There’s an unforgettable scene in Tobe Hooper’s horror classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre where Sally, the final victim of the murderous Sawyer family, is bound to a chair and forced to break bread with her captors. The family bicker and tease one another in a chilling perversion of a Norman Rockwell painting, before chainsaw-wielding igor Leatherface arrives in full matriarchal costume to complete the picture.
It’s a scene echoed near beat for beat in Capcom’s Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, which also takes place in the Deep South. Marguerite, Jack and Lucas Baker are this generation’s Sawyers, willing you to take part in their twisted practices, to sit at the dinner table and eat the decaying remains of their victims while they literally rot beside you.
It’s easy to dismiss the Deep South horror sub-genre as malicious. After all, it’s painting a picture of an entire region as a group of murderous hillbillies chomping at the bit to slaughter innocent ‘city folk’ who dare venture into their isolated terrain. But a less observed trait in the genre paints a different picture; that of a forgotten region where time has stood still. Here, the Sawyers and the Bakers become slightly more sympathetic monsters.
While the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was not the first massacre movie set in the American South, it certainly popularised it in the public consciousness, and it was no coincidence that it was made at the pinnacle of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. “Chainsaw came out of the heavy times in the Nixon administration,” said Hooper. “In that sense it’s allegorical. Times were turbulent, we were all low on fuel and the outlook was bleak.” (Ellen Farley, Impresarios of Axploitation Movies, LA Times.)
Hooper’s message here is clear from the outset. When Sally and her friends pick up a hitchhiker on their way to visit their family’s homestead, he bemoans the new ‘air gun’ technology used at the slaughterhouse where his family once worked. The hitchhiker fondly remembers the day of the ‘sledge’, because with the new way, “people were put out of jobs.”
Immediately The Texas Chainsaw Massacre paints a picture of a region left behind; atrophying, where its inhabitant’s niche specialisations have been overtaken by more advanced technology as ordered by a corrupt government losing a violent war. By the time we are sitting at the dinner table with the Sawyers and the proprietor laments the fact that his father - a barely breathing corpse - can no longer lift a hammer, it’s clear that time has not only stood still for these folks; it’s rotted.
Food's up.
Though Resident Evil 7’s narrative wrapper is a gimmicky series staple – the Baker family have been infected with a disease that turns them into raging monsters – it nonetheless explores similar themes as Chainsaw. As you explore the dusty house you find diary entries and notes that show the Baker family were once upon a time terrified of their fate, and pick up knick knacks and photos that suggest a tightknit, loving family.
The Bakers don’t forget this familial love even after they’ve been thoroughly infected, and go through the flailing motions of it like zombies stumbling through the mall in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead - that is what we’re supposed to do, isn’t it? When you first meet them at that dinner table it speaks to their past characters that they want you to eat. They want you to be part of their family. That’s just good Southern hospitality.
Both families are relics of a bygone era, ignored by a country that values virility and shuns age. As Kim Newman wrote in his book Nightmare Movies, “nobody stops at the Bates motel since they built that new highway.” Through this lens, both The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Resident Evil 7 feel less like a mean reinforcement of a stereotype and more a fiercely confrontational cry for help.
Lucy O'Brien is an editor at IGN’s Sydney office. Follow her ramblings on Twitter.
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