic saying “Das ist Wurst” (“It doesn’t matter” or “Who cares?”). That cynical family catechism is effectively the film’s thematic key.
 
Indifference is the film’s essential diagnosis. The fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification simply complete the indifference of a capitalistic mentality. And when Alfred, the head of the family of butchers, welcomes all East Germans with the words: “This is where the free market begins”, before killing and processing them into sausages, the industrial site shows Germany as a battleground where the free market celebrates its victory, which came about with the decline of the GDR and its socialist visions. With capitalism, however (and this is the film’s central point), comes a dissolution of moral standards, values and differentiation. Limitless capitalism brings the removal of all boundaries: at a time when everything is possible, it does not matter if it is good or bad. It is here that Schlingensief’s film reveals its moral core – and presumably its fear of a reunified Germany that transgressed and continues to transgress any border, be it territorial, ideological or moral.
 
One can see that Schlingensief’s abandoned industrial site within rural Germany appropriated the rural setting of Hooper’s TCSM. This “terrible place” [43] is the reunified Germany and it would be worth comparing the two films’ ‘haunted castles’, the Sawyer mansion and the German family’s mansion, together with the inhabitants of both in order to elaborate on both films’ similarities and differences. So far, we have seen that both films share a notion of anti-capitalism and show its Janus face emerging in rural settings. But whereas, in Hooper’s case, “the sense that the hopes and aspirations of the American dream had ended […] was pervasive in 1970s America” [44], Schlingensief shot his film at a time when the German dream, its hopes and aspirations, had only just begun. In 1990, Schlingensief is already asserting its end, and envisioning its cannibalistic dynamics.

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Footnotes

1. Donaldson, L.F. (2010) “Access and Excess in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)”, In Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, 1: 1.
2. Hogan, D.J. (1986) Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 247.
3. Worland, R. (2008) The Horror Film: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 208.
4. Wood, R. (1979) “An Introduction to the American Horror Film”, In: Wood, R. and Lippe, R. (eds) The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film. Toronto: Festival of Festivals, 7-33: 17.
5. Roche, D. (2014) Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s: Why Don’t They Do It Like They Used To? Jackson: University of Mississippi Press; Merritt, N. (2010) “Cannibalistic Capitalism and other American Delicacies. A Bataillean Taste of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre”, Film-Philosophy 14.1 [online]. Available at: https://www.film-philosophy.com/index.php/f-p/article/viewFile/190/178. Accessed 13 January 2016; Brown, J. (2013) Cannibalism in Literature and Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
6.  Phillips, K. R. (2005) Projected Fears. Horror Films and American Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger, 102-103. See also: Sharrett, C. (2004) “The Idea of Apocalypse in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, In Grant, B.K. and Sharrett, C. (eds) Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 300-321.
7. Muir, K. (2002) Eaten Alive at the Chainsaw Massacre: The Films of Tobe Hooper. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 67.
8. Roche, D. Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s: Why Don’t They Do It Like They Used To?, 23-24. 
9. Merritt, N. “Cannibalistic Capitalism and other American Delicacies. A Bataillean Taste of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre”; and Jackson, C. (2008) “Blood for Oil. Crude Metonymies and Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)”, Gothic Studies, 10.1, 48-60.
10. Phillips, K. R. Projected Fears. Horror Films and American Culture.
11. Albright, B. (2012): Regional Horror Films, 1958-1990: A State-by-State Guide with Interviews. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.
12. Rose, J. ([2013] 2014) Devil’s Advocates: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Peterborough: Ateur. Rose quotes the following source: Marcor, A. (2010) Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids: 30 Years of Filmmaking in Allston, Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 29.
13.  Rose, J. Devil’s Advocates, 30.
14. Brown, J. Cannibalism in Literature and Film. 108-116.
15. Sharrett, C. “The Idea of Apocalypse in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, 305.
16. Bell, D. (1997) “Anti-Idyll. Rural Horror”, In: Cloke, P. and Little, J. Contested Countryside Cultures: Rurality and Socio-cultural Marginalisation. Florence: Taylor and Francis, 94-108.
17. Muir, K. Eaten Alive, 15.
18. Rose, J. Devil´s Advocates: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, 13. Rose quotes the following source: Marcor, A. (2010) Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids: 30 Years of Filmmaking in Allston, Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 31.
19. Schlingensief, C. (2005) Christoph Schlingensief und seine Filme. Interview mit Frieder Schlaich. [DVD]. Berlin: Filmedition Filmgalerie 451.
20. Coulson, A. S. (1995) “New land and forgotten spaces: the portrayal of another Germany in post-unification film”, In: Durrani, O., Good, C. and Hilliard, K. (eds)., The New Germany. Literature and Society after Unification. Sheffield: Academic Press. 213-230, 218.
21. Phillips, K. R. Projected Fears. Horror Films and American Culture.
22. Goethe, J.W. von (1966) Goethe. Poetische Werke. Gedichte und Singspiele II: Gedichte. Nachlese und Nachlaß. Weimar and Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 441.The translation is by the present author.
23. Schmidt, G (2007) “Friedrich Meineckes Kulturnation. Zum historischen Kontext nationaler Ideen in Weimar-Jena um 1800“, Historische Zeitschrift, 284, 597–622.
24. Hoffmann  von Fallersleben, A. H. and Richter, E. (1842) Schlesische Volkslieder mit Melodien. Aus dem Munde des Volkes gesammelt. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 307.
25. Lammel, I. (1959) Lieder der Agitprop-Truppen vor 1945. Leipzig: VEB Hofmeister.
26. Nachtigal, J.K.C (2013) Volcks-Sagen. Berlin: Edition Holzinger Taschenbuch, 46.
27. Brown, J. Cannibalism in Literature and Film. 107-108.
28. Cherry, B. (2009) Horror. London and New York: Routledge, 90.
29. Speer, A. (1969) Erinnerungen. Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen.
30. Boldt, K.-W. and Gelhar, M. (2008) Das Ruhrgebiet. Landschaft – Industrie – Kultur. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 55.
31. Aring, J. and Butzin, B. and Danielzyk, R. and Helbrecht, I. (1989) Krisenregion Ruhrgebiet? Alltag, Strukturwandel und Planung. Oldenburg: Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem der Universität Oldenburg, 35.
32. Aring et al. 37.
33. Aring et al. 39.
34. Boldt, K.W. and Gelhar, M. Das Ruhrgebiet. Landschaft – Industrie – Kultur, 58.
35. Wirschning, A. (2006) Abschied vom Provisorium 1982-1990. München: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 249ff. Hartmann, R. and Konegen, N. (1985) “Das Leben geht weiter – die Krise auch” In: Barcikowski, R. (ed). Jeder kocht seinen eigenen Stahl. 10 Jahre Stahlpolitik in der Krise, Göttingen: SOVEC. 119-121.
36. Rödder, A. (2004) Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1969-1990. München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag. 184ff.
37. Salavati, N. (2015) “So viel Wurst essen die Deutschen”, Süddeutsche Zeitung [online], 27.10.2015. Available at: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/fleischindustrie-so-viel-wurst-essen-die-deutschen-1.2710373 [Accessed 13 January 2016].
38. Anthony Enns (2012) elaborates this “connection between capitalism and cruelty” in: “Post Unification Cinema. Horror, Nostalgia, Redemption”, In: Ginsberg, T. and Mensch, A. (eds.). A Companion to German Cinema. Malden  [Mass]: Wiley & Blackwell. 110-133, 112.
39. Wood, R. (1984) “An Introduction to the American Horror Film”, In: Grant, B.K. and Sharrett, C. (eds.). Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press. 164-200. Williams, T. (1996) Hearths of Darkness. The Family in the American Horror Film. London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Merritt, N. “Cannibalistic Capitalism and other American Delicacies. A Bataillean Taste of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre”.
40. Rödder, A. Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1969-1990, 94.
41. Jackson, C. “Blood for Oil. Crude Metonymies and Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)”.
42. Rose, J. (2013) Devil’s Advocates. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.  New York: Auteur, 86.
43. Clover, C.J. (1989) “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film”. In: Bloch, H. R. and Ferguson, F. (eds). Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy. Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press. 187-221, 197.
44. Phillips, K. R. Projected Fears. Horror Films and American Culture. 107.