WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Texas Chainsaw Massacre, now available to stream on Netflix.
Leatherface is back to menacing a new generation of victims in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre revival film. Taking a page from the successful Halloween revival movies, the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie only maintains direct continuity with its original film, ignoring all the interim sequels and reboots the slasher movie franchise has released across its nearly 50-year history. Following this real-time gap, Leatherface hasn’t been active since that infamous killing spree in 1973 before inevitably picking the chainsaw back up. And in returning to his bloodthirsty ways, Leatherface reveals a major weakness that highlights just how tragic the masked mass murderer truly is.
The new Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a group come to the abandoned town of Harlow, Texas, planning to revitalize and gentrify the town into a trendy, vibrant community. With Leatherface and the Sawyer family’s murderous antics now decades-past and largely forgotten, the group of potential real estate buyers encounters an elderly woman named Mrs. Mc, who lives in the town’s orphanage in the company of an older man. After getting into a heated argument regarding the ownership of her property with the prospective buyers, Mrs. Mc suffers a fatal heart attack, driving the man berserk as he reveals himself to be Leatherface. And in reclaiming his serial killer destiny, Leatherface reveals the only thing that has kept him going for all these years: love.
Leatherface had stopped killing for 50 years since the events of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre because he found the one thing he never could quite achieve with the Sawyers: the underlying need for acceptance. In the intervening decades, Mrs. Mc cared for Leatherface as a maternal figure who constantly reminded him to be a good boy. With Mrs. Mc dead and Leatherface blaming the outsiders arriving in Harlow for triggering the lethal heart attack, Leatherface no longer has anyone in the world who accepts him for who is. To mark this reversion to his wicked ways, Leatherface cuts off Mrs. Mc’s face to use as his new mask, with anyone who sees him reminded of why this new killing spree has begun.
In a lot of ways, this need for a familial sense of love and acceptance has always been a hallmark of who Leatherface is. The Sawyer family is usually depicted as exploiting Leatherface’s mental condition to serve as their muscle, often belittling him and goading him into doing the lion’s share of hunting down and butchering victims for them. Both 2013’s Texas Chainsaw 3D and 2017’s Leatherface reveal a killer who values family above all else but, at the same time, is also intensely lonely and desperate for approval. Leatherface, in particular, has the eponymous killer turn on his newfound friend, Elizabeth, when the Sawyers welcome him back in the fold, killing her when she insults his mother before turning her face into his latest mask.
Like Psycho‘s Norman Bates, Leatherface is a killer who just wants approval from his family, and killing people is the best way he perceives to gain this acceptance after growing up in the abusive Sawyer household. The new Texas Chainsaw Massacre suggests that Leatherface is capable of being a docile, if still slightly creepy, member of society. But once that familial love is taken away, he has nothing left to keep him from picking the chainsaw back up and resuming killing as if no time has passed at all while showcasing how unhealthily co-dependent Leatherface truly is.
To see this tragic take on Leatherface, Texas Chainsaw Massacre is available to stream now on Netflix.
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