On the surface, I guess this was a weird request for me. I have not actually seen the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and have no intention to. Why did I request this? Because I have a strong love of horror movies and am very much interested in how culture influences horror and vice versa. This book seemed right up my street as it promised to provide cultural context to a very iconic horror movie. Sadly it didn't quite deliver.
The best way I can describe this book is poor execution of some great ideas and content. My main issue was that the organisation is all over the place. Rather than linking together the context and the film, you instead get long paragraphs about the politics at the time followed by some vaguely related statement about the movie. Sometimes it's not even vaguely related. For example, there is tons of information about real-life serial killers from around the same time period but this is very loosely linked to the content of the film. It just makes for a confusing time and I found the book very hard to engage with because of this.
I also found that not much background was given to the cultural context in itself. This might sound weird as the context should be the background but I didn't feel enough detail was given so that someone unfamiliar with America's culture from the 70s could fully understand what the author was talking about. This is linked to the overall problems with cohesion but I also found the cultural aspects jumped around a lot. One minute it would focus on serial killers, then move onto something else, then go back to serial killers. The chapters did kind of group things but they also could have done with a little subheading under the chapter title to actually explain what that chapter was focusing on (all the chapters were titled with quotes/references).
Overall, this book did have some neat information in it and some interesting facts about the film. However, I just found the lack of structure and detail too much of an obstacle to enjoying the content. I will say, this is definitely not related to me not having seen the film. I know the plot very well and that wasn't what I was having issues with as the film sections were detailed enough. I just wish the cultural context had been linked better to the movie as this could have been a really great book.
Overall Rating:
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